Needles

So the day after I post The Black Squiggle, a story that ties Sam tightly to me through shared delusions of terror, he strides into the house and proves he's no son of mine. "Look at this!" he happily mumbles, pointing at his face where a twisted smile is playing over his puffed-up top lip. I've been home with a nasty cold, so I spent a dazed moment or two thinking that maybe Sam was showing off the damaging results of his first school-yard brawl ("but you should see the other guy..").

Then I remembered that he's just back from the dentist. We'd called Dr. Archibald after his accident at swimming lessons last week—he'd smashed his mouth on the tiled edge of the pool during a game and spit out (to his horror) a wedge from the back of his brand new front tooth. "You needed to have it repaired, eh?" I asked, aiming for nonchalance. But my knees went a little weak when I followed up with, "Did you get a freezing needle?" Even as I write that, I feel faint.

My mother can attest to the teams—literally, teams—of medical and dental professionals who have had to hold me down when someone so much as cast a suspicious glance towards a syringe. And my little boy just had one poked right into the front of his face. "Ya," he answered breezily, distracted by the satisfying image of his distorted lip in the mirror. "But she put some cream on it first, so it was no big deal." Sure, that numbing cream is very nice, but to this day I have to close my eyes before the needle looms into view or there's a good chance I'll punch someone. How can my child fail to grasp the horror of that cold metallic instrument stabbing its way through his gums? I mean, seriously, Sam goes zero-to-hysteria in five seconds flat at the sight of a pinprick's worth of his own blood. So where does he get the dentist needle bravado?

Must be an Ashe thing.