Splinters

Every year I begin a crusade. I believe children should be shod when they go outside. Shoeless Joe Jackson and his fellow barefoot comrades view the coming of crocuses and planting of gardens as a sign to lose any footwear they may have consented to wear during the winter months. As a result, I have been known to begin loading the car an hour prior to an appointment only to be sabotaged by a single shoe.

If the people who determined when to show clemency about being late for appointments, witnessed my struggle to get all of them into the car, only to spend a frantic 30 minutes tearing apart couches and beds to locate a single pair of not necessarily matching but left and right shoes, only to then bargain with the shoe gods and being willing to accept even just two shoes the same size that are for the same foot, they’d just give me a standing appointment…when you show, it’s your time.

I have also in sheer desperation, given my eldest daughter a twenty and told her to go into the Walmart and come back out with one size fits all slippers for whoever it is that is missing footwear.

So you’ld think I’d be gung ho about being barefoot but having had small children for the past 16 years, I’ve also taken out my fair share of splinters. The most memorable one I helped remove from my three year old son during the course of a family party. He’d been playing on the wooden deck on our house and got a huge one in his left foot. He was in tears. We were hosting the party but spent the bulk of the next hour soaking, working with tweezers, but nothing was working and he was in hysterics.

My brother tried to calm him down by explaining the situation. My son was having none of it.

“If you don’t let us remove the splinter, it will continue to hurt.”
“IT HURTS NOW!”

“If you don’t let us remove the splinter, it could even become infected.”
“I DON’T CARE!”

“If you don’t let us remove it, the infection could be serious.”
“SO?”

“So your parents who love you want to remove the splinter so you won’t get sick or be in pain or die.”
“I DON’T… WANT… TO LIVE!” he gasped, holding and hiding his foot from my tweezers.

I voted for more soaking at this point.

Over the years, I’ve learned tricks like having the kids close their eyes while I remove the foreign objects from their toes and that handing them an ice cream while watching television is also a good anesthesia. I’ve also given up explaining why splinters need to come out entirely.

But I’ve also come up with a solution for splinters and summer and shoes. You don’t have to wear shoes if you can’t find them, but then you must wear socks.

Thick socks.
Thick Soccer up past your knees socks.

They don’t have to match.

One morning of enduring those heat insulators on one’s feet and we’ll have no problems from June until September with locating footwear.

Now, if only I could devise a similar solution for winter.