Worried Birds

By Beck

It was a snow day yesterday, which meant that my oldest child was home from school and that I declared a house-wide break from all schoolwork and THIS meant that I spent all day listening to my kids fight and by the end of the day I was making mental lists of other careers I might possibly consider. (“Spunky girl detective.”)

My Baby – who is, I must now always add, four years old and not anything like an actual baby – was sick earlier this week, with a high miserable fever and a hacking cough and she spent two nights sleeping feverishly and unsoundly beside me while I lay wide awake and worried. And now she is pretty much all better, but is still pale and pajama-clad and insisting upon extra attention and rest.

So today, I feel a bit frazzled. My youngest daughter is making construction paper candles and my son is making a woven paper heart basket and my head is making the noise that the greyed-out channels on your television set makes.

I think it’s pretty normal, if you’re the mother to more than one child, to have a specific child who takes up much of your worrying. Other children might briefly be the focus but then your worry goes flitting back like an anxious bird to your worrisome child again. And my worrisome child is – gee, no kidding? – my Baby, and sometimes I worry that my frightened focus on her blocks my view of my other children. So yesterday felt like just retribution, my other children forcing my eyes on them for the entire day – look at me, look at me, look at me.

Spunky girl detectives have it easy, I think – some wisecracks, the criminal unmasked and revealed at the end and everyone goes home and the book closes. Motherhood, though, seems to reveal the same thing over and over again – you will make the same mistake repeatedly, you will let your kids down, you will not notice enough that time is fleeting away, as fast as little birds, as fast as snow falling heavily in the sky.