Mo Chuisle

My Ellie is not the easiest of children.

My pregnancy with her was riddled with little dramas - never about her health, but first of her existence (blood tests initially showed negative), then later, of her gender (bad technology left us wondering). She was a week past due when I was induced for a VBAC; the only straightforward part was the twenty minutes of pushing to her delivery.

Within two weeks of her (late) arrival, she began our semester long education on colic.

When the midwife remarked on my child's absence at my post-partum checkup, a time when most new moms can't wait to show off their sweet sleeping cherubs, I explained that I needed the break from her.

I wept, telling her of the screaming, the endless nights, her inability to be consoled, and how I simply didn't know what else to do (an unfortunate experience for any mother, one that Paige told of her own colicky girl so poignantly).

She looked at me with kindness and understanding and said, "It's hard to bond with a colicky baby."

An understatement to say the very least.

Ellie's 1st Hanukkah!

At six weeks, we discovered that if swaddled, cozied up in a sling, rocked, shushed and swayed at the right intervals for an appropriate duration, she became tolerable (at small doses).

I reasoned that she didn't believe she was ready to be born; she didn't choose it, maybe it wasn't time. Since she didn't know how to soothe herself, being close to me - to my heart and the sounds of my body - was enough.

It had to be. It was all I had left.

All I could give her was my heart.

+ + +

Right after her third birthday, she decided she was ready for a Big Girl Bed. In her crib (the same bed, but with a side rail), she slept all night. Dry. No little dramas.

In the Big Girl Bed, she is up, SCREAMING, once, twice, sometimes three times a night. She needs to pee. She's fallen out of bed. Now she can't find her bed. She's had a bad dream. She can't find her blanket. She's lost a sock. Is it morning now? (She asks this whether it's 8:30 p.m. or 3:30 a.m.)

I do what I can.

I find what is missing.

I tuck her in tightly.

I try to give her every security that she must feel she has lost.

Some nights, she asks for me to hold her. I spend a few minutes in either her bed or mine and we lay chest to chest. She has again found a way to be close to my heart. She still needs this from me and though I'd never ask, sometimes I need it too.

+ + +

Like the chorus of a song you can't forget, I keep thinking about a piece I read of Catherine Newman's at Wondertime. It's not so much the entirety of what she wrote, it's a few words she included from a friend's e-mail written about his own growing children that are stuck in my brain:

"There WILL be a day when they don't want to be carried up the stairs … But the idea that the last time will go unmarked and slip away without being cherished just made me so sad."

Her last day with colic, her last night in the crib. Had I known how quickly it would pass, maybe I wouldn't have rushed through her babyhood wishing her older and less dependent. How I'd miss the routines that gave us the smallest shards of sanity during her colic. How I'd long for the feeling of lifting her growing body, then placing her down gently in her crib at the end of each day. Those days are gone. I keep the pacifiers (out of sight and out of reach) that we collected from around the house almost two years ago when she gave up her "night night," not expecting that she'd use them again, but stunned that she never asked.

One day, she won't ask for me either.

Today she does, and it is that which I cherish.

My heart is full.

"Mo chuisle" literally means "My pulse", but can mean "My love" or "My darling".

It's a term of endearment taken from the original phrases "A chuisle mo chroí", or "Pulse of my heart".

The movie Million Dollar Baby incorrectly spells "Mo chuisle" as "Mo cuishle". (Source)

Does anyone have the number of a local exorcist?

It must be getting better, I reasoned in my head. I'm starting to sound like Pollyanna again.

"Well, at least we didn't get pink eye!"

It's a toss up (and I mean that rather literally) between which birthday celebration was worse for me: last year, when Rafe had an emergency appendectomy or this year with Ellie vomiting all over my special day.

Better after the bug, we took her out for Jake's school Hanukkah show the next day, only to quickly remove her when a rash began spreading across her little body.

At least we have a booster seat in each car!

Rafe stayed at the show with Jake while I called the doctor from home. Ellie simply had an odd reaction to something on her clothes - naked, she was fine.

If that wasn't bad enough (at that point, the appendectomy was still winning), as Ellie recovered, Jake's complaints worsened. Saturday he was diagnosed with an ear infection and bronchitis. Then he got that stomach bug. And since he couldn't keep anything down, my boy and his daddy spent Sunday in the ER to determine if Jake would need an antibiotic injection and IV fluids (he didn't); while they were there, each had a chest x-ray to learn that they both have a mild case of pneumonia.

At least it's just the walking kind of pneumonia! (Or as Rafe calls it, "working pneumonia.")

Bringing Ellie back to school after her brief hiatus, we learned that while we were out, several classmates were sent home with conjunctivitis. But not us! We were home sterilizing every surface and washing every set of sheets we own.

Being home with sick kids has meant being out of work, too.

At least I'm saving on fuel and daycare!