Postcards from the Edge

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE—OF PARENTHOOD
February Postcards

THE FAMILY GROOVE'S RESIDENT MOM-ENTATOR,
SASHA BROWN-WORSHAM REPORTS ON THE MADNESS OF MOTHERHOOD

TYPHOID MARY AND THE TALE OF THE FIRST TIME

I have spent the last 24 hours sucking snot from my baby’s nose with a blue bulb
while she writhes, screams and generally tries to avoid the very thing that will
make her breathing easier.

She can’t nurse. She can’t play. She does not want food. At least she sleeps. Since we have not left the house in more than 24 hours, I have forgotten what the outside world looks like, although I hear it might snow today. Not that I have time to look out the window or listen to a weather report.

Mama may have said there would be days like this, but no one tells you that Mamahood can be like this. My body aches for my child. I feel each chill as her temperature climbs, that sore jointed discomfort, whole body throbbing feeling that accompanies a fever. I know it well. I just wish she didn’t.

It is her first illness, “the first of many,” my husband keeps reminding me when I start to tear up at the sound of her ragged cough, deep mouth breathing and the sight of her red-rimmed eyes. She is cheerful, for the most part. She wants to crawl around and play. But more than that, she wants to be read to more and wants to be in my arms, her little head curled into my chest, the heat radiating from her like an oven set to 400 degrees.

And even as she cuddles, I feel that she is far away. There is nothing I can do to fix this problem. There’s no way for me to take away the fog filling her head or the aching in her joints. She has to fight it herself, even as I support her. I know, I know. It’s just a cold. But she has never had one before. It might as well be something far more serious for all the experience I have caring for someone else.

My only experience with childhood illnesses has been my own. I remember lying in my parent’s bed, head heavy and thick with fever, a stupid book on my lap, my stomach churning beneath me. I can remember my mother’s guilt when she had to meet a client. “Just a half hour,” she promised me, calling from her car phone the second she left and asking me to keep the line open until she returned—as if I was in any condition to make calls. Somehow it was easier to be the sick kid.

Rachel_Ally

How will I ever get through the other 999 childhood illnesses my daughter is sure to encounter on the road to adulthood if this is how I react to the first? It is just a virus. I know this because I rushed her to the pediatrician because she pulled on her ear—once. “First time parents,” my pediatrician says with a laugh. There is no ear infection, no strep throat, no whooping cough. Just a virus. So, why do I feel like holding a candlelight vigil? Why do I feel compelled to ask strangers for their prayers?

Maybe I am not cut out for motherhood. Maybe my constitution is too weak. I spend hours contemplating all of the ills that could befall my child. That cough isn’t just a cough. It’s clearly pneumonia. And that snot dripping out of her nose? It is coming from a brain tumor. Clearly. Last night I even wondered if we should put her on a cot on the floor away from anything soft, should the combination of stuffed nose and soft things somehow lead to suffocation. Rational thought, never my strong point, has fled. In its place are fears and concerns. “It is just a cold,” my husband says.

“Should I keep her away from other children?” I ask the pediatrician who laughs.

“If you isolated each time a child has a cold, you would not leave the house all winter,” she tells me before realizing that I am actually considering that as a reasonable way to keep my kid healthy. Never leave the house. Never get sick. It makes sense. I can just send my husband out to get everything we need. We can stock the pantry with canned good, bottled water. It could be like the millennium panic only without all that Y2K nonsense.

I know exactly who got her sick. The irrational part of me, currently dominating my brain function, is furious at the kid despite the fact that she is only a few months old and wholly innocent. Still, I am at least furious at her parents for allowing us to spend time at their house amidst all of their germ-laden toys. Henceforth, that child will be known as “Typhoid Mary,” my husband tells me with a grin.

But I am serious in my anger, only it is not really at Typhoid Mary or her parents. It is at myself. I am so frustrated by my inability to protect my child.

She had to get sick. There had to be a first time. Even my breast milk and the fact that I stay home with her could not protect her forever. And am I really going to keep her inside for more than five months (and in Massachusetts, even longer)? Of course not. But each time something touches my child’s life that hurts her, I feel she is farther from the womb, farther from the place where I could protect her, untouched, cocooned.

Today it is a cold. Tomorrow it will be “don’t talk to strangers” and then it is just a short jaunt to Jaded Island where the rest of us 30-somethings walk around in one-pieces and butt-hiding sarongs while drinking margaritas made from bottom shelf tequila.

She will recover. But I may not. I guess I have to get used to this, to the ebb and flow of my child’s immune system. I guess I will learn to trust it to protect her, even when I can’t. She is on the road to independence. And all I can do is sit, watch and wipe her little nose.

—Sasha Brown-Worsham

Sasha Brown-Worsham is a mother and freelance writer who lives in Boston, MA where she writes and chases her suddenly mobile daughter around the house.