Will this scar heal?

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A month ago I let my two-year-old boy fall, strapped in a backpack, from a stack of boxes onto a shopping cart, leaving a nasty bruise on his cheek.

I wrote about it a few days later. I talked about how bad I felt but how forgiving he was. I talked about making the decision to be honest, not sugar-coating my role in the accident.

At that point, I thought it was over and done, all but a little healing.

I was wrong.

About a week after the accident, my wife came downstairs looking somber after tucking Sam in bed.

"We were sitting there cuddling," she said, "and all of a sudden he said, ‘backpack. Cart. Cheek.'"

I heard him say something similar the next day. And he's talked about it many times since. "Backpack," he'll say matter-of-factly. "Sam fall down. Cheek hurt."

My heart breaks every time. And again I tell him it was my fault, and I'm sorry, and he doesn't need to be afraid

Meanwhile, the bruise healed and the swelling went down. But it was clear that the thick wire of the shopping cart's top edge had done more damage; there was an indented line in my little boy's cheek, like a long, ghastly, unnatural dimple. I could feel the hard tissue underneath it, like a scar underneath the skin.

"It probably killed the fat cells in his cheek," our pediatrician said when I took Sam there Monday.

Would it heal?

Not likely. He scribbled out a recommendation.

And tomorrow we are taking our little boy to Children's Hospital for a plastic surgery consultation.

Yes, surgery.

"I assume they'll go in from inside his mouth, so they don't even break the skin," my wife said. "I do NOT want him going around with a big scar on his face his whole life."

Then she got very quiet.

"I just can't think about it," she said when I asked. "The idea of him lying there, getting cut open..."

As much as that bothers me, though, I am bothered more by the other scar: the one on his memory.

"Backpack. Sam fall down. Cheek hurt."

Is he two young for permanent memories? Maybe, maybe not. My older son has a flash picture of the bedroom I used when my first wife and I were separated but living in the same house, and that situation ended when he was two years and three months old. My stepson remembers the apartment he lived in when he was three, before his little brother was born.

Could this be Sam's earliest memory? Of falling and smashing face-first on that shopping cart? It would certainly be vivid enough to stick, and he doesn't talk about any other past event the same way. He almost sounds puzzled when he brings it up, like these images are in his mind and he's not used to the sensation, doesn't know what to do with it.

If it is, of course, it is. No surgeon can go in and fix a memory. There are no stitches for it, no dead fat cells to remove.

Perhaps, I think to myself, we'll be able to laugh about it someday. He'll tease me about how I scarred him, damaged him. I'll shed some mock tears, tell him that I'm just glad he doesn't remember all the beatings before that. It will be a good family joke, part of our lore.

But it's sure not funny now.

Brian David/Dec. 16, 2008

Read the complete post at http://pittsburghmom.com/blogs/burghdad/archive/2008/12/17/will-this-scar-heal.aspx