Illness and an intimate moment.

You know the days where your heart aches? The days that you feel more compassion and love for your children than normal? That moment between ‘It’s just teething’ and ‘We might need to go to A&E’? The sheer terror that there might be something seriously wrong, or as we often do as parents overreact?

We had one of those last week, Mojo was ill. She was actually sick, twice. She’d never been sick before, not a proper vomit. She woke up screaming, her temperature was just on the right side of safe. She was wailing, her stomach was heaving up and down, her tiny face collapsed in on itself, she was scared, she looked a bit green.

I knew she needed to be sick, so I rubbed her back, she began to open her mouth so very, very wide, her expression changed and for one moment I didn’t recognise her at all. I began to cry. I couldn’t stand it. I’m usually very good with illness, but I’d forgot the look in a babies eye. The look of confusion and fear because they haven’t been sick yet. The don’t understand what is happening to their bodies.

I forgot that it was a ‘first’ that we hadn’t encountered, I forgot it was one we had to go through at all.

So that is me sharing a very intimate moment with me and Mojo.