20151027.0621

Ms. 8 will be getting a flu shot today. I do not expect she will be happy about the experience; she has tended not to be pleased to have needles stuck into her, and she has had a fair bit of experience with having them stuck in her in just over twenty months of living. The first happened not long after she was taken out of her mother and brought into the world, and, aside from vaccinations since, she has had to have blood drawn. (Her first birthday saw her at the hospital, and me with her, finding out that she had pneumonia. Nobody enjoyed it--although there are worse alternatives, to be sure. And she is fine now.) And I am again going to be in the position of having to hold her while some other person who smells funny sticks a cold needle into her and pumps her full of some fluid that will leave her sore--but will also leave her better protected than she otherwise would be. It is not the way I would prefer to spend the morning.

It is a fairly common thing in my experience that I must impose some small violence on Ms. 8 now--and helping to restrain her so that another can stick sharp metal into her counts as violence, as do any number of corrective responses to other things--in the interest of forestalling worse problems later. I do not necessarily enjoy the tasks. I confess to some degree of sadism, to be sure; I have taken delight in causing others pain on occasion, and there are still people in whose misfortunes I find joy--and feel that I would find yet more were I able to cause those misfortunes, particularly could I not worry about the consequences thereof. (I have said before that I am not a good person, I think.) Most of those, however, are people who have done me wrong or whom I perceive as having done me wrong; my daughter is not such a person. More to the point, I care about her, which is not the case for a great many others. For both reasons, I find myself not entirely at ease with having to do as I must do, and cause her present pain against future need.

Such a struggle is a small one, I know. I could have much worse problems than having to listen to my daughter cry at getting a vaccination. I could have to listen to my daughter cry in pain as disease ravages her body and leaves her paralyzed in full or in part or hinders her growth. I could have to listen to my daughter stop crying as she stops doing all else; I could have to see her to the grave before me. I do not envy those who have had to do so, certainly. But that does not mean I am happy to see Ms. 8 cry, and it does not mean I am happy to be the cause or complicit with the cause of those tears.