How Long Does the Brain Damage Last?

Bill Cosby was right: children are brain-damaged.

 

I was doing my hair the other morning and I heard mysterious splashing sounds coming from the boys’ bathroom.  And giggling.  You just know there’s going to be trouble when giggling is involved.  I slyly, silently made my way along the hall to peek in the bathroom and immediately shrieked in horror, “Put that DOWN!  No touch!  NO TOUCH!”  Jamie was dipping his toothbrush and a cup in the toilet, then splashing the water from the cup back in the toilet and sucking the toilet-water from the toothbrush.  The toilet at which we had both yelled, “Bye-bye poop!” not ten minutes before when I dumped the contents of a particularly foul diaper into the bowl and flushed.

 

Oh, gag me with a spoon, this kid has no sense of self-preservation.  I was terrified that within the next few days he would spike a fever and come down with some sort of horrible infection and then I’d take him to the ER where they would culture his throat and find some disgusting poop bacteria and then arrest me for feeding my child feces.

 

Another amazing thing about children?  Their resiliency.  My kids could eat anything and not get sick.  And they frequently do.  Charles cannot resist candy or gum, no matter what sidewalk he finds some on, and Jamie will drink out of any body of water, no matter how stagnant or scummy.  Frankly, it’s exhausting trying to keep them from ingesting foul substances.  In our family’s case, genetics has provided for a strong constitution to counter the very clear BRAIN DAMAGE.

 

I think the brain damage must extend to their auditory processing system because I swear that these children do not understand me when I am speaking.  I am like the adults on Charlie Brown, a cacophony of “whomp-whomps” that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.  The only thing either of my children understood last night of all the things I said to them was “ice cream.”  They had ice cream, but they did not get numerous bedtime stories because they behaved like Tasmanian Devils in the bath and did not respond AT ALL when I shouted at them to “Stop splashing!  Now, you’ve lost one bedtime story!  Now another!  Only one story left!  Stop splashing!”  When they were finally ready for bed after swirling and twirling all the water out of the bathtub and onto the walls and floor, neither of them could understand why they didn’t get to have more than one bedtime story (which, for Jamie, was a story that doesn’t have words, just different kinds of dog barks [“Woof!  Yap!  Yap!  Ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff!”] – BRAIN DAMAGE).  It’s like I wasn’t even there during bath time.  They didn’t hear me and thought that they were being punished for no reason.

 

It is no mystery why I choose to send my children to preschool and go to work every day: adults.  Who have stories that don’t involve the themes of “Garbage truck!” or “Batman was flying but then he got stuck and had to call Superman and the dragon shot fire out of his MOUTH but then Wonder Woman talked to him and he was a good dragon again and I’m going to wear my Lighting McQueen costume today but I’m not going to take a nap because I love gum.”