The Ironies of Life

I just returned from Bella's 4 year check-up.  It was eventful, to say the least.  She had to get 4 shots - FOUR!  The doctor asked me whether I wanted to do them all together or do two now and then make another appointment before preschool started in the fall for the other two.  I thought he must be nuts if he thought I was going to make Bella go through being held down twice in a matter of 6 months!

But as I and two other nurses held down my poor, screaming, crying child, I thought about how ironic it was that I was putting her in pain to keep her from getting sick.  She looked at me and said, "But Mommy, why?" when I was holding her down and saying she had to get it done.  I felt like telling the nurses to forget it and high-tailing it out of there.  Another ironic thing about the visit is that we have been trying to teach Bella to have modesty about her body and that if anyone touches her in a way that's uncomfortable that it is okay for her to tell them "no" and to tell us about it.  But then the nurse told me when she left to have Bella strip down to her undies to see the doctor. Bella was insistent that she would not take off her clothes and she looked at the little paper gown they offered in disgust.  I tried to talk to her about how the doctor was different and that it was his job to check her whole body and make sure it was okay.  In the end, I didn't make her take her clothes off.  I am sure it took an extra minute or two for the doctor to maneuver around the clothes, but she was much more comfortable and, since I knew she would be getting shots after the check-up, I decided that I would give her the concession of not fighting the clothes issue.

I witnessed a completely different irony about two weeks ago when I was driving home from the South Fairmont exit through where all of the construction is going on - for the fifth time. -  I mean, really, how many times do you have to dig the same ground up to fix the problem correctly!  - Anyway, I had just past all the construction mess and was driving down Rt. 250 and almost ran over a sign laying in the middle of the road.  I swerved and missed it, but as I was passing Muriale's, I saw a Highway Safety Truck pulled off the side of the road, with a trailer full of road signs, and a man walking from the truck to retrieve the sign that had obviously blown off the trailer.  I thought that it was ironic that a highway safety truck would create a highway hazard. 

We as humans are so full of contradictions and exceptions.  I feel like these little ironies of life just let us see glimpses of the bigger ironies of life - the times when we reject the very thing we need, for what we know we don't.