Think Childbirth Is Painful? Wait Until the Kid Comes Home

By Robin Abcarian

April 9, 1995 12 AM PT

Most of the negative bits about parenting you glean from the grapevine: the lack of sleep, the lack of sex, the inevitable conflicts between the needs of mate and child.

By the time you bring that little bundle home, you think you have heard it all. But you haven’t. Because there is one thing no one admits. They don’t discuss it at Lamaze. Not a hint in the maternity wards. Children’s advocates completely ignore it.

The secret, you see, is that little kids are walking, talking weapons of assault.

I don’t mean viruses, bacteria or other hideous microscopic havoc they can wreak with your body. I mean great bodily injury.

“Oh, you mean all the broken noses?” asks the nurse in our pediatrician’s office when I call to ask about parents who have been wounded by their children.

“Is that pretty common?”

“Yes,” she says. “It happens a lot.”

“Why is that?”

“Well,” she replies, “because your nose is out there.”

A timely medical observation, as it happens.

Just two weeks ago, Carla Schalman, mother of two sons, was leaning over her 6-year-old, whose face was buried in the floor, trying to convince him that it was indeed time to take a shower. Ethan maintained that it was time to play football.

As she leaned down to confer, the bridge of her nose met the back of his head at a velocity I don’t care to imagine.

“There wasn’t any blood,” Schalman said, “but there was a big noise. I suspected it was broken because of the sound and also because I noticed that one part was jutting out to the side, and the bone was obviously not in the right place.”

The plastic surgeon who fixed the break told Schalman that one of his patients has sought him out each of the three times her nose has been broken by unanticipated contact with the back of her child’s head.

“It’s kind of ironic,” confessed Schalman, “because I really liked my nose. I mean, I never sat in front of the mirror and went, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ But I have actually had plastic surgeons tell me what a great nose I have.”

She anticipates that her nose will return to its original perfection once the bruises fade and the swelling goes down.

But trouble lurks.

“Ethan got mad at me the other day,” Schalman said, “and said he was gonna break my nose again.”

A restraining order, unfortunately, is out of the question.

I am not a stranger to family violence of this type.

My own child has cracked me in the chin, the cheek and the nose with her own blocklike skull. Just the other evening, she asked me to throw her in the air; when I did, she kicked me square in the chest as she squealed with delight. (Memo to myself: Remove her construction boots before attempting this trick again.)

My own family of origin was a brood of four so rambunctious, so contentious that friends watching a National Geographic special on monkeys once shouted: “Look! The Abcarian kids!”

As youngsters, we fought so intensely I thought it unlikely that my parents had escaped from our childhoods unscathed.

“I remember bumps and so on,” my father said. “But in terms of major injuries, I don’t think so.”

Pause.

“We’re not talking about emotional injuries, right?”

Cute, Dad.

An odd paradox ruled our household. Although we children regularly beat the tar out of each other, my parents rarely lifted a hand to us. My mother said they felt that corporal punishment amounted to nothing more than a loss of control on the part of the people who were supposed to be in charge.

There came a time, however, when even my pacifist parents decided that “swift swats” might be the antidote to some of our unruly escapades. My mother used a Ping-Pong paddle on our tender behinds, which we loved because air resistance rendered it useless.

Why did she take up the paddle? It seems that when she swatted us barehanded, she broke blood vessels in her palm. And spent the next few days in pain.

In my circle of friends, nearly every parent has a tale of woe about inadvertent injury inflicted by small children.

One friend came home from the hospital with her second child and a tender Cesarean incision, only to be kicked in the stomach countless times by her firstborn, who was 18 months old and none to happy to share his mother with a rival.

Another friend visited her doctor, certain she had cancer because of the unremitting pain in one breast. She solved the mystery later as she lay abed with her toddler and noticed that he planted his sharp little elbow on her bosom each time he sat up. As she was telling me this by phone, her son whacked her in the head with a videotape and the line went dead.

Men worry about protecting their noses and their reproductive capabilities. One kicking toddler I know felled his uncle last week with what his father proudly described as a “inadvertent pile-driver maneuver” wherein the child’s foot met the uncle’s groin with such force that the boy may never have cousins on that side of the family.

It takes all the self-control in the world not to drop-kick such a child through the nearest available goal posts.

But we are the grown-ups after all.

One day, if we are lucky, we will have grandchildren.

And they will provide our sweetest revenge.