Surviving Parental Abuse

My husband and I, like most parents, have been the recipients of mouth-smacks, blows to the stomach, vicious shin and groin kicks, bites, headbutts, running headbutts, and whatever that WWF wrestling move is where the one guy brings his knee down on the back of the other guy who is already lying helpless on the floor. Can't remember the name of that move, but it was big in the '80s.

“Broken noses are a very common injury for parents,” my doctor once told me flatly, while she was checking the corneal damage I had after my adorable then-12-month-old daughter had poked me in the eye. "You know, if you try to carry a toddler having a tantrum and they fling their head back? Yeah. I've seen lots of parents come in here with broken noses from that."

“Make sure you keep her fingernails trimmed,” my doc offered, hinting that my eye damage could have been prevented had I properly groomed my kids. I left with the understanding that parental abuse was one of the few types of abuse where no matter what happened to you, it was always your fault.

Case in point.

A while ago, when my husband was hiding from us in the mountains of Peru on another seemingly interminable business trip, I was near my breaking point one night at dinner time. All three children—then aged 6, 3.5 and 2—had begun their nightly caterwauling when faced with their meal. The littlest, my son, was being particularly bothersome to the other two, so I decided it would be a good idea to have him eat his meal on my lap.

He began waving his arms around in an attempt to entertain the table. It was cute, and seemed to diffuse the negative mood, and I was brain-jammed from the caterwauling.

I didn't notice that in his right hand he was tightly gripping his fork like a switchblade. After one particularly erratic movement, he flung his arm backward and stabbed me in the eye with the utensil. The pain was dreadful, and when I took my hand away from my eye, there was blood seeping from the corner.

I felt terribly sorry for myself, because there was no one else there to do it, and I began to cry.

“Eeeew!” said the girls, looking at the bloodstained tears coursing down my face. I went into full breakdown mode and began to weep openly.

“Are you ok, mom?” said one of the girls, though I quickly realized from the expression in her eyes that it wasn't a question about my injury, but about my sanity.

“It's just really hard being a mom sometimes,” I said between sobs.

“Uh-oh...” the girls said in unison, giving each other a look before breaking into a fit of conspiratorial giggles.

They began to eat finally, and in the end the eye stab was a plus, since it distracted them long enough to forget about hating their dinner.

As I finally tucked into my meal, holding a napkin to my still seeping eye. I thought, “I should never have put him on my lap to eat. He's too big for that now. Really, it was all my fault.”