My children have been sick and I have been playing nurse since last week. We started out with some regular runny noses and sore throats. Then Elena got the FLU. Then Elena, already weakened, got strep throat. Gabriela followed with a case of anemia and now croup (laryngitis).
I love helping my children heal when they are ill even though it is exhausting. Last night, just as my exhausted head was about to hit the pillow, Gabriela barked out the all too familiar croup cough and gasping for air and panicked cry. I went to her bedroom and scooped my 5 year old baby into my arms. Not an easy task! She's a tall girl! While sitting on the bathroom floor, I ran the hottest water possible into the tub. At the same time, I got to work on bringing down her fever. She was on fire. I undressed her as much as possible while the room quickly filled with steam and she was breathing a little more easy.
I then brought her to my bed, washed her nose with saline solution and snuggled her until I was sure the fever was down and she was breathing okay. I laid her on a makeshift bed on the floor at the foot of my bed where I could keep a close watch on her during the night.
The coughing and the gasping and the panicky crying returned after just a few minutes. Once again, I scooped her into my arms and tried to calm her. Then I told her to look at me, that I would keep her by my side and that she would be okay. She looked at me with her big trusting eyes and nodded her head. The coughing subsided and she was quickly slumbering and so was I!
I woke up around 3 am, sweating impossibly because I was sleeping in the middle of Sam and Gabriela. I put her back into the makeshift bed at the foot of my bed where she slumbered peacefully until this morning.
She has been giving me grateful hugs all day long. I am so grateful to be a mother. I am so grateful to work as a partner with my Heavenly Father to nurture and teach my children. What a powerful yet sweet influence I feel in my life as I mother my children.
“You are the guardians of the hearth,” said President Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) as he introduced “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” in the general Relief Society meeting in 1995. “You are the bearers of the children. You are they who nurture them and establish within them the habits of their lives. No other work reaches so close to divinity as does the nurturing of the sons and daughters of God.”1
P.S. NieNie (Stephanie Nielson) has been a huge inspiration to me in learning to embrace with joy my role as a mother.
Pin It
I am so impressed by your account of last night and helping your beautiful daughter through a difficult night. I admire the way you seem to embrace what I find to be sometimes scarey: I am fearful sometimes when my children are sick. Fearful of not being strong enough to see them suffering. Your words have helped me view things differently.
ReplyDeleteThank you.