Compulsions

"Aidan, please take your fingers out of your mouth."

Of course I know it's futile. He's been habitually, constantly chewing his nails for the last year or two, and there is little I can say to change the compulsion. This time, he just grins a smug grin, eyes closed, chin thrust out, as if to say, "Ha, ha, you can't stop me." Other times he might make his mean-tiger face, a fierce frown with teeth and claws bared.

"I don't know why you keep doing that, even when it hurts you." About every other day he asks for a Band-Aid to put on a finger that is red and raw from his nibbling. But this time, as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I pull up short and think.

Janet and I were listening to Angela's Ashes, and I think of Malachy "mad with the drink," helpless before his alcoholic compulsions. There was no sense to those compulsions, either . . . no sense at all. And, for that matter, I have my own nervous compulsions. If my hair gets too long, I twist the forelock of my hair until it sticks out in a Disraeli spiral, until my hands and elbows hurt with the exertion. "What if, instead of the irresistable urge to touch my hair, it was the irrestible urge to take a drink?"

"Hey, Boo-boo . . . tell you what. You can remind me whenever I twist my hair, and I'll tell you whenever you're chewing your nails. And maybe we can help remind each other not to do it."

"Ok."