The Benefit of Having a Sick Kid

It's 11:00 and I'm only now sitting down to work. I had some errands to run this morning, and they took a lot longer than I'd planned. Why is it always that way?

It doesn't help that -- as Jen pointed out in a comment to my last post -- my fingers are sore as hell from yesterday's acrylic nail removal ordeal. Even something as simple as doing the dishes is agony, because what's left of my fingernails is so thin that they are really sensitive to hot and cold.

Anyway, once again, I am not having the day I'd so carefully planned last evening. I am now actually kind of glad that the lunch date I was going to have was cancelled this morning, with a direct tweet from a friend:

my daughter is sick. 12am and we're up with 102 fever. Sorry, going to need to take a raincheck :(

I tweeted right back something about enjoying the time she gets to spend with her sick daughter.

And then I realized that might have sounded a little bit weird. But I meant it.

Because as awful as it is to see your very active children turn listless and achey; as helpless as you feel being unable to give them anything more than Children's Tylenol; as much as you can't wait for the fever to break so you can send them back to school...

... I have come to realize that my daughter's sick days are the ones where I feel most like a mother.

Let's face it: at nearly 12 years old, my baby girl is not a baby anymore. She goes to school for six hours a day, then to gymnastics for four and is assigned the kind of homework I had to do in high school. She has a cell phone she uses to text her friends, and her own email and AIM accounts. She ignores me when I tell her to wear a jacket and rolls her eyes when I insist upon it in front of her friends, which embarrasses her.

I tell her it is my JOB to embarrass her, and apparently, I am very good at it.

These days, my daughter seems to only need me to drive her to school and her activities.

That is, until she gets sick. That's when I get to see a glimpse of the baby girl she was just a few short years ago.

When she's sick, I become her Mommy again. She wants me to make her comfort foods and sit beside her while she eats them. She asks me to bring out all the old Disney DVD's and watch with her until she falls asleep. She wants to cuddle. And when she's awake, we play Monopoly and Scrabble together.

My days as a stay-at-home, work-at-home mom are busy. I feel like a hamster on a wheel, always racing against time, trying to cram as many tasks and activities as I can into that short window between the time I drop her off at school until I pick her up and begin my second shift as a chauffeur and cook.

And her young life is just as busy: School, gymnastics, Hebrew school and homework all make demands on her. If I were to tote up the time we actually have together, it would amount to about 30 minutes in the morning, getting ready and driving to school, another 30 minutes driving to and from gym, and 90 minutes at night, eating dinner and relaxing, before I send her to bed.

That's not much.

I often feel that my daughter's little illnesses are nature's way of forcing us both to slow down, take a seat, and pay some real attention to one another, as mother and daughter.

And allow me to feel like a "Mommy" again.

Comments

[Shannon]

You are right about cherishing those moments. But with four boys there is NEVER a dull moment around here, lol.

[Liz]

I've always thought the same thing - one mother's comfort is another child's misfortune - I think I hear the mommy kicking in, right now!

[Liz]

Update to last comment - Thing One's fever is back and Mini-me just yack-a-doodled all over the kitchen floor. Well, not JUST now. Before. But, I cleaned it up already and then took a bath in Lysol. You're welcome!

[Florinda]

My son was one of those oddball kids who was rarely sick when he was growing up, but when he was, it did seem to take our relations with each other back to a more basic time. And on the flip side, I recall that when I got sick as a child, that seemed to be when my mother gave me the most "mom-like" attention, so I really didn't mind it.