Melmac Mom

My kids hate it when I use their names in my posts. They say it’s a violation of their privacy. So out of respect to their wishes, and to keep peace in the home, I’ve given them blog names of Oldest Daughter (OD) and Youngest Daughter (YD). Not very original, but chances are I wouldn’t remember an alias or a “Nome de Plume.” Oldest Daughter and Youngest Daughter sounds kind of Charlie Chan, don’t you think? If you don’t know who Charlie Chan is, that’s OK.

If you ever meet OD, ask about the little scar on her head. No, maybe you shouldn’t ask about it, but today I feel like “true confessions” so I need to tell you about the time I split her head open. Until recently, this was a funny in-house story that my kids would bring up once in awhile when they wanted to tease me. But recently, at an extended family gathering, my kids “outed” me about this, so now it’s public…

I’ve been a single mom since my daughters were still in diapers. And I’ve worked full-time since my oldest was in kindergarten. For a few years, they were enrolled at schools where I worked and childcare wasn’t a problem – they could hang out in the library or on the playground for an hour or so. But when they got a little older, they wanted to go to the neighborhood school and be with their friends. My kids weren’t exactly latchkey kids, but there were many afternoons when they came home from school a few hours before I got home from work.

During especially lean times, I took second jobs to help keep us afloat. There were days that I left the house at 6 a.m. and didn’t get home until 11 p.m. Not many – sometimes I got to spend an hour or two at home with my daughters before having to rush off to work again. Luckily, I didn’t need to keep the extra jobs for long – usually just a few months or until the holidays were over.

Anyway, after a particularly long week, I came home to find the house in total disarray. Dishes scattered all over the living room, clothes in piles everywhere, shoes kicked off by the front door, scummy water in the kitchen sink because nobody had washed dishes in three days. I did what every child expert says you should never do. I started yelling.

“Look at this mess! Get those dishes out of this room and stack them by the sink! Pick up your filthy clothes! You two are PIGS! I am sick of this crap!”

I was frustrated and angry, not at my kids – at my life. But I was taking it out on them. OD, who was at that adolescent age (about 13) where her lips would run before her brain could catch up, picked up a melmac plate and tossed it across the living room like a Frisbee. It hit my leg and fell to the floor. It wasn’t a hard toss, just a flick of the wrist; such a brazen thing for her to do that it almost made me chuckle.

I picked up that plate and said something like, “Do NOT throw dishes at me – put this in the sink!” Then, I tossed it back at her. Again, not a hard toss, just a little flick. But at that moment either a breeze blew through the room or some nefarious spirit lifted that plastic plate, because it seemed to rise and then gently turn sideways. It grazed lightly across the top of OD’s head like a buzz saw and fell to the floor.


The smart aleck comment she was about to make turned into a screech when she put her hand up to her head and felt the blood oozing out of the inch-long cut the plastic disk had made. My first aide training taught me that even tiny head wounds will bleed a lot, but the mother in me wasn’t thinking of that. She had blood dripping down her forehead. I grabbed her up in my arms and carried her to the bathroom. Just a couple minutes of a clean, dry washcloth pressed against the wound stopped the bleeding. I could see it wasn’t deep. But Oldest Daughter had always been afraid of the site of her own blood. She was shaking in my arms.

“Do I need to go to the emergency room?” she asked me, those beautiful, tear-filled brown eyes looking up at me.

“No, honey. It’ll be fine.” I told her, trying frantically to think of what I could possibly tell an ER doctor to make him or her understand that I had not meant to hurt my baby.

Then she got that “knowing” look in her eyes and said, “You can’t take me to the hospital, can you? Because they’d want to know how I got this HOLE IN MY HEAD! And you’d have to tell them that you ABUSED ME!” She was in full righteous anger mode, and ready to throw me to the wolves.

What should I do, what should I do, whatshouldido, whatshouldido…my brain was stalled and wouldn’t shift into gear. Finally, like a big burp, my brain started firing again.

“Is your head hurting?” I asked. “No.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?” “Two.” Correct.
“Do you have a headache or feel sick to your stomach?” “No.”
I went over the usual checklist that school office employees learn when we do first aide for kids on the many days there’s no nurse on site. She checked out fine.

I said, “OK, if you want to go to the hospital we will. They may want to put a stitch or staple in your head which means they’ll have to shave your hair in the front. But it looks fine and I think you’ll be OK if we just put some Neosporin on it. If it’s still bothering you in an hour, we can go to the ER.”

I meant what I told her. If she wanted to go to the hospital that minute, we would. But I was hoping she’d be so horrified at having her head shaved that she’d opt to wait an hour. It really was just a surface wound, no more than an inch long and already forming a thin scab as the blood dried. She’d scraped her knees worse than this before and I’d cleaned and bandaged them, and sent her on her way. This wasn’t deep or wide enough for a stitch or a staple. But truthfully…I didn’t want to go to the ER because I didn’t want to explain to a stranger why and how I had tossed a melmac plate at my kid. No matter the circumstances, I was guaranteed to come out the bad guy.

An hour later, she was already outside, hanging out with her cousins. She was probably telling them how she got me to do all the housework. Yup – while she was outside bragging about her war wound, I was cleaning the house from top to bottom. I think I also agreed to host a sleepover for her friends that weekend. Guilt – they know how to work it from a young age.

This is the same kid who, several years before, I had spied practicing her “crying” in front of a mirror and giving Youngest Sister pointers on how to sniffle and hiccup like you do when you’ve been crying really hard. She’d rubbed her eyes until they were red and dribbled water on her cheeks to look like tears.

I backed quietly out of the doorway and a minute later she was in the kitchen, telling me “tearfully” about how she really, really wanted the new Barbie doll we had seen at Target that morning. Would I please, please, please get it for her? I was tempted…if only because the acting was good enough to win an Oscar.

Shortly after the “melmac incident” as we call it in my family, I got a promotion with the school district, which meant that I didn’t have to work those part-time jobs anymore. I’d like to say that things settled down to a normal routine, but that would be a huge lie. Anyway – now it’s off my chest. Feel free to throw melmac at me if we ever meet.