A Cautionary Tale

Dear Readers, especially those with healthy small children,

Avoid turning to your spouse and exclaiming happily about how wonderful it is that your child hasn't been sick in so long, hasn't had so much as a runny nose in nine months, hasn't had a fever, hasn't been up coughing at night, hasn't smeared snot all over you or thrown up in your bed. The minute you do that, your child will come down with a fever of 102.5 and you will have to leave work to pick her up. You will spend the next two-and-a-half days cooped up in a house with a child who is too sick to go to school, but is not sick enough to lie compliantly on the couch and watch DVD's and rest. You will take her to the doctor on the third day, and the doctor will look in her ears and listen to her lungs and smile and say, "Everything sounds great! It's just a cold! Call if she gets worse!" You will want to punch the doctor in the face a little bit, because a diagnosis of, say, an ear infection, would mean that the doctor could prescribe antibiotics that would make your child better. (You are also a control freak who likes to have things fixed.) You're convinced that your child will, in fact, get worse before she gets better, and chances are you'll wind up right back in the doctor's office a few days later. (Or, for extra fun, she'll be so miserable on Sunday that you'll drive her all the way to Tacoma to the clinic that's actually open that day.) And she will get worse. She will wake up with a junky cough the next day, and she will whine a lot. She will take long naps. She will pull at her ears and cry, and your heart will break a bit. She will wake up half-way through her normal naptime and ask to rock with you, and you will wrap your arms around her warm little body and settle into the glider in her room. You'll rock back and forth, and she will rest her head on your shoulder.

You will stay like this for a long time.

She will wake up too early in the morning, and you will pour her sticky-sweet pink Children's Tylenol into the little dosing cup. She will drink it and insist on climbing into bed with you, and you allow this because you just want her to sleep somewhere, anywhere, and also you miss the days of nursing her to sleep next to you and listening to those contented milk-drunk sighs. You miss watching her sleep and feeling the rise and fall of her breath against your own body.

When she climbs in your bed these days, she is usually fidgety -- all kicks and squirms and giggles -- and you tolerate this because it is part of mothering a toddler, even though you wonder why you had to get the one who seems to be allergic to sleep. But when she is sick like this, she will cuddle up close and lie still, and she will allow you to slip an arm around her. You will lie like this with her for a long time. And even though you would give anything to be the one who feels sick, you would offer up yourself in an instant, take the fever, take the cough, take the runny nose and the congestion that makes "Mama" sound pitifully like "Baba," you understand that this moment is still, somehow, awfully sweet.