“Ow! Please be more gentle.” “Darling, I couldn’t be more gentle but we have to get these tangles out. That’s the thing about long hair. It has to be brushed. There, we’re almost –”
“Ouch! You’re scalping me!”
“I am not,” I laughed, wiggling a last recalcitrant knot between my fingers. Finally the brush went all the way through.
“I can’t believe you’re laughing. That hurt!”
“I’m not laughing at your pain, I’m laughing at what you said.”
“Humpf,” said the now-coiffed child, and stomped away.
After years of combing and brushing my children’s hair, I had developed a fairly businesslike attitude. Into every life a little rain must fall; from every snarled head of hair some yelps will emerge. Using detangling spray and a light touch can ameliorate discomfort, but cannot, in my experience, eliminate it entirely. It’s just the price of having hair.
When my mother was the one wielding the brush and I was doing the yelping, she would say: “You have to suffer to be beautiful.” At the time I resented her lightness of tone; now, as a mother myself, I understood it completely.
It is easy to discount pain — especially the momentary pain of, say, hair pulling — when you are not the person experiencing it. Yes, it hurts to knock your shin against something; yes, it’s unpleasant to bite the inside of your cheek by accident; and, sure, a bite of cold apple can give a shock to a person with sensitive front teeth, but please, can we keep it in perspective? These pains are trivial. They are not life threatening. They go away.
“Come now, darling, you must be brave,” mothers like me tell our children when they come limping into the house on twisted ankles, or hobbling in with blood running from scraped knees, or when they’re pettish and fretful from fever.
That is not to say we are not kind and tender, for of course we are, but there’s no need to hit the panic button because a child has a small injury. We need to keep their pain in perspective as a means of teaching them to keep their pain in perspective.
Don’t we? Sure we do. Yes, indeed, momentary pain is nothing to panic about. Be brave, darling. Pull yourself together. And, if you would be so kind, please serve me an extra-large helping of Humble Pie, because —
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” My hand rushed to my cheek as the “1812 Overture” went off in my jaw and temple.
“Mummy, what is it?” the children cried, rushing into the kitchen.
“Oh ow ow ow!” I whimpered helplessly.
“Are you OK?”
“I … — it … — own … on … -ome-hing … ard,” I tried to say, through the shriek of invisible artillery fire. “My tooth. …”
Reader, I had cracked it. It was agony. The pain eclipsed nearly everything. Yet through the mists of my suffering, I could perceive that, to the people around me, nothing seemed to have happened. There was no observable injury, just a woman standing with unusual stillness and making funny noises.
So it almost (almost!) made me smile when one of the children reached up and patted my shoulder.
“Come on, Mummy,” she said, “Be brave.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
