People offer you all kinds of advice when you become a parent.
They’ll tell you to sleep when the baby sleeps, and to find a good daycare. They recommend which brand of shoes to buy and how to make sure your kid eats their vegetables. They say to limit screen time and to read to them nightly and to start a 529 plan and on and on and on.
No one ever told me how much I’d have to budget for Band-Aids.
Children are, by and large, clumsy. It’s kind of their whole deal. Immediately after a baby learns to walk, they learn to fall down. Unfortunately, however, they don’t learn to fall down in any sort of controlled manner until years later.
And once a child begins moving around, they often begin exploring their surroundings. They’ll figure out how to get to the stairs, and eventually how to use them. Kind of. They’ll learn how to stand on things, and then they learn that some things aren’t meant to be stood upon. Or at least, you hope they learn that part after a single instance. It generally takes many more lessons.
As children explore, they often find themselves in unfamiliar situations. New ground on which to walk, new objects to examine, new ways to become injured. My kids, of course, are no exception.
My oldest daughter, Rainbow Flower, once walked right into a rose bush in our front yard. She regularly comes home from school with blisters on her hands from playing on the monkey bars.
My youngest daughter, whose new pseudonym will be revealed momentarily, is a perpetual motion machine who constantly finds the limit of her coordination and then leaps well past it. We got her a little push-car for her first birthday and her first thought was “I should climb on top of this and stand up.” She once was holding a laundry basket, stumbled, and banged her lips on the edge of the basket, breaking the skin. After a few seconds of tears, she grabbed the basket and started running around, blood still dripping from her mouth.
Quickly, the pseudonym: she regularly does things just to see what’s going to happen, pushing boundaries and buttons. She’s aggressive and impulsive. She’s basically an agent of chaos. She’s not Batman. She’s the Joker.
Both daughters recently took some spills in the driveway that drew blood, and as you would expect, required adhesive bandages. Before that, there was a scrape on a finger. No blood, but RF needed a Band-Aid. Then she needed another one after the first one came off while washing her hands. Before that, she had bumped her knee, and the only thing to keep her calm was a bandage over the extremely light pink mark that remained.
Those three incidents cost, conservatively, $34 in Band-Aids.
I don’t know if bandages contain gold, diamonds, or eggs, but they are, objectively, one of the most valuable commodities in the modern world. The only reasonably priced bandages are composed of damp toilet paper and recycled pencil erasers, with the adhesiveness of motor oil. The name-brand version are slightly more durable, and kids will go through a box of them in under two weeks.
And that’s for the wounds a bandage can actually help. Many times, the girls will have nothing more than a minor scrape. Painful, certainly, but nothing a Band-Aid will affect. And yet, we pull them in close, give them a hug, put a Band-Aid on the scrape, give it a kiss, and tell them it’ll heal up in no time.
Sure enough, hours later, the wound has healed, and the magic of the bandage is proven, thus ensuring the next scratch will require another bandage. And the cycle continues until you have to take out a second mortgage to get the next month’s supply of Frozen-branded (and they must be Frozen-branded) Band-Aids.
I’m generally not a fan of inefficiencies in most areas of my life, so you can imagine this isn’t a process I enjoyed. When RF asks for a bandage to put on a bruise, my internal dialogue consists of this:
It doesn’t make sense. Why should we put a bandage on a wound that isn’t bleeding? Especially when the bandage is going to end up in the trash in 20 minutes? A Band-Aid isn’t going to help!
Except, the thing about being a parent is that, even when you can’t do anything to help, it doesn’t mean you can do nothing. You have to do something, even if it feels useless, because, to your kids, simply doing something is useful.
When they’re little, we put bandages on bumps to make them feel better, but it’s not the bandage that accomplishes this goal. It’s their parent being there and holding them when they’re hurting. My working theory is that this entire bandage process is merely a trial for later years, when they’ll deal with things far more painful than a scraped knee.
A bandage won’t heal a pinched finger, just like it won’t heal hurt feelings. It won’t take away disappointment, or mend a broken heart, or comfort a grieving soul.
In those situations, just like with their bruises and scratches, there’s nothing I can do to make it all go away. I won’t be able to solve their problems or make their agony disappear.
All I can do is be there, pull them in close, give them a hug and kiss, and tell them the wound will heal up in no time. And, more importantly, that even if it doesn’t heal in no time, I’ll still be there.
I just need to hit the ATM then pick up another box of Band-Aids first.
I’m the magic of Bandaids is one of those pieces of parental advice we often do not share. Each kid went through a stage where bandaids had yo be placed on their stuffed animals (they do not come off very well - but you can easily identify the most beloved stuffed animal. Now that my kids are older - I felt that statement about being there for them during the rough parts of life. You are so right - it is about letting them be heard and understood. After that it is walking the rough patch with them while the healing occurs. Great article!!