I don’t write about the terrifying news, viral in recent days, of two children found in the middle of the bushallegedly blindfolded by their mother, who traveled thousands of kilometers to abandon them on our roads, is an atrocity that is too unnatural.
The antithesis of being a mother.
At the same time, today I experience the other side of my profession, pediatrician, caregiver for other mothers’ children, counselor, calmer of distressed hearts, within my possibilities, in times of illness.
With three grown-up children, I have always understood very well the pain of a mother, which is much worse than that of our children because we would rather be the ones to suffer.
I overcame the moments that arose, like any mother, with the apparent ease added by noticing childhood illnesses passing me by, generating ‘what ifs’, at various times I medicated them alone, sure of what I was doing rationally, but with a mother’s heart emotionally insecure.
A mother is capable of anything for her child, and gains strength she didn’t know she had, in the moments when she needs it most. (Abandons them, cruelly, without eating or drinking, left to their fate, as I hear on the news? It can’t be.)
Today, after a night spent in a hospital chair, next to my youngest son, I learned another lesson about our infinite capacity to be mothers: managing anxiety that can’t be explained, breathing and being conscious while our son spends hours that don’t seem to pass, unconscious on an operating table.
The day before, with a smile always present on the outside and tears trapped inside, responding calmly and assertively, even without knowing the answers, and lying, because no one can be absolutely sure whether a surgery will go well, only God.
On the day of the surgery, with everything already organized, I fall apart inside with the early morning phone call, the block full of trauma surgeries for hospitalized patients, probably my son’s surgery being postponed, but it may not be.
With my son still unaware and asleep, I remembered another lesson of crying quickly so he wouldn’t see (I already have a doctorate in this one, because there are three children). When it was time to wake up for the supposed surgery, I managed to calmly tell him (boiling inside) that it might not be done, but to be calm (What is that? And what kind of calm do you feel when abandoning a child in the middle of nowhere?).
A mother is capable of waiting, even if impatience is her middle name.
With his knee “damaged” by football and a month away from the national high school exams, delaying this complicated arthroscopy any longer would make the school year and going to college very difficult, because the recovery is painful.
I wanted to be me in pain, with exams, but it’s my son. It hurts me a lot and I can’t study for him, and I can’t exchange with him the ability to run and make the most of the summer months as he had planned.
A mother is not capable of exchanging her turn to suffer for that of her child. You are not able to change surgery appointments. But he is capable of praying, always believing and never giving up.
Fortunately, with God’s help and some luck, the surgery happened later in the day.
I learned to wait for the doctors to tell me how it went. Or rather: I lived in the moment.
That, and waiting while your child undergoes surgery, I realized that you never learn, because no one learns to breathe without breathing, in an apnea in which our vital signs work but it doesn’t seem like it.
But I was capable, and that, believe me, a mother is capable of doing. And sleeping awake in the armchair next to him, in that state of numb alertness that you experience when your child is newborn…
Completely attentive to his needs, almost as if ours didn’t exist, a hospitalized child is once again a newborn, that’s what I feel now, after an almost white night, my almost-man boy has woken up and smiled, the road is long but he will be able to do it because I will support him, always.
I will leave the ward grateful to the good souls who crossed my path on this hospital foray; Yes, there are good people who knew how to deal with my son, assistants, nurses, colleagues, there is humanity in the NHS.
In disbelief at the news that was playing uninterruptedly on the screens in the block’s waiting room, children rejected by someone supposedly “mother”, I preferred not to follow what happened anymore, and dedicate myself as best I can in the near future to helping my boy recover from his football injury, one of the things that gives him the most pleasure, since he learned to kick a ball, and which in a few months he will do again, because God will want it.
And I wrote these lines while I was still in hospital, to leave a message of hope to mothers who, at this moment, are on the eve of surgery: a mother is capable of anything for her child.
