Sick Child Shoes
by Kara Martinez Bachman
No doubt, you have all been in my shoes before; they are not pretty shoes. They are not bright red stilettos, made for dancing. They are not ballet slippers.
They are the shoes of a mom with a sick child. They are flat, and worn, and maybe a bit tired from over-work. The soles are hanging off and they are covered in splatters.
Walking in these shoes can be confusing; sometimes, you are sure that your child is exaggerating. The dramatics of belly-rubbing and painful howls are just too much to believe. Instead of letting your kid stay home to take in as many cartoons on TV as is humanly possible, you send her to school anyway.
And here’s when the mom-of-a-sick-child-shoes seem to suddenly become a size too small: when two hours after dropping her off, the school nurse calls, asking that you reclaim her as soon as possible. The throat is red; the temperature is high; the Oscar-worthy dramatics have calmed down and are a mere memory, as the silent child now lies still.
And then, there are the times that are quite the opposite. There are times when you are just a little bit duped. Weary of the daily demands of parenting, you are too tired to diagnose or to consider. You march into your kid’s room in the wee morning hours wearing a nice pair of Italian leather wedges, and march out wearing the mom-of-a-sick-child shoes that you chose to put on all by yourself. In your heart of hearts, you know that little Johnny needs to take off his Transformers PJ’s and get up and go. But no…you oblige.
This is what moms far and wide refer to as a mental health day. I am quite sure, after having lived through a few of these myself, that the “mental health” is more concerned with the lady in the now-raggedy shoes, instead of with a kid who should be wearing a school uniform instead of an iCarly nightgown.
“Mental Health” days are not about bad parenting. They are not about trying to buck the system, or about not giving a hoot. In my experience, mental health days are our moments or admitting how important our pediatricians and other medical professionals are in our lives. It is our moment of saying: “Heck, I just don’t know!” When the thermometer reads as borderline and the throat looks a little red…but not TOO red…we make this small concession to sanity and err with the PJ’s and the really awful cartoons. We wish that we had an instant doctor’s appraisal to pull out of our back pocket—but we don’t. In these moments, we tend to take the path of least resistance…we go with the flow.
I wonder sometimes what lesson we teach our children on this one special day every year, this borderline sick day, this weird holiday when we pretend with our child that her condition is worse than it is. We always say something like “We both know you really weren’t THAT sick—don’t expect to get away with this ever again.” And as we turn away we may grin a little, remembering our own falsely amped up fevers and the moaning and groaning bellyaches of our childhoods. Then, once we leave the room and our questionable behavior hits home, we wonder: are we accidentally teaching them that learning is not important? Are we teaching them that exaggerating is okay? Are we teaching them something that will come to haunt us?Whatever the appraisal turns out to be, almost all parents are guilty of the “mental health day” at least once during their child’s upbringing. Although I can’t condone this as a fitting regular behavior, or even a good one, I condone it as being fully human. Sometimes we walk in the ugly sick child shoes because we have to; at other times, we do it because we are just too dang tired to put on a pair of heels.
