Moms Don't Get Sick

It all started on the day you became a mother.  Your body still aching from post-labor and fresh stitches,  you insist on being the one who gets up from bed to carry your newborn baby whenever he cries in the dead of the night.  Pain has nothing on the joys of motherhood.

And from then on --for the sake of your child-- you've decided sickness would never overcome you.

The whole household's got the flu bug (including you), but you'll still be the one staying up late, running around to monitor your kids' conditions, taking vitals as methodically as Florence Nightingale. and doing sponge baths and med administrations in between.  You forget that you're sick, too.  And the bug --bored of your indifference-- leaves you.

You're somehow immune to muscle pains, sprains, toothaches, and tiny cuts.  If the kids need to be prepared for school, you dive on that mother!  The pain will hit you for a while but you cast it aside like an old dish rag.  Things have to be done and you will have none of this sicky-sicky feeling nonsense.

Likewise, insomnia to you is a wuss.  If you have work to do but you need to give your kids full attention in the day ...then you hit that laptop when they've gone to bed.  Right about the time when you should be sleeping.  Headache schmedache!

Before you finally have the time to digest any of these (supposedly) crippling states you've willingly subjected yourself into, the shunned culprit of agony would have long gone.  In my opinion, illnesses don't stay long in a person who refuses to acknowledge its presence.  Mind over matter.

Or should I say Mom over matter.

*written by a mother who's running a fever herself, waiting for her kids' 3AM Paracetamol schedule