I should begin this entry by saying that I’m going on too little sleep due to having two sick daughters. They’re not badly ill, but even a cold keeps them, and therefore their parents, up at night. Alexis may be waking up from her hard-won nap right now, too, so this entry may be shorter than planned.
Being tired, I’m not feeling very forgiving, especially to the person who, in my mind, helped to cause my tiredness. Thankfully, I can’t put a name to that person though I have a friend who can (and who wisely refused to fill me in). What am I talking about? Someone who chose to bring their sick child to our last MOPS meeting though we’ve been clearly asked, in writing, not to bring sick children to the nursery and young classes. My 2 yr old has always picked up colds very easily. I’ve been told this is actually a good thing because she’s building up immunities early on, but it makes things rather difficult for now. It’s especially bothersome because she has virally induced asthma, so about half the time when she catches a cold, we end up dealing with terrible coughing along with wheezing at the point where you’d think the cold would be over. And so I’m extremely annoyed to learn that one of the mothers deliberately chose to bring their coldy child and leave them in the 2 yr old classroom this past Friday.
This brings up the question of when it does become acceptable to bring your coldy child to a class. After all, there must be an age when you stop keeping your child home with every minor illness. They certainly won’t stay home from school if they have a cold. So when does that start? I don’t know, but even before I had kids I would have said that 2 seemed too early.
What makes it worse, of course, is the fact that I (and I’m not the only one) try to be conscientious and not bring my child in when she’s sick. Since I don’t have family in the area, that means I’ll miss whatever meeting is that day (Bible study, MOPS, or church). My friend, the one who saw the MOPS mother drop off her sick child, also has a sick daughter due to the child’s sickness, and she and her husband took turns attending different church services on Sunday so they wouldn’t pass anything on. We didn’t know before church that Alexis was sick, so she unwittingly passed on the plague in Sunday School. 😛 I find it interesting that I feel incredibly guilty about this though I didn’t know of her sickness, yet other women don’t seem to have any trouble doing it completely knowingly.
Another interesting topic which came up in nursery yesterday….
I was nursing my baby in between services, and there were three other women in the infants room helping with the babies. We all knew each other to some extent, and we struck up a conversation. However, somehow the conversation began to be mainly between two of the women on the topic of how their part-time jobs were a salvation to them and how they had the best of both worlds, working and taking care of their kids. One woman, noticing that the other lady and I had stopped talking as much, made a comment about how she really admired us stay-at-home moms and she didn’t know how we managed. I made a passing comment about how Bible study and MOPS really helped, but it struck me that suddenly I was feeling rather stuck. On one side, there was a group of people (personified, in my mind, by the MOPS group) telling me that I was doing the best of all jobs and I should be happy and proud, and on the other side was the career women, whether part-time or full-time, who were telling me I was missing out. I tend to lean toward the first view, though there are certainly times when I would like to get out of the house and work my mind a bit more. Seems to me there will be time for that later, though. Not to say there aren’t moments when I want to make the time now, but I have to think there are moments when the working moms want to be home with their kids and can’t do it, either. Or, as the one lady in the nursery was saying, they spend time with their children but are exremely tired when they do. (Sounds familiar today.) 🙂 I don’t know. I just didn’t like feeling like I was put in a place where I had to act put-out by the job of raising my children when really, to me, it’s just as rewarding as a job outside the home. Rewarding in different ways, granted, but still rewarding.
Now I’m waiting to hear from my mother who will probably say I complained too much in this entry, but I’ll just blame it on the lack of sleep. After all, there are times, especially when we’re tired and rather frustrated, that a good bout of explanatory complaining can be just the catharsis we need. 🙂