Have I got one eye or two eyes? 

We were on our way out, going Ten Pin Bowling in the car at the weekend and my son asks:

Have I got one eye or two eyes, Mam?

My body immediately had a reaction. I went into fight or flight mode. I started to come out in a cold sweat. I had palpitations. I could hardly breathe. It took me a second to work out why. I had heard this question before. Many many times. Back when he was 3 years old. He had spent the best part of 6 months asking this question repeatedly. And I thought the question was gone but here it was again.

Have I got one eye or two eyes?

Practically every day for months he asked me have I got one eye or two? I couldn’t work out why he needed this reassurance that he had two eyes. Every time he asked he would touch both his eyes to make sure I was telling the truth. He would then do the same to mine to check I had two eyes. At this point I was still quite naive about things and just thought he had maybe watched a cartoon about a one eye monster or something. Little did I know that this was the start of many many questions.

After a good few months of this question I went out for coffee with my mam and said god I am sick of telling him he has two eyes!!!! And she finally confessed that it was her fault he was asking. One day he had put her face against his, forehead to forehead, nose to nose, and when you do this with someone they look like they have one eye and she had said to him ooooooo you have one eye. Yeah thanks mam!!!!! It had obviously preyed on his mind because he asked and asked and no matter how many times I told him he had two eyes, and he touched both his eyes he still needed hear it. Now I knew why he was asking, I put a plan in place to make sure it stopped. My mum said she would do the face thing with him again and say oh you do have two eyes. She did do it (although had to do it several times) and after a while he did eventually see (no pun intended) that he did have two eyes, until today, approx 18 months later when he asked the question again. Once again I had no idea where this question had come from. And once again I was batting in the dark (pun most definitely intended this time!). I just had to go with it today and if the question continued see what plan I could come up with. 

I reassured him that he did have two eyes still. And he said 

“But I can’t see out of this one” 

Now the rational side of me knows he can see out of both his eyes and nothing had happened to stop his sight in one eye but in these situations sometimes the irrational side comes out and you have a fleeting moment where you think oh my god is that true, what if for the last 18 months he hasn’t been able to see out of one of his eyes and he has just had one working eye and I was the worst parent in the world for not doing anything about it.

You are laughing but it is possible that I am the worst parent in the world because there was one time my daughter had hurt her elbow quite badly after coming off her bike. She seemed to be coping ok and she got the chance to go bowling which she really wanted to do so I sent her bowling. When she came back her elbow looked a lot worse and after a trip to hospital with her it turned out she had broken her elbow. Yes that’s right I had sent her bowling with a broken elbow*!!!!!  And right now when my son asked this question have I got one eye or two eyes we were on our way to bowling….again!!!! I think I am starting to hate bowling!!! The irrational side of me started to panic. Could it be possible that my son couldn’t see out of one eye, and had been like this for the last 18 months?!?!? 

I did the classic held a couple of fingers up and asked him to say how many I was holding up. He said 20. Wow I don’t even have 20 fingers!!! Panic was well and truly set in but I told him I would make an eye appointment for him and I spent the rest of the day covertly checking his eyesight trying to get into his peripheral vision to see if he could see me. I say covertly because if you look at my son for too long he hates it. He is constantly shouting “don’t look at me”!! I knew if I got a “dont look at me!” shouted at me at least he could see me!

As the weekend went on I started to realise that quite clearly the eye question was part of a bigger concern around his whole head. Because not only was he concerned about his eye but also his throat. He kept asking me

“Where is my throat in my neck?”

“Is this bit my throat?”

And feeling for it. I assume he was feeling for his windpipe which you can feel and grab hold of. But if you turn your neck to the side your neck muscles stick out and he wanted to know if that bit was his throat. Between his eye and his throat and all the research I was doing on Google I bet Google thought I was training to be a doctor. 

At one point he also asked….

“How big is my brain?”

I believed that the bigger the head the bigger the brain so I expect his brain was quite large as he does have a rather large head. At 5 years old I was buying him hats that fit a 10 year old so I imagine if it was related to head size his brain would be big, and maybe that would explain all these questions. The bigger the brain the more thirsty you are for information!! However another Google later and it turns out your brain is the size of your two fists together, and he has average sized fists, not hulk size fists, and so his brain must be average size. 

All these questions about his head over one weekend and I thought maybe I should buy a science book all about the human body until I remembered The Invisible String book (read my last post if you haven’t already!!!) and decided I couldn’t quite cope with another book incident. And so I did nothing and hoped my answers satisfied him….until he asked this…..

“Have I got a hole in my bum?”

And I will leave you all with that question. Because it is one of the best questions I have ever had the pleasure of answering. Read next week’s post to find out what happened!!

*my daughter was absolutely fine by the way. Her elbow healed fine and we joke about it now but the guilt will haunt me forever.