A real nail-biter

By Mike Cound

We began to notice that our son was becoming an accomplished nail-biter before we moved back to Chattanooga, a little over a year ago. It wasn’t too hard to pick up on this, as he seemed to prefer the taste of cuticles over corndogs.

Back in Little Rock, we didn’t really focus much on his habit; we just figured it was a phase that would pass. When we got to Chattanooga, however, it seemed to get worse. Maybe the stress of the move put him over the top, but Jerry began to pretty much keep one hand in his mouth at all times, and that was only because two hands didn’t fit in there. (I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I don’t really know why he was stressed, since he barely helped us move at all—physically or financially.) In any case, when he reached the point that his fingertips had become like Havarti to a house mouse, we realized we had to stop it.

Now, let me pause for a moment and admit, with all the shame in the world, that I, too, am a nail-biter. For some reason, my habit is generally limited to the dark coverage of movie theaters during intense action films, but it exists all the same. The point is that I am indeed a hypocrite for wanting to stop my son from nail-biting, since I have no intention of giving it up myself, as this would negatively affect my cinematic experience. So it was against with this backdrop that my wife Cindy and I set out to stop the madness (my son’s, not mine).

We considered castor oil on the fingertips, handcuffs, really stern looks, and other accepted methods of torture from the parental handbook, but we never got around to implementing any of them. Dealing with the problem would be just too time-consuming—and, after all, Jerry hadn’t reached the first joint of any of his fingers, so we had not hit red alert yet.

Fortunately, one of Jerry’s baseball teammates had a dad who happened to be a pediatrician in his free time. He was a self-proclaimed pro at this nail-biting cessation stuff—evidently, there had been an epidemic of nail-biting issues within the Chattanooga elementary school system—and he had a failsafe solution: a reward program. That’s right, a program! The idea was that if Jerry could get through a full day without being seen biting his nails, he would get a point. After 10 points, he would get a reward. Sounded OK to me. The big question was, “What should the reward be?”

Now, let me pause again and tell you that I am an extremely vocal opponent of all video games—Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, whatever. They are not coming into our house to stay; it’s just not happening! I have developed the reputation of being a video game ogre, and I’ve been one of the last holdouts that I know of in this parental arena. So given my feelings about video games, you know that I felt tricked into agreeing to purchase Wii Sports as Jerry’s reward at the end of the proposed “nail-biters treatment clinic,” à la Betty Ford.

I could have a lot to say about the Wii at some other time, but let me just explain that when I made the Wii deal, I really didn’t know what it was, and I had never played it. Also, the game was marketed to me (a sports agent by trade) by my son as “Wii Sports”—with an emphasis on “sports” and how it was a “really active” and “positive” video game and “I’ll never play it if you don’t want me to” and “I may get a college scholarship due to the skills I acquire” and all sorts of other manipulative sales tactics. I envisioned a group of elite athletes, with no body fat whatsoever, bowling and golfing in my living room. It is with this understanding of the Wii that I agreed to purchase it if Jerry earned 10 points in the “program.”

Keep in mind that his nail-biting problem was so severe that I didn’t think he’d get through one day, much less 10, so I felt pretty confident that we’d never be getting a Wii, anway.

I was duped! He won the prize in 11 days! The only reason he didn’t get there in 10 days was that he didn’t initially understand the rules of the program. Believe me, I tried to change the rules as we went along, but he and his mom would have none of it.

So we got a Wii, and Jerry stopped biting his nails. Problem solved, right?

Nope.

Little did we know, but our boy has evidently been genetically engineered to grow fingernails at a superhuman rate. Once he stopped biting them, they grew so long, so quickly, that soon all we needed was a long purple robe and piano lessons to have a little Liberace running around the house.

Thus we swapped a nail-biter for a son who was sporting a creative assortment of kitchen knives at the end of his digits. This became a hazard to both himself and others; even the dogs were afraid to come near him. My wife had to set up a manicure station somewhere in the house in order to clip the little guy on a regular basis.

Still, this particular weaponry finally drew blood on his birthday. Since Jerry is convinced that he cannot enter the water without a complete seal over his nose, he is the one-armed swimmer. Despite all of my coaching, he refuses to release his death grip on his nostrils, having convinced himself that certain drowning is the consequence.

So we were out on the Tennessee River with a bunch of screaming youngsters for his birthday party, and the very first boy to jump in the water was the birthday boy, complete with a set of new fingernails—and holding his nose, of course. Bad combination! He ripped a gash in one of his nostrils and came up bleeding profusely. Emotionally he was fine until one of the screaming partygoers pointed out that he was bleeding and probably going to die. At this point, he saw the blood and decided that his life was coming to a tragic, poetic end on his ninth birthday. Then two other boys started crying, evidently in a show of support for Jerry’s wounded nostril. At this point, Cindy and I both considered crying but were somehow able to hold it together.

Ultimately everyone settled down and we got through the rest of the day, and that evening Cindy and I agreed that Jerry needed more frequent visits to the manicure station. Unofficially and away from the hearing range of my wife, however, I took him aside and said, “Hey, buddy, just go back to biting those nails.”

That seemed a little safer.