It was a total rookie movie, me stepping on that Lego. I knew better. At the time, I’d been a parent for at least five years. One day on the parenting job doesn't make a girl an expert, but five years? This wasn't my first time in the playroom. And yet, like a total newbie, I dared to walk barefoot near my children’s toys.
“MothereffingpieceofeffingLego!” I screamed as the little plastic bone breaker embedded itself in my foot. “This hurts more than childbirth.” The pain was intense, like a needle digging into each and every nerve in my entire body. If only I had that epidural that made childbirth manageable. I fell back onto the couch, dug the Lego out of my foot, and winced in pain hoping I hadn’t broken anything.
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My husband had heard my expletive-filled scream and, assuming there was an emergency, came running. “What happened?” he asked. With tears in my eyes I explained what that Lego had done to me.
“Oh,” he replied. “I thought something really bad happened.”
“Something bad has happened!” I yelled. “A Lego tried to hobble me.”
Instead of offering help, or Advil, he shrugged and said he didn’t know what the big deal was. “It’s just a Lego,” he said all cavalier and cocky.
But every Mom knows firsthand, or should I say first foot, that Legos are lethal weapons.
I couldn’t go on my usual run the next day and had to avoid wearing heels for the following week. Still incredulous, the hubs thought I was just being overdramatic. To this day whenever our kids are playing Legos, he makes some joke about the time I “pretended” a Lego was a lethal weapon.
But every Mom knows firsthand, or should I say first foot, that Legos are lethal weapons. They're small, hard plastic devices that don’t bend or give when stepped on. And they're always stepped on because the small humans of the house like to leave their Legos everywhere. Everywhere. But still, my Lego incident has become our family’s joke. “Maybe if you’d ever clean the playroom,” I retort to my darling husband, “You’d know what it feels like to step on a Lego.
But now, thanks to the You Tube Channel Today I Found Out, science is backing me up. In fact, science is backing up every mom who has been wounded on the job via Lego. Because science not only supports the notion that stepping on a Lego hurts like a mother, science understands why.
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See, statistics show that there are enough Legos in the world for each person to have 83. So the probability one will step on one of their 83 is pretty high. The shape of a Lego (usually a rectangular brick), those tiny pointy corners, and the unbendable construction means they're sharp to the touch. Our feet are filled with thousands of nerves whose job is to give our body information, help us stand, and help us balance. Step on a tiny knob filled brick and your entire body is sure to get some major information from those nerve endings.
And that information is a ton of pain.
So if your feet have been on the tail end of the wrath of a Lego and the loved ones in your life didn’t quite get why it took you longer to recover from stepping on a Lego than it did from birthing that baby, just tell them everyone knows stepping on a Lego hurts like hell—even science.
And if they still don’t believe you, tell them to clean the playroom themselves. Then sit back, relax, and wait for the curse-filled scream.
