Catherine Connors is a mother, writer and recovering academic who traded the lecture hall for the playroom and discovered that university students and preschoolers have much the same attention span. She still dips her toes into academic waters by writing the occasional scholarly article about the place of motherhood in Western philosophy, but mostly now she changes diapers and wipes noses and indulges in long reflections on whether Yo Gabba Gabba is a harbinger of the decline of western civilization. Oh, and she blogs: in addition to Bad Mother blogging at BeliefNet, she is, among other things, the author of HerBadMother.com, Managing Editor of MamaPop, moderator of Her Bad Mother’s Basement, co-founder and co-editor of WeCovet, Contributing Editor at BlogHer, and (deep breath) founder of and contributor to Canada Moms Blog. And in her spare time… oh, wait. She doesn’t have spare time. But she’s okay with that.
I spent yesterday morning in a hospital waiting room. Two hours or so, waiting for a doctor to see Emilia, whose face and neck had swollen grotesquely in reaction to a bug bite. Was she allergic? Had the bug bit become infected? Was she mutating into the bug? I didn’t know. And not knowing things – especially things that pertain to the health of my children – terrifies me.
That’s the thing about hospitals, for me: they are spaces of unknowing. And it’s not the kind of dynamic, healthy unknowing that defines, say, the space of a school (that is unknowing being treated by learning, unknowing directed upon a journey – ideally, an endless journey – toward knowing), it’s a kind of desperate, anxious unknowing. You go into a hospital knowing – ! – that you might not come out with answers. You hope for answers, but you hope more fervently for solutions.
(Sometimes, you hope for no answers. In all my time in hospitals, it has seemed that answers, more often than not, are bad. Far better, in some respects, to hear we don’t know why your child has been vomiting so much, but she seems fine now than to hear your child has spinal meningitis. But maybe that’s just me.)
I’ve spent too much time in hospitals, both as a mother and as an aunt. And even though most of that time has ended in happy unknowns (we don’t know why the vomiting, what the allergy, but he/she’ll be fine), enough of it hasn’t (he has meningitis, he has muscular dystrophy, he won’t live beyond his teens) to have instilled in me a fear of these spaces, these spaces of such terrifying unknowns, such that it sometimes nearly cripples me.
I know that as a mother I must buck up and deal with this fear, but still. I can face that fear with as much courage as I can muster – I can go into these spaces and be strong, be brave for my children – but the fear will nevertheless remain.
posted June 16, 2009 at 1:10 pm
The very definition of courage is feeling the fear and doing ‘it’ anyway despite the fear. Kudos to you for moving forward in the face of fear and giving your children an excellent role model when in the future they are faced with their own fears.
Kudos too, to the brave folks who work everyday in hospitals of all kinds, I’m afraid I could never do what they do day in and day out…one moment you get to be the bearer of great joy and the next you are the bearer of such great sorrow that it brings people to their knees. It is nice to hope that the former outweighs that latter, but I find that difficult to believe.
Grateful that the news this time was good