Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Jake gets reflexologized
I’m back. For those of you who popped over here yesterday and blurted “WTF?” surprising family and colleagues alike, my apologies. Every now and then, I like to experiment to see what sorts of manipulations will bump my traffic. Pandering to Technorati yesterday doubled my daily traffic. The real question, of course, is whether any of those drive-bys will stay for the picnic or scoot on to the next blog.
Yesterday, I took Jake to a reflexologist. We’ve tried damn near everything else for his headaches. Both of my employees talked it up quite a bit, so I thought, what the hell? It can’t hurt, right? Matter of fact, the foot rub is my favorite part of a massage. What could be better than a one-hour foot rub?
We warned the reflexologist that Jake was 9 going on 19, and that she shouldn’t condescend to him. She seemed nice enough when I dropped Jake off. Knowing my son, I didn’t stick around. I felt that my presence wouldn’t be helpful — call it intuition; call it stupidity.
Karen picked him up after his session, dropped him off at home, and came back to the office. She had this mischievous look in her eyes.
“So,” I said, “How did it go?”
“You’re going to have to apologize to him. I recommend that you just do it. Suck it up like a man.”
“Huh? But –”
“Don’t try to make excuses. Don’t try to explain yourself. Just say you’re sorry and be done with it.”
I stammered a bit more.
“It was awful,” she said. “She never stopped talking, the whole hour. I heard the tail end of it. You really should apologize to him.”
I think I can see it from Jake’s point of view. No one asked him if he wanted a foot massage. I dropped this on him the day before, didn’t ask his opinion on it, then plopped him into the therapist’s office and abandoned him to her ministrations. Whereupon she yammered at him like he was six with her New Age insights, all the while applying exquisite foot torture. Oh, yes — did I mention it hurt?
As it played out, he wasn’t all that pissed off at me. We played some Stratego when I got home, and all was well. And now he’ll have a story to tell his kids.
Okay, enough goofing off for the morning. Time to write.
D.
Okay, here it is. I missed it.
Well, that didn’t sound fun. I know healing is dynamic and can often involve a certain amount of pain, but for a reflexologist to just dive in on a kid like that is rude, insensitive, bad form, and unprofessional.
I always, always, ALWAYS tell my clients that they should let me know if what I’m doing hurts, that any time they feel like they want to cringe to tell me and I ask several times throughout a session if the pressure is okay. Pain is okay and normal in therapeutic massage but it should always be to the client’s tolerance.
Poor Jake.
M
Yah, well, he got over it pretty quickly. The main problem with this experience is he may be leery of any similar things, e.g. massage. Which would be very unfortunate indeed.
Obviously, this reflexologist has had little experience with children. The fact that it hurt instead of feeling good says a lot.
Jake would have been better off getting a pedicure. I never heard of a reflexologist.