And A Mommy In A Pear Tree

Tuesday night, 3 days before Christmas, 12 am. Excited to join my family in Texas for Christmas, Tim heads to bed as I keep packing my and the girls’ suitcase. We’re going to leave at 3am–an hour earlier than usual.

12:30 am Ellie wakes up and her skin feels like it’s been in a 400 degree oven. I take her temperature–101. Add 1 degree like we’re supposed to with the underarms and we’re up to 102. I go back to bed telling Tim that we have to go to the doctor in the morning. Then I waver, telling Tim that she might not have a fever at all, complaining about the inaccuracies of the underarm thermometer.  She may just be a hot sleeper, I say.  In any case, we decide to forgo our 3am goal for letting Ellie sleep till she wakes up.

7:30 am Ellie wakes up and seems peppy, I decide we can just go ahead on our drive. But then I catch her staring blankly at the bottom of the stairs. She’s at 100, unadjusted. I change my mind again and decide to go to the doctor on our way out of town.

10:45 am We’re finally taken to the patient room for our 9:45 appointment. I say that if it’s nothing, at least we won’t be driving to Texas worried. Ellie is happily entertained by her daddy, who draws this on my phone:

11:00 am The doctor is in the room with us, and we find out that Ellie has a sinus infection. She’s cleared to go and we head out of Colorado Springs, prescription in hand, and pick up where we should have been 9 hours earlier, already feeling like we’d been in the car too long, already at the point where it all falls apart.

About 6 years ago, before kids and before marriage, someone looked across a table at me and said, “You need to trust your instincts more.” I’m often the one who feels more comfortable gaining a consensus from the masses before making a decision–it would have been easiest and most natural for me to call everyone I know, tell them the story of the middle-of-the-night wake-up and take a vote whether or not we should go to the doctor.

Confession: When Ellie was born, she stayed in the hospital nursery every night and most of every day. I didn’t know what to do with her. I didn’t trust myself with her. I didn’t think I had what it took to have her in my room.

But these 2 years of motherhood have forced me into having to make choices on my own. I have to trust that I have the wisdom I need for my girls. I have to be willing to take on the responsibility and know that God has put in me everything I need to be the best mother for them.

Thank God for mommy instincts. Not only would we probably have ended up at a strange doctor’s office in Texas on Christmas Eve but the worry of whether Ellie was sick or well would have resulted in her having her temperature taken every fifteen minutes and me staring at her for the whole 10 hours, which is what I do when I’m wondering if she’s sick. That would have made my back hurt.

Do you have a story of when you have had to muster up faith in yourself and listen to your mommy instincts?