I often either hear the wrong thing or say the wrong thing.
Today when my daughters and I were watching TV, I noticed my youngest daughter was super tired.
“You must be growing,” I said to her. She is very petite, so I thought I was paying her a compliment. I figured I would do one better, and I said, “Your head looks bigger.”
I have no idea why I said that, and boy was that the wrong thing to say.
“MOM,” she huffed.
My oldest daughter put her head in her hands and then started laughing hysterically; then, I caught on to my huge blunder.
You see, when Arden was very young, she was on prednisone for breathing problems, so she was very skinny with big cheeks. A day didn’t go by without someone telling her, “My, what big cheeks you have.”
Young children don’t want to be told they have big cheeks. All she heard was people telling her what a big head she had – much like the multitude of times I was called a Tow Head because of my light blond hair. I always heard people saying my head looked like a giant toe, which is also something young children do not want to hear.
Just as I would spend nights looking at my big toe, and then to my head in the handheld mirror, and then back to my big toe, Arden would look at herself in the mirror and suck those checks in.
One October, Bronwyn, Arden, and I were sitting at the kitchen table talking about Halloween costumes.
“We all like the cartoon Jimmy Neutron,” Bronwyn said. “Maybe we could find some costumes from that.”
Arden chimed in, “OK, OK, I’ll be Cindy,” with great resignation.
We looked at her confused.
“You know, because of my big head.” The cartoon character has a giant head. Well, all the characters did.
We burst out laughing then because that was the last thing on anyone’s mind, but sadly, it was on Arden’s mind.
I thought she had found some peace with her bigheaded self-image, but evidently, I stepped all over her self-esteem this evening.
I apologized over and over again. I am not sure she heard it.
Earlier this evening we were at a friend’s home, and he was talking about visiting a place in Bosnia called Magic Oreo. At least, that is what Bronwyn and I heard, and we couldn’t get the picture of Oreos out of our mind to faithfully follow his conversation.
On the ride home, Bronwyn was cackling in the car saying, “Did you say ‘Beef Strip’?” in an over pronounced manner.
She was poking fun at me.
A few weeks ago when I was dealing with a miserable head cold, my husband Byron came home and said he ran into our friend Linda who had told him about her beef strip.
He continued to talk about what Linda had told him.
I was bewildered.
“Wait. Did you say ‘Beef Strip’?” I asked him over pronouncing the words beef strip a second time.
“Um, Laurie, I said beach trip,” he replied.
“Oh, thank heavens,” I sighed. “That makes a lot more sense,” I said as Bronwyn and Arden’s laughter rang through the house.