Enough

There was a reason I decided to start blogging again. A moment when things fell back into place and made sense again.

Adam had Kawasaki Disease earlier this year. It wasn’t an easy week, and when that one week was over, there was medication and there were follow-up scans, and there was adjustment for all of us. Then, three months later, he fell and broke his two front teeth. And I realized that day that I wasn’t over the Kawasaki at all. Not even slightly, not even close. I wondered whether I’d ever be over it. Not just the experience of it, but the trauma, the fear, the panic. It was always there, just below the surface, always simmering and about to overflow. To an extent, I learnt to live with it. It wasn’t the way I wanted to live, but I felt entirely helpless about it.

Two weeks ago, Adam wasn’t very well. He isn’t a sickly child at all, and this was probably the first time he was unwell since the Kawasaki Disease in April. It didn’t help that there were a few symptoms that were the same as when he had KD, but it wasn’t even that I was worried about. I wasn’t actually worried. I was just a mess. I was reliving April all over again and there didn’t seem to be a single rational thought in my head.

It lasted two days. He had a fever but he was fine and jumping around and making jokes, and I was a mess.

Then on the third day, something seemed to click. He woke up from his nap with a bright red (and hot) cheek and ear (and a smile on his face and skip in his step). And some part of me decided it was Enough.

Pre-Kawasaki, I was that mother who didn’t panic if there was fever, merely considered it the body fighting it’s way back to health. The mother who knew that if a child is well in himself, running around and making jokes, then there is no immediate reason to panic. I was still this person with Emily, but not with Adam.

On that third day, things changed. I knew, deep inside, that it was probably just his second molars coming through. I did not need to take him to the doctor because his cheek was red. That old, more relaxed (but now more experienced) me fought her way back from wherever she was ashamedly hiding for not taking Adam to the doctor right away when his eyes turned red and he DID have KD.

I WILL forgive myself for that. I am human and I make mistakes. I am not going to spend the rest of my life dragging Adam in and out of doctors’ offices just in case it’s something insanely rare again. I still got him treated in time, even then. It’s time to give my mother’s instinct a second chance. It’s time to stop mollycoddling Adam and to stop neglecting Emily. It’s time to get over it. It will never completely leave me, I know that. I’m not expecting miracles. But I do know I can’t live like I’m constantly balancing on the edge of a cliff either.

And things have been much easier this past week. (I still can’t look at pictures we took around the time he got sick in April, but) Adam is getting away with less, Emily is getting her fair share of attention, and I am more, way more, relaxed.

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