The Right Tool for the Job

Tweezers on cotton
Originally uploaded by FurLined

It’s all about the right tool for the job. My finger, for instance, when the Fox looks at me with a green cork in his left nostril. This cork isn’t made of the bark of a Spanish tree. It is a booger cork, a hard plug. And I know I shouldn’t. I know because I just had this conversation with my mommy friend. She has her panties all tied in a knot because her daughter is “walking around with her finger in her nose all the time.” She was embarrassed, I was sanguine. (Which is so easy when it’s not my kid.)

“Well, she’s figured out that it fits,” I say into the phone. “It’s kind of a natural thing to do.”

Silence.

“I mean, a handkerchief is just an artificial layer we put on it, right?”

Long silence.

“But Ella,” she finally says, “it’s so gross.”

Yeah, it’s gross. And I know that “Do as I say, not as I do” is a futile strategy with a child. And I’ll probably regret this when it’s my own kid walking around with his finger jammed up his nose. But I can’t help it. My short nail is just the right length and the Fox trusts me, says “Take it OUT, Mommy!” Lifts his chin slightly so that I can slip my nail under the edge and pop the cork out to allow the Fox, like any good vintage, to breathe.

It’s all about the right tool for the job.

A knife for instance. A plastic knife for the Fox and a long slim table knife for me. You see, I have discovered a little task. A perfect little toddler task. A mommy trifecta. Something that a) we can do together, that b) is interesting and satisfying to both of us and c) is really useful.

A task so perfect that I am loathe to give it up, even now, after yesterday’s agony proved what can go wrong.

The task is scraping out the moss and dirt and dog hair that are jammed into the crevices between the boards of our deck. It is morning. I am on my knees, Forest is on his. The sun is shining on our backs. We slide the knives in between the boards and the stuff just lifts right out. It feels good. We are doing it together. This perfection continues until I slide my knife along the board and it gets jammed, there is a wood chip or something stuck in there. I push harder.

Next to me, the Fox is chattering happily. (He has taken to narrating himself in third person. I am thinking of this as a cool language development frontier, rather than the precursor to a third-world dictatorship.) He says, “Forest is PUSHING.” (He also likes to finish his sentences with all caps. See above note.) And I am also pushing. Ahead of me is a long, clean space between the boards where I have already cleared the gnarl. Behind me, it rises like a furry stripe, like our deck is a sleeping hyena. My knife is stuck, but I am going to get this sucker out. And then I give a really hard push and the hyena bites, it drives a long splinter a half-inch under my thumbnail.

And breaks off underneath it.

“OW!”

The Fox looks at me.

“Mommy has an owie,” I say. I can’t believe how calm my voice sounds. I grip my throbbing, numb, throbbing, oh, there it is, searing-slice of-pain-thumb. I stand and walk in the house, leaving Forest on the deck with his little plastic knife. I go to the medicine cabinet and get the sharp nail clippers. I cut the nail off, all the way to the pink. I walk out to the kitchen sink. I glance at Forest, who is now happily trotting back and forth between the deck and me as I lean over the sink with my peroxide and needle-nosed tweezers and ice. I am getting nauseated now, but he must know what I need, because he goes into the living room and plays in his pillow pile while I take the right tool for the job and stick the tweezers in there. Just in a little way at first. I squeeze and pull. Nothing. I can’t feel it, I can’t feel the splinter. It is all pain. It feels like there is a knife all the way down to my first knuckle. I force the tweezers in more. Squeeze and pull. Nothing. I glance at Forest. He is okay. And then I commit. I force them in hard, pushing them between the nail and the flesh on both sides of the splinter, forcing them all the way under, forcing them all the way down, carving a furrow in the healthy pink. I press them down into the flesh and then I squeeze and pull. I feel something. My knees wobble a little as I pull out most of the splinter. It has broken into pieces of hyena gnarl that are still in there and it’s bleeding now, but I grit my teeth and I go back for the little pieces, over and over, until I get them all.

This is a minor miracle, by the way. See, I am a fainter. I have fainted in restaurants, clinics, kitchens, and bathrooms just for talking about pain and blood and gore. I have to avoid violent movies and I will walk out of the room if you start telling me about the time you got stitches in your schma-schma.

I mean, I fainted during a book report once.

And yesterday, as I rose off my knees on the sunny deck, my mind did what it usually does when I am about to faint. It narrowed my vision to a field the size of a quarter, brightly lit, the size of my thumbnail. It started closing the curtains of red and black on stage left and stage right. But then it did something new. It expanded to the size of my son. Rose above me like a mommy periscope and watched him, knowing where he was. Rose above me and held me up while I smiled at him, hid my fear, calmly walked into the house and practiced ancient torture techniques on my own hand. It held me up, saying “You do not want to go to urgent care and have a stranger hold him while he cries and you faint. You have to do this. Get it out NOW.”

Two years ago, I would have been on the floor. This is another way that motherhood has tested me and then made me stronger and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. But after so many years of being a fainter, I didn’t expect the mommy periscope. I didn’t expect that I could get bigger, and yet, it just keeps happening. Motherhood keeps calling these things out of me: gadgets and goofiness, tolerance for boogers and capacity to carve new spaces into myself. I see him. I spend every day watching the Fox, the ways he grows and changes and speaks in all caps. But every now and then I see me and I am reminded: This is a two-way street. I am reminded that, just as I helped make him, he helps make me.  And I am right tool for the job.