Woog Gets A Stiff One

Isn't it funny how the very traits that used to drive your dear mother to distraction are now visited upon you with a vengeance in the person of your own child? Perhaps it's nature's version of serving up your just desserts, karma at it's most potent, "an eye for an eye...", the wheel of ka, and all that.

Woog awoke yesterday with a crick in the neck. And for the rest of the day, he did his best to drive a crick into everyone's necks as well.

"Mom, I don't feel well, " he moaned from the stairs as I hurried to get ready for work. It was 8 AM and I'd given up trying to prod his inert form from the warmth of his bed.

"What's wrong," I asked, hurrying over to feel his forehead, "are you sick? What hurts?"

"My neck hurts."

Ah, the stiff neck. No biggie. I launched into a lecture about the hazards of staying in bed too long, despite the efforts of one's mother to rouse one for breakfast. He rolled his eyes at that and continued moaning. Typical.

Still, I urged him on to the breakfast table, where he commenced an exaggerated display of upper-body stiffness, groaning at each tiny movement and throwing long-suffering glances my way.

"Woog, you have to eat. Try and roll your neck around, just a little bit. Like this (rolls neck). Work the stiffness out, it'll go away, I promise."

And so he moved his head a fraction to the side...and wailed.

Patience is a virtue...I exhorted myself and went over to help him. But the moment I laid a hand on his head to move it, he broke into drawn-out pseudo-sobs, "No, it hurts, it hurts! Mom, I'm sick!"

"Alright, lets get you to the hospital then."

A terrified "No! They might cut off my neck!" and a continuation of his moaning sickbed mode. Over a stiff neck.

Wasn't this scenario gratingly familiar? Once, over a year ago, his Yaya had called me at work in a panic. It seemed Woog had fallen on his wrist after a rough and tumble game of tag and was screaming that he had broken it. Atch & I left our offices in a flash and rushed him to the ER for x-rays. And the result? The wrist carefully wrapped in flannel that this whimpering little boy held gingerly close to his chest (the x-ray technician had a devil of a time trying to get him to lay it on the metal table), WAS. BARELY. BRUISED.

"Mommmmmy, I'm sick...a-huh-huh-huh..."

Before I totally lost it and wounded his feelings completely, I was suddenly reminded of a certain 7-year old girl huddled for a good part of New Year's Eve in her father's arms, sobbing over a tiny burn in her forefinger from touching a warm ember of a fizzled firecracker. Or of the same little girl screaming blue murder as her mother held her in an attempt to tweeze off a miniscule wooden splinter from the pad of the little girl's big toe. The memories came flooding in, of the same girl feigning speechlessness because of the "excruciating agony" of lightly swollen tonsils, or calling in sick from school because of an aching shoulder blade.

In the midst of this dejavu, and mostly because I was shamed into facing this version of my childhood self, I tried to tame my temper and smooth over this impending crick in my relationship with my son. Wasn't his fifth birthday barely a week away? Surely he deserved some sort of break from his perpetually harried and irritable mother.

Patiently, I stayed by him while he nibbled at his toast in between whimpers and groans, and when he was done with that, he asked to be excused, leaving behind a plateful of rice, egg and vienna sausage. It was when he asked to be carried to the tv room that I put my foot down. "That's too much," I warned him. Offer the kid a hand and he takes off your whole arm. Sheesh.

I left late for work, in equal parts miffed about his insipid frailty and guilty over not having given him more of my time. By the time I got back that night, Yaya Merly had assembled her report: He refused to take a bath, for fear of moving his neck. He refused to take his siesta, for fear of moving his neck. He stayed in the same stiff position in front of the tv the whole day, for fear of moving his neck - despite a bathroom break outside to pee on his Lolo's rear tire and to squirt his cousin Ia in the face with his water gun.

At bedtime, as I rubbed a mentholated liniment gently around his stiff neck, he arched his back and purred, "Mommy, can you please do my back too?"

Like I said, offer the kid a hand...but then again, this is my childhood self glaring right at me. How could I refuse?