MORTIFICATION

I don’t think I ever truly understood the word mortification until we took our daughter Vivienne, 12 months old at the time, out to a supposedly relaxed and friendly dinner with some friends.
We had fed her while we ate, and kept her happy and relatively quiet by giving her bits of French bread as the meal went on.
And then suddenly it all went to hell.
There was a repellent retching sound – imagine a large dog gagging on a jagged piece of bone and you have the proximate decibel level and sound quality – and every diner in the restaurant swung about as one, their heads pivoting to view the spectacle unfolding at our table. Our genteel daughter Vivienne had shoved her right hand down her throat and was in the process of gagging herself. In fact, the arm was invisible right up to the elbow; meanwhile her face turning tomato red and tears brimming from her eyes. All the while accompanied by the aforementioned choking sound.
My daughter had been doing this to herself, usually when bored, and usually at the dinner table, for about 2 months. When we told our pediatrician about this behavior he waved it off as if swatting a slight nuisance, saying only that she was ‘exploring her body.’
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think about ‘exploring my body’, something a little more enjoyable than self induced choking comes to mind.
We were usually able to get her hand out of her mouth before she got the full fist all way down the throat. But you had to be alert and you had to be quick. Alas, while dining with our friends and enjoying good food and conversation we were neither alert nor quick.
So as sixty diners gawked at our lovely daughter, they got the Full Monty, so to speak. The beet red face, the tear filled eyes, and a sound straight from the gates of hell. And just to top it all off, to make their dining experience a truly unforgettable affair, everything that Vivienne had eaten in the past 3 hours then flowed out of her mouth, around her fat little arm and down the front of her, spilling over the booster chair onto the restaurant floor.
And in the embarrassed stillness that followed, while our friends stared at our previously darling daughter with looks of stupefied disgust, and my appalled wife leapt to attend our daughter as I looked for a hole to crawl into; it was then that I came to fully comprehend the meaning of the word mortification. For indeed, I was well and truly mortified.