Mike Maddock

There are many painful parts to growing up. From diaper rash to arthritis, we're all forced to deal with various discomforting certainties in life. Some of these certainties are gifts from God and some are gifts from our own dumb luck. For example, everyone I know has slammed some appendage in a car door at some point in his or her life.

When I was eight- years-old, I caught my thumb in my father's mid- life crisis mobile. It was a 1978 Porsche 914, and my father had no business driving it. First of all, the windshield wipers alone cost as much as my mother's Ford Maverick, and that Porsche only had two seats. So where did I ride? On the emergency break in the middle, of course. But that's another story.

I slammed my hand in this death mobile's door one crisp fall afternoon and danced a horrific jig until my father realized what was happening and unlocked the door for me. My thumb swelled to the size of a baseball, and I lost the nail a week later. But that's all a part of growing up, right?

So I was not totally surprised when my wife called me at work the other day crying hysterically. She had accidentally slammed my three-year-old son's wrist in our mini-van's sliding side door. He will have a sore wrist for a week or two, but nothing is broken. My wife, on the other hand, is still a wreck.

I've tried to assure her that if she didn't slam his wrist in the door, destiny and the aging process surely would have taken care of it for her. When parents and kids get together, accidents are going to happen.

We don't have to look very far to find proof of that. My very own mother is a walking case study. She could not have loved me more as a child, but sometimes I wonder how I survived those younger years.

One day when I was seven-months-old, I was living it up in the back of one of those 15-seater Chevrolets. I was in some sort of 1960s style baby carrier (probably metal with ill-placed bolts and screws) near my mother in the back seat. My grandparents were in the front seat with my granddad driving. As my mother tells the story, they were all chatting it up when my granddad took a hard right turn off Gervais. My carrier and I went sliding across the seat, out the door, and skidded to a stop in the middle of Oak Street...but that's not the worst part.

My mother says she and her parents were so involved in their conversation that no one even noticed I was gone until they were a good block down Oak Street. Only then did they frantically U-turn and rescue me from the streets of downtown Columbia.

Apparently I survived the incident with little more than a scratch or two, but to this day, my mother still gets chills when she thinks about it. She also still worries about the time she starved me for a few weeks when she mistakenly watered down my formula, the time I sank to the bottom of the neighborhood pool as a two-year-old, and the time my pre-school buddy and I wandered down a busy road to the local 7-11 to grab a couple of toy airplanes.

My wife may feel guilty for a few weeks, or at least until the swelling goes down on my son's wrist, but she can't hope to stop the accidents of the aging process...she can only hope to contain them. Plus, she's got a long way to go before my mother will give her any sympathy.