Okay, I can't take credit for the title. Just a saying I read now and then in the self-help section of the bookstore.
Last night, was a perfect example of the phrase.
It started when I went to fill the bathtub for my son's nightly bath. I started to turn the water on when I saw one of those spider-crickets (cave crickets, camel crickets whatever) bending his antenna at me. I've become a master at catching those varmints in recent years, mainly because my house has an abundance of them. Once, while shimmying around in the crawl-space beneath the house, I had about 40 of them jump on my face. While the incident generated goosebump pimples where I didn't know they would grow, it helped me overcome my fear of the vile things.
I was feeling humane and decided to capture the thing and set it free outside. Somewhere not so deep in the subconscious, I was hoping God was keeping a record of this for judgement day. The trick to catching these things is to go the opposite of where you think they'll jump.
This time, however, I didn't even have to catch him. I put my hand out near him and said "Come on, little fella. I'm going to help you". Amazingly, he just crawled up in my hand and waited as I carried him to the back-door.
That freaked me out a little and I had a slight distracting thought of people being reincarnated as insects being one of the levels of hell.
Because I was barefoot and the ground outside was wet, I balanced on my big toe on the threshhold as I leaned outside to put my new friend softly to the ground. I mentally patted myself on the back for my good deed when suddenly--
SLAM!!
Immense pain blinded me to everything before I identified it as coming from my big toe. "Dammit" popped out of my mouth effortlessly and then I turned to see my son had playfully slammed the door on my toe.
Although in my mind I paused, outwardly it wasn't enough for my son. I turned to him and lashed out yelling "DON'T......EVER......SLAM......THIS.......DOOR......AGAIN!!!"
He stooped and cringed to the ground like a dog expecting to be spanked and crawled under the table.
My wife ran downstairs to see what was going on and helped coax him from beneath the table. His face immediately broke into tears and now I not only had pain screaming from my toe, but guilt filling me from my toe to my head.
My pain would go away after a couple of Motrins and a shot of Vodka or 6. I had hurt my son on the inside, however. And how long it would take for that pain to go away, I could only guess.
Suddenly, I was hoping God didn't have his eye on me after all.
I did all I could do to help remedy the situation. I said "I'm sorry for yelling at you son. I shouldn't have done that. I know it was an accident"
By bedtime, Sawyer's actions said he had forgotten the incident. Daddy wasn't the red-faced devil anymore. Just daddy. But somewhere, deep inside, he'll always dread making the devil come out of daddy.
Hurt people hurt people. But I would give my big toe to take back my harsh words to my son.
