Baby, Don't Hurt Me; Don't Hurt Me, No More

 

 I am pretty sure I am raising a hypochondriac.

If I had a dollar for every time my daughter said “My eyes hurt!” or “My knee hurts!” I could buy Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, which already has a wing dedicated to my children after getting about half a million dollars of my insurance money over the past nine months.

Parents, please tell me if this is normal for a 2 year old?

Of course, you first worry that she really is hurt. But after awhile, you realize no human being on earth can be hurt in the elbow, knee, eyes, foot, belly, ear, beard (her word for cheeks), finger, toe and every other body part as frequently as she is. And, when you ask her what hurts and she replies “finger” one second and five seconds later says “knee,” it is kind of a giveaway that she might not be telling the truth.

So then I theorized it was about attention. She has been surrounded with sickness and hospitalizations over the past nine months, between my son’s birth and heart surgery and my mother’s stomach surgeries. Maybe she sees all the attention they received and wants in on the action? Plus, she’s had her own legitimate sicknesses and those have paid off with extra attention.

But Lord knows this chick is already Queen of the Ball. She couldn’t get more adoration from her parents, and whenever she visits with relatives or friends, she’s usually the center of attention.

We have recently noticed that some of these “hurts” come up when she is scolded. She begins to cry – real tears -- and says “Daddy, my knee hurts.” We’ve come to realize that it is her feelings that are hurt, but she does not have a way of expressing it. So, we are trying to teach her about “feelings.”

That’s like trying to teach geometry to Jessica Simpson. She is having a really hard time grasping it and often still reverts to the “my eyes hurt” line.

The key for me is to determine what is real and what is fake. As you can imagine, I am a pushover for those tears. I’m a puddle of jello.

I try to hold out. The other night, she was crying in her bed, yelling about her leg being hurt, and I thought it was another attention-seeking episode. I let her go on and on. As the cries got more urgent, I grew frustrated and finally went in to say “enough.”

That’s when I found her right leg legitimately caught in between the slats of her crib, obviously causing her great pain.

Ahh….yeah. Nice move, daddy. It isn’t really Woody Allen material, but a move like that will surely keep me out of the Daddy Hall of Fame. My heart ached on that one.

I think where this type of thing is concerned, it is always best to check first and ignore later.

I hope this phase does not last long. If it does, then she either legitimately has pain, which is obviously not a good thing, or she is a hypochondriac, which means I’m in for a long 18 years and another wing at Children’s Hospital.