Putting Mom First

By Rosemary Burns

Photo via Flickr by KB35

I’m tired. I have spent the last two weeks taking care of my family as a nasty stomach virus ran rampant through my house. I will spare you the gross details. Suffice it to say, I should’ve bought stock in the Immodium, Pedialyte and Lysol companies… Strangely, I was the only family member to have been spared from the wrath of the ‘bug’, and I have been trying to figure out why? Could it be that I downed an Emergen-C immune system booster sample that came in the mail, or that I recently joined the YMCA, (I bet you just sang those letters didn’t ya?) and have been faithfully working out daily for the past month, or could it be that I am a substitute teacher and as such, have been exposed to every germ known to mankind? I don’t know, I’m just glad to still be healthy at this point. But like I said, I’m tired.

When my kids are sick, they generally want me to sleep near them, and they don’t follow a civilized schedule- They routinely like to vomit in the middle of the night or spike fevers just as I am nodding off for a well deserved nap.

-A helpful hint, have your child sleep with a towel. That way, when they awake and throw up they can do so into the towel, rather than a bucket that Mom must then go wash out. Instead Mom can directly throw the offending towel directly into the washing machine. It is much easier to disinfect the washing machine at a later time when you are more fully alert. Cuts way back on the gag reflex too whilst caring for your charges

I have recently decided that putting myself first sometimes in not a BAD thing. Not an easy concept for me to grasp as I was raised in a time and a family where the gender roles were pretty traditional. I had seven siblings and the girls were taught homemaking and parenting skills- not a bad thing to know for sure. At the same time, the boys were learning how to be providers and successful outside of the home. This is just how it was coming up in the 60’s and 70’s. There was also a lot of change going on with Women’s Liberation and other important Civil Rights movements, but my family stayed true to the old school thinking on gender roles. Looking back, I don’t think my mom ever put herself first-a little hard to do when you have eight children depending on you 24/7. I do vaguely remember when for a time, when her youngest child was around twelve-years-old, she finally needed some space and she took a part-time job at a department store for a few years.

As a little girl, I naturally wanted to be like my mom and have a family and make a happy home for them. Well, ‘happy’ is a relative term isn’t it? No one is happy 100% of the time. This was a tough lesson for me to learn because my mom made it look as if we were. She and my dad never discussed things like bills, budgets, wars, politics or any thing unpleasant in front of us kids. My kids are exposed to so much more ‘reality’ on a daily basis-I’m not sure which way is better, there is probably a happy-medium out there. I mean, my kids have Smart Phones and the Internet. I, had a wall mounted telephone with a long cord attached to it and a black and white television with a bent metal hanger used for it’s antennae that picked up six channels. But I digress.

Photo via Flickr by tableatny

My family has been watching a lot of the Olympics as we recover from the ‘Polar Vortex of Vomit’ that stormed through our home. Ya know what I’ve been thinking as I watch these Olympic games? That every Olympian competing has had to have put themselves first to get where they are -and that we mere mortals look up to and idolize them! If there were an Olympics for Mothers- NONE of us would qualify because NONE of us would put ourselves first! Crazy huh?!

Think I’ll go to the YMCA and sweat out some liquid stress…

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