Maiming Gracie

We've already covered how I've managed to scar Grace emotionally.  Last week, for the first time, I scarred Grace physically.

Like most daddy screw ups, it started off with me trying to do something good for my daughter, cutting her nails.  In typical baby fashion, Grace constantly grabs at her face, and since baby nails grow like weeds she ends up scratching herself.  Because of this, nail clipping has to happen every two or three days, or else it'll look like we put Grace to bed with a feral cat in her bassinet.

Carrie and I approached nail clipping with extreme trepidation.  Baby nails are adorably, terrifyingly small and Grace is very wiggly, so this endeavor was obviously fraught with danger.  Since I have the steadier hands in the family, I got first crack with the clippers.

The first time I cut Grace's nails was a nerve wracking success.  It took the better part of 20 minutes, but with determined patience and extreme delicacy, my daughter made it through the ordeal unscathed.  And thus, I got to add another permanently ongoing responsibility to my daddy resume.

The weeks went on and I got the hang of things.  20 minutes became 15, then, well, stayed around 15.  Cutting nails is hard.  Nonetheless, I got better at it.  Then I made a fateful mistake.  I got cocky.

Outwardly, I seem like a pretty easygoing, humble guy.  But as anyone that really knows me (or at least played poker with me) will attest, I've got a pretty deep arrogant streak running through me.  It only takes the slightest bit of knowledge for me to turn into an overconfident know-it-all.

So, with a track record of nail cutting success in the books, I started to drop my guard.  The fear of messing up, which had help keep me cautious and precise, had diminished.  I became too quick to clip.  With my sleeping sweetheart lying in my lap, I nicked her thumb.  Grace woke up with a spine chilling scream, torn away from her rest by a never-before-experienced pain.  A trickle of blood dripped from her finger, and I fell to pieces.

One of the toughest things about being a dad is seeing your child in pain and not being able to help them.  It's absolutely heartbreaking.  For example, in the hospital the morning after Grace was born, she sneezed for the first time and started to cry from the surprise.  I was powerless to help her understand what had happened.  It seemed at the time that no amount of comforting would help her understand that sneezes were normal and nothing to be afraid of.  Things like that happen all the time.

This was different though.  This pain was all my fault.  It may seem like a little thing, there'll be plenty more cuts and bruises in the months and years to come, but knowing that the first one was because of something I did killed me inside for the rest of the day.

Carrie did her best to console me, through compassionate teasing, as is our way.  At least during that first night.  The next day, she dropped the compassionate part and was letting me have it pretty good, leaving me with two burdens to bear.

As a postscript, Grace has fully forgiven me, though she got her revenge that night by peeing on me the next time I changed her diaper.  Meanwhile, Carrie received her comeuppance for her reign of joking terror.  Two days after my mis-clipping, Carrie was playing airplane with Grace and things got a bit too turbulent.  Grace threw up from the bumpy flight, leaving my wife as the quivering, puke covered emotional wreck behind our daughter's momentary misery for the rest of the night.