We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this breaking news update.
“Mom, my tummy hurts.”
It’s the breaking news of parenthood. Never predictable, never convenient, and never avoidable, the announcement coming into the nerve center of the family like a police scanner at the assignment desk of the newsroom: we are about to embark on an adventure together that will not be fun. Adrenaline rush start now.
Jake arrived home from school last week with the news that his tummy hurt. A snack didn’t help and waiting out his brother’s music lesson in the back seat of the car only made things worse. By the trip home he was holding a bag and whimpering, “How much longer till we get there?”
Moments after we were home, the real impact of the illness hit, as we revisited the day’s meals emptying the contents of his stomach into the bathroom by the back door. It’s high alert time for everyone. As per usual, it happens when only one parent is at home. The other sibling has plans, lots of homework and is starving.
It is times like this that you earn your parenting stripes, manage to handle situations you are not at all sure you know how to handle, and climb the ladder of shared experience that only other parents can fully appreciate and understand. Somehow, amazingly, you grow through the experience in ways you never expect.
My son, feeling as horrible as a human can feel battling a nasty stomach virus, humbly says to me, “Mom, I’m sorry you have to clean that up.”
Over the course of the next 15 hours, my son would bravely battle nausea that would strike every half hour or 45 minutes. While trying to eek out little bits of sleep between urgent calls for “MAMA!!” I have just a minute to find a feeling of peace come over my body that says; this is a gift you are giving your son that he will remember his entire life. It’s a shared bonding that is like no other and neither of us will ever forget. Don’t you remember that night you were so sick and your mom stayed with you all night, wiping your brow, holding your hand, saying it would be ok? Don’t you miss that now?
Sometime around 4 a.m. both of us exhausted, Jake gazed into my eyes in his darkened room and said, “I’m so glad you’re here with me Mommy. I love you so much.”
Parents may not get paid in overtime like you do when there is breaking news in the newsroom, but that 4 a.m. paycheck is gold to me and is automatically deposited where it needs to go to get us through the rest of the breaking news story developing down the hall. Update at 10.
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