Wart Stick

The kids must have told Crow, during her interrogation of them after their last weekend with us, that I took many pictures of the growing, blackened sore on the bottom of Sunflower’s foot.  Apparently the health of one of her beloved children did not warrant an actual trip to the doctor, though Sunflower showed up this past weekend with a grimy wart stick jammed in a sandwich bag.

I had conducted my own research on what could be causing the painful bump on her foot, and when I was helping Sunflower put on her medicine and change the Band-Aid, I was reading the ingredients and the directions on the well-worn wart stick when I mentioned that considering a plantar wart is infectious, a stick that is rubbed all over the wart and therefore picking up all the germs and bacteria is a rather silly design for wart medicine.

Without missing a beat, and totally matter-of-fact, Sunflower told me, “That is Uncle Fester’s wart stick.”  (Uncle Fester is Crow’s grossly obese, no-neck husband.)

I nearly dropped the disgusting wart stick.  SERIOUSLY?  Who does that?  Who is too goddamn lazy and cheap and apathetic that they smear someone’s used wart stick on their own child?

Crow, that’s who!  Her mothering skills are astounding, are they not?

The nasty, used wart stick case was rubbed down with alcohol, and we sliced off a chunk from the top to remove any contamination from Uncle Fester and prevent his bacteria from being smeared all over Sunflower’s foot, as Crow had been doing for two solid weeks (if she was actually helping Sunflower tend to her foot at all).

Is it any wonder, for god’s sake, that the wart was not going away, if Sunflower’s own mother was rubbing someone else’s dirty wart stick on it?