The Band-Aid Addiction

I’ve ignored it for long enough.

I’ve turned a blind eye, I’ve laughed about it and I’ve even supported it. But the time has come for me to face the truth. The ugly truth.

My four year old has an addiction… And, it’s all my fault.

It started innocently enough.”I have a boo-boo,” he pronounced, last year, his eyes welling with tears. I inspected his knee, but there was no cut nor scrape to be found.In an effort to halt the tears and get on with dinner making, I offered up a Captain America adorned piece of plastic.

“Feel better?” I asked as I kissed his grass stained skin.

Yes, he nodded. All better.

And, that was all it took. In an instant, an addict was born.

Lily and Ben were different. Stronger, you might say. They understood the difference between a cut which required bandaging and one which was completely fabricated. They could resist the call of Johnson & Johnson from the medicine cabinet. They enjoyed seeing their fingertips and toes. Their eyes didn’t light up at a new character adorning a box or the medicine cabinet at a friend’s house. Evan, however, wasn’t so lucky.

The evidence is everywhere. I find discarded, dirty bandages on the floor, stuck to my jeans and wadded up in my sheets. Over the summer, he developed tan lines according to which imaginary injury he was covering. There are crumpled up wrappers littering my bathroom floor, evidence of the haste with which application took place. He cries when they are yanked off, but immediately asks for a replacement. He simply can’t resist their allure, and I simply can’t resist buying them.

So, here we are, with a half-box a day habit and nobody to blame but me.

Well, me, and the person who thought of putting damn characters on Band-Aids to begin with.