Aug 21, 2017 3 min read

We had a lesson in natural consequences last week. My son was running full bore through the house and slammed his foot off a chair. Apparently, it happened first thing in the morning, though I didn’t find out about it until after lunch.

I was at work the day it happened. I got a call around noon that his foot was hurting. He simply told me that he had stubbed his toe, so I told him to suck it up. A little while later, he called again.

“I think I broke it, Mommy,” he said.

I rolled my eyes.

“Ask your sister to take a picture and send it to me,” I replied.

“I can’t,” he said. “They told me I was whining too much so they went to town.”

I told him to prop his foot on a pillow and put an ice pack on it. Then I texted his sisters and asked them to text me a photo of their brother’s foot the minute they got home.

It was nearly quitting time when the photo finally came in. Meanwhile, I had gotten several more phone calls from an ever more frantic preteen who was concerned that his ice pack had melted, that he couldn’t move his entire leg, and that, since his sisters still had not returned, that he was lonely as well.

I began to fear that my eyes would get stuck in the top of my head from rolling them so hard.

When the picture did arrive, it was somewhat blurry. I could see that the toe was not black and blue so I didn’t rush my drive. But when I got there, I could hear my son crying. I called to him, and discovered that he had been ushered upstairs by his compassion-deficient sisters because he was “drowning out their Netfix program.”

He crawled down the stairs on his hands and knees, and I could see that, regardless of the injury’s severity, his pain was genuine. He was sweating and pale. I had him sit on the steps and hold his foot up for me to see.

True to the picture, there was minimal bruising. However, the blurred quality of the photo did not do justice to the amount of swelling he had. Mind you, this kid already has Fred Flintstone feet. (Thick all over and fairly square, you know?) So, for me to be able to see swelling meant it was pretty darned swollen.

I rolled my eyes again as I helped him hobble to the car. He sucked air in with every step, and every exhale was a moan. By the time we got to the hospital, he was dry heaving. I had to request a wheelchair for him as he is too big for me to carry anywhere anymore.

X-rays were taken and they determined that he had indeed fractured his toe. They taped them together and put him in a boot to soften his steps for a few days. They gave him a dose of ibuprofen to help calm his pain and reduce his swelling. He walked to the car with a decisive limp but otherwise unaided.

As we buckled up and began to pull away, he asked me if we could get ice cream since he had suffered so greatly all day.

I resisted the urge to tell him that he was responsible for his own great suffering and let the natural consequences speak for themselves. I couldn’t, however, resist the urge to roll my eyes one last time.