My Fear of Pencils

Several months ago, when I was very new to blogging, I told you the story of how I broke my foot trying to save my kids from harm...which they were inflicting upon themselves...on the stairs. In that entry, I described how I tend to knock my feet and toes into walls, and that I also broke my pinky toe last year. Something that I see in my home on a daily basis has started me thinking about how accident prone I have always been when it comes to my feet, and because of it, I might have an irrational fear of pencils.

When I was a girl in my elementary school years, I would hurt my feet quite often. Some of my injuries were probably pretty common, others not so much. I used to spend hours outside, running around the backyard with no shoes. It was a daily occurrence in the summer months. I can remember frequently stepping on bees during those carefree, barefoot days. My mom was always coming at me with the tweezers to remove the leftover bee stingers. I was also prone to catching slivers of wood in my feet. (You might call them splinters). I suppose I should have started wearing shoes.

I very clearly remember the time that I was hanging out alone in my dad's garage. I discovered a small, square piece of wood, with a nail sticking out of it, lying on the floor. I should have told my parents what I found, or simply picked it up and placed it on a high shelf. I didn't do either of those things. I believed that I would be able to balance on it...on the nail itself. What was I thinking? I don't know, I was a clueless kid, and as I tried to step on it, that nail went straight through my foot. I needed a tetanus shot and who knows what else to heal that injury.

My dad also stored his free weights in the garage. Of course, I wasn't supposed to mess with them, but somehow, I must have felt invincible. I dropped one of the heavy weights directly onto my big toe. To this day, my toes look different from each other because of the damage that weight caused.

The foot incident that triggers the most amount of trauma in my mind is the time that I went charging down the hallway to my bedroom, only to be stopped short by a pencil being thrust into my right foot. I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I believed was so important to send me running down the hall that night. What I do recall is crashing to the ground when that pencil jammed up into my foot. It went straight in and then broke, leaving about 1/4 inch of the pencil lodged deeply in my foot. Another trip to the emergency room resulted, and I returned home with that little piece of pencil neatly wrapped in clear medical tape as a souvenir. Isn't that gross? At this very moment, I can still see the stain left behind in my foot by that fateful pencil. My parents have never moved from my childhood house, and once in a while, when I see one of my kids running down that hallway, I flash back to my encounter with that horrible pencil.

After the pencil vs. foot fiasco, my mom was obsessively diligent about making sure we never again had pencils on the floor. Her words were eternally ingrained in me:

"Never leave pencils on the floor! Pick up that pencil! Somebody will step on it!"

As a result, I have grown up to be the same type of mom. I am always, always, always harping on my kids to pick up their pencils. Yet, I probably find one on the floor every day. With four kids, a lot of pencils are in use, but why won't they just pick them up and put them away? I don't know how to make them understand how dangerous it is to have pencils on the floor. I tell them my story. I show them my graphite-colored scar. Nothing works. I picked up a pencil from the family room just before I sat down to type this post. Does anybody else worry about pencils on the floor, or is it just me? Do I sound obsessive? 

Do you have anything that happened in your childhood that you incessantly worry might reoccur with your own kids, like being burned by the stove or falling into a pond? How do you stress to the kids to be safer than you were, and do they actually listen? Just like I believed I could carry heavy weights and balance on nails, I imagine our kids are oblivious to the dangers that lie in every day objects. I'm sure I'll be nagging about pencils on the floor for-ev-er.