… But It Never Gets Easy

It’s 11:30 on Thursday night. I, like most people up at this hour, would like nothing better than to be asleep right now –– or at least curled up under the sheets and duvet with a trashy mystery novel. Instead, I’m wearing an old T-shirt with an old towel on my head while my sheets swish around in the washer. My daughter is asleep on a chair while her bedding is in the dryer. Soon, I will remake her bed with clean sheets, lay her down, smooth her hair, kiss her forehead. Soon, I will switch my own bedding to the dryer. Eventually, I will be able to go to sleep.

Ruby got sent home from school today with lice. It’s gross, but honestly, I’m too busy to worry about the stigma. The stigma is fading anyway –– almost everyone I know, it seems, has done battle with the beastly little creatures, and like most things, the more open people are about it, the less shame is associated with it –– but even if it weren’t, the inconvenience is far greater than the stigma.

Every working mom –– and working dads, too –– panics when the day care number shows up on Caller ID. The first panic is legitimate: Is my child OK? Did something happen? The secondary panic takes over once you learn that your kid isn’t in the ER but has thrown up or developed a rash or, well, has lice. The relief of knowing your child is, for the most part, just fine is short-lived and quickly overcome, even while you’re still on the phone with the teacher, with thoughts of what’s due, what meetings you have, what can be done from home, what can be rescheduled.

Obviously, Ruby comes first, and when she’s actually been sick, it hasn’t mattered a bit what I had on my calendar. And when she’s just been minorly ill –– an infected finger, a tummy ache –– and I haven’t had anything pressing, I’ve relished the chance to spend a little extra quality time with her. But when she has something non-serious on a day when I am already insanely overbooked … well, I hate to admit it, but I’m annoyed. And when she has something that’s both gross and work-intensive to take care of, like these blasted lice, I’m even more annoyed.

I don’t want her to feel like a nuisance, ever. It’s not her fault. But last week, when I wrote that it gets better, I guess I forgot that it doesn’t ever get easy. There will be moments when you’re sitting in the warm October twilight licking Nutella off your fingers and laughing –– and then there will be moments when it’s 11:30 on a Thursday night and you’ve been running all week and you just treated your entire head with foul-smelling shampoo and your sheets won’t be dry for at least another hour and your kid can’t go back to day care until Monday and you have to speak at a huge luncheon tomorrow at noon and you just kind of want to scream and pull out your lice-infested hair.

It’s still worth it. But I guess part of me keeps waiting to turn that corner after which parenting will be easy. And then I stop and remember the first time Ruby got really sick. She was 11 months old, and she started running a fever at about 9 p.m. By 11 p.m., she was burning up –– 104 degrees –– and vomiting. I called the doctor‘s answering service, and they said anything under 106 was OK for a baby that age. They said to keep nursing her, so I did, and about five minutes after she’d finish, her stomach would make this horrible churning noise and she’d throw up all over me. This happened again and again until I finally stopped even changing my clothes each time. I was worried sick and soaked in baby vomit, and there was no way I was going to sleep. At 3 a.m., I called the doctor again. If she’s still throwing up in 12 hours, bring her in, they said. I went back to the routine: pace, nurse, get vomited on, take temperature, pace, etc. At 5 a.m., I called the doctor again. She’s fine, they said again. In tears and exhausted, I called my mom. At 5 a.m.

“She’s sick and they say she’s fine and it’s the middle of the night and I haven’t slept and oh my GOD, Mom, when does this get easier?!”

She waited. She waited a long time, until I thought maybe she’d fallen back asleep on the other end. “Well,” she said carefully, “it’s 5 a.m., and you’re 27, and you’re calling me. So, ah, I don’t really think it ever gets easier, my love. But it’s always worth it. Why don’t I come by? We’ll go by that 24-hour Walgreen’s and get some Pedialyte and some Tylenol suppositories, OK? And then I’ll watch her while you get some sleep.”

I have never been so grateful to have a mom, and I am always grateful to be a mom. Even a working mom, even at 11:30 on a Thursday night, even when I think I may never get the smell of RID out of my hair.

And now Ruby’s sheets are dry, and I need to make her bed and lay her down and smooth her hair and kiss her forehead. I need to take a moment to enjoy it, to realize that being needed by a child is both a burden and a blessing –– because as stressed and frantic and annoyed as I feel right now, I can think of nothing I’d want more than Ruby, 25 years from now, needing me , trusting me, enough to call me at 5 a.m. to ask me when having a child gets easier. I already know exactly what I’ll tell her.
 

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