Thursday, 17 December 2009

• Mama Takes a Sick Day

  Guest post from MamaTRUE
  
  

  
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  What happens when you don’t listen to your body asking for a rest? It gives you one, knocks you down and takes it. At least mine does.

  But when you’re a SAHM, taking a sick day isn’t as easy as calling in to work. My toddler accepts no excuses. He is undoubtedly the most demanding boss I have ever had. Unlike the office, which used to wait at least a couple of days to inquire when I might return, Cavanaugh asked, “Are you better yet?” in the Walgreen’s drive-thru, before they’d handed me my antibiotics.

  So how’s a SAHM supposed to take a sick day? Hope it’s the weekend so her husband is home? Hire a babysitter so she can take a nap? I did both of those things, but the illnesses lasted longer than that. And it was my fault they did.

  First I got the annoying cough that has been following everyone in Austin around this fall. It has lingered like a houseguest for weeks, but I took colloidal silver and elderberry syrup just often enough to keep it from turning into anything full blown, but not enough to get it out of my system.

  Did I start going to bed earlier, eating better, listening to my body ask for a rest? No. I just kept pushing.

  Then came the kidney infection. It took more than a week for me to figure out that the lower back pain wasn’t from lack of exercise since the cough had kept me from the gym. My kidney took enough attention from my immune system that the houseguest cough turned into a sinus infection. So for the last four days I was fighting both at once—and by fighting, I mean lying in bed, at one point with a heating pad wrapped around my head.

  The irony is that on Saturday, in the second monthly meeting of a personal renewal group I’m in with five other mamas, the chapter topic was “The Transformative Power of Self-Care.” The chapter has four areas of self-care: mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical. And one of the questions for the chapter is, “Which area is calling out to you right now?”

  At about that time, my right ear started ringing and the pressure in my head was so great, everyone sounded further away, as if my head were covered with a pillow. Hmmm? Which area should I focus on?

  So how do you take a sick day with a toddler? With a lot of help from other people. Otherwise, you may find yourself losing puzzle pieces in the bed or playing peek-a-boo in the pillows. Cavanaugh would have been fine with one day of that, maybe even two, but two weeks of having to say I couldn’t carry him or that Mama wasn’t feeling well were too much. When my body whispered to me that it needed more caffeine to keep going, raised its voice a little in the form of a scratchy throat, then began yelling through the aches in my bone marrow, I didn’t listen.

  While we can’t prevent every bug from taking up residence, many of the mamas I know need some lessons in self-care, whether it be physical, emotional, mental, and/or spiritual. What area is calling to you right now?

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