Today I felt like an awful mother. This has happened a few times, but I was terrified I toasted my son’s testes.
He was recently diagnosed with Cradle Cap (common and looks bad but doesn’t bother him at all) and was prescribed a topical treatment that almost looks like calamine lotion but smells wacky. Apparently it is made with the same stuff you can find in dandruff shampoos. It was $14 and I’ve used a teaspoon worth of the bottle. Suffice to say we will only be using $.50 of it.
Anyhoo, you have to wet his head and rinse it off so you might as well run a bath, or that was my thinking. So I run the bath, check the temperature, have my husband check it, then put him in. He almost immediately stopped crying when he got into the warm water.
I massage the treatment into his scalp as recommended then start to lather him up. When I was almost finishing rinsing him he starts crying. Nothing got in his eyes, perhaps the treatment starting burning or he’s just a baby… I hope the second one. I look down and his testes are pale and hard. I, no joke, thought of semi cooked chicken (like when you first throw it into the pan) and yelled at my husband to come make sure I didn’t cook my son’s manhood. Before my husband could even make it into the room, my son was already calming down and the pale/hardness was slowly returning to normal.
Turns out regardless of the temperature or state of crying, his testes turn pale and a hardened.
The point of this post is to show that you will feel like an awful parent at times. And though you might be judged as such with some choices you make, ask yourself these questions: Is your child fed? Is your child happy? Is their diaper clean? Now I would have said “no” to the second question in my scenario but once he calmed down everything was fine.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone is a beginner at some point and we are all just doing our best to figure it out.
Easier said than done.
Have you ever had a moment where you felt like an awful parent? Fess up and comment below.