Last year at this time Middle Daughter was struggling with her two month-long mystery illness that caused daily debilitating headaches and stomachaches. She was mostly healthy after April and after a milder recurrence last fall, we discovered that she has celiac disease. Since eliminating gluten from her diet she has been much healthier (knock wood) and weathered the seasonal flu earlier this year without weeks of prolonged illness.
Oldest Daughter has not been so lucky this year. Now in 6th grade and at Middle School, she's missed more days in January and February than she's attended. Starting last month, first came the flu. She recovered for all of five minutes before coming down with strep. After a course of antibiotics, she became sick with the latest crud. A similar series of evens preceded Middle Daughter's illness last year. Currently, Oldest Daughter wakes daily with extreme nausea and stomach pain. Her eyes squint and she curls into a fetal position. As the day goes on, she manages to drink and sit up in bed. She doesn't throw up or run a temp but she does have a sore throat and sometimes a headache. The pediatrician can only really tell us, to a limited extent, what she doesn't have; it's not strep or flu again.
Every morning I am faced with the decision to try to send a child whimpering in pain to school or to let her rest. In addition to the stress of watching her suffer, I am unable to work much while on Sick Kid Watch. I have my own health issues to manage at this point too. Today, I needed a physical. So after dragging a sick kid along, having a fasting blood draw, a shot, and a pelvic exam, I was not in the best mood when Middle School Nurse (MSN) called.
The gist of the conversation with MSN was 'Hey we don't like that your kid has missed school. We want her to come to school.' No shit. I understand that this person is doing her job and has guidelines to monitor, but I really don't care about the school's overall attendance goals. I have communicated with the school daily and sent in doctor's notes to excuse her absences. What really irks me, though, is the subtext to this conversation: the bitchy, passive aggressive subtext. MSN's statements imply that I am irresponsible and not acting in the best interest of my child. This person (MSN) does not know me and she is certainly dealing with less than stellar parents in some situations. If she knew me, however, she would know that this implication (that I am not doing what's best for my kid) is the fastest way to move me from Gandhi to MMA Fighter on the Rage Scale.
But I am also a reflective person. Why does this infuriate me? This attitude infuriates me because it ignores the context and history of our lives and my role as a parent. MSN, through her unspoken accusations, presumes to judge my mother role performance in total based on a single, isolated metric - Oldest Daughter's Attendance Record. Really?! I want to scream. How can you understand our lives without knowing how much we as parents have invested in these kids? We made the deliberate choice to defer my income in order to provide a stay-at-home parent for our children when they were younger. This has not always been an easy or unquestioned choice. And while we were grateful to have this "option," it has not been without extra effort. (This is to say nothing of the eight years I spent either pregnant or breastfeeding and changing diapers.)
I am not a perfect person and I am not a perfect mother. I fail. I fail early and often. But I also succeed and I will take partial credit (or responsibility) for the individuals my children are becoming. If you are going to judge my performance as a mother, at least have the decency to look at the kid as more than the sum of her Attendance Record. Oldest Daughter has never had a behavioral reprimand in her seven plus years of public school. She thinks critically without being critical. She is sensitive to the feelings of others without compromising her Self. She may not be the most organized kid, but she does everything we ask of her. And do you know what she does while she's home in bed? She reads voraciously. She writes, she dreams, she draws, she CREATES. She creates because she hasn't been beaten down by the "standards" and "expectations" of this world. And I will do everything in my power to see that she never is. Because that's what being a mother means to me - it means protecting and nurturing the light that she brings into this world, even if sometimes I find myself standing over her shaking my fist at the powers that be.
Mama Grizzly? I'm not sure. But like the Mother Pelican, I would pour out my life's blood to protect my children.
