Mother Ireland

I spend an unhealthy amount of time in a state of bewilderment at why boys do what they do.
Being a girl and all I can’t for the life of me see the big attraction in digging holes, smashing stuff, karate kicks, jumping off things or hitting stuff with sticks. For me hanging upside down from trees or throwing stones does not a good time make. Maybe I have just forgotten what it’s like to be a kid.
Mum and I were clearing a wardrobe in my younger brother’s room last week when we found a photo album. The album was full of the usual cutesy photos of my kid brother in which there was a bit of a recurring theme. As a boy he seemed to always accessorise his outfits with some sort of plaster cast or bandages. Broken legs, broken arms, staved fingers, concussions, bruised heads, broken noses. My poor mother spent so much time in the casualty department that they were actually going to start charging her rent.
I’m not saying it was all of his own doing. There was one incident when I thought it would be a great idea to create our own indoor adventure centre using a baby bath, a belt and a set of stairs. I felt he would be better suited for the dummy run so I strapped him in and sent him hurtling down the stairs at high speed. A concussion followed. Surprisingly my mother was not even remotely impressed at my innovative play ideas or my creative construction of the bath/slide and more concerned that my brother was still breathing.
Had she stopped screaming for just one minute, looked at the bigger picture and maybe tried a little praise I may well have be the chief engineer at Disneyland today. It’s their loss.
And the injured party was fine. He has gone on to become a famous concert pianist. In fact I could probably take the credit for knocking some sense into him. Before the bath incident the boy had strong aspirations of becoming a snooker player.
My own middle child has obviously inherited the clumsy genes from his uncle.
The child is incapable of finishing a week at school without some sort of physical injury. Last week he jumped off a wall and when I arrived to pick him up a scene reminiscent of Rambo greeted me. The boy was up on the counter trying to be brave while a teacher dabbed his busted knee. There were bloody paper towels strewn everywhere. This week the boy fell flat on his face in the playground and has a purple bump the size of an egg on his forehead. He spent his lunch hour with a family-size bag of frozen Rancho-style chips attached to the injury.
I fear the school might have to draft in a crack team of security personnel to protect the boy from himself.
Unlike his uncle he’s not quite a level seven injury magnet yet, Cathal’s calamity crown is safe – in the past few years he has slept through the Madrid bomb when it smashed all the windows at the front of his house, wrote off his SUV in a snowstorm the US and managed to escape injury when the steering wheel of his car actually came off in his hands while driving to Donegal. Those are some big shoes to fill.