The time my father tried to stab me in the eye with a nail

When my daughter was a baby and I was eighteen, I was visiting my parents.

My daughter was a screamy baby, prone to jagged fits of wailing that sometimes lasted hours, but we had discovered on a previous visit that she loved the baby swing. Yellow and plastic, my parents had picked it up second hand and hung it with some rope from the veranda. No electronic swinging baby devices here, this swing had a piece of rope tied to the back, so that I could sit back comfortably and still swing the baby.

That day, it was too cold to sit outside and eventually my mother and I convinced Dad that he should put some nails in the roof beams in his shed, so that we could move the swing inside and I could actually put the baby down.

Grumbling slightly (he grumbles about everything – I suspect it’s so that my mother and I don’t get complacent and take him and his amazing building and making skills for granted), he went to get the six inch nails and his hammer.

As he started to hammer, I moved to the other side of the eight ball table, jiggling and rocking Amy as I went.

Suddenly, Dad hit the nail wrong and it jumped out of the beam, flew across the room and hit me just above the eye.

All of this happened so fast, that my father was still looking around to see where the nail had fallen, and no one else was quite sure what they’d seen.

To my credit, while I was shocked, I didn’t drop the baby, or burst into tears, choosing instead to yell “YOU JUST HIT ME IN THE HEAD WITH A NAIL!”

Luckily (and I do mean luckily – because if you’ve just been hit in the head with a nail, you have to look for some positives) it flew end over end and hit me with the head of the nail, rather than the sharp end.

Dad was suitably apologetic, Mum produced an ice-pack, while Nathan jiggled Amy and I prodded at my eyebrow to make sure it was still there.

I developed a pretty bruise just above my eyebrow and a hefty worry about standing near someone hammering nails into wood. Nails are unpredictable.

And that is how my father tried to take out my eye with a nail.