AND Here We Go Again With the Crazies

My kid is sick. SHIT. 

Okay, okay, we are actually SO VERY lucky that Josephine is healthy in general these days. In fact, I seriously cannot remember the last time she was sick. I can't even remember the last time she had a runny nose. I couldn't even find her saline nose spray right away because it had been so long since we'd used it.

I thought a new outfit might help with the sickies:

Eh. Still not feeling so great, mom. But she looks SO CUTE, even with the snotty nose.

But then Yo Gabba Gabba! came on. This led to dancing around the house:

And showing off her belly button (she's pretty big on showing kids her belly button these days):

Of course, that tired her out and she spent the next half hour with her head on my lap, but if she can muster the energy for some dancy-dance, I think we'll make it.

And, this cold (virus?) is a little easier than the last because she can blow her nose. Of course, it would be nice if she ONLY did it when I was holding a tissue up to her nose and not just at any given moment. :)

Unfortunately, every little cold also takes me back to the time when Josephine was sick and no one knew why. Yes, we obviously have it MUCH better than many people; it "only" took two months to discover the problem, and then we were able to fix it. And although those two months were excruciating and heart-breaking, they really were only two months. She got better, and now she is healthy and happy. 

I know there are millions of kids who are not so lucky, and I would never put our issues on par with theirs, but there are also millions of kids who don't have to go through two months of agony because her doctors couldn't discover a simple problem, and I have such tremendous guilt over all of it. Why didn't I take her to different doctors? Why didn't I discover the problem myself? Why did I let her go through all of that and let her get the point that she had to be hospitalized and ... oh my god, the hospital. I try really hard not to remember the details of the visit. Tubes, an IV that took an hour of poking to start, starving her for 24 hours to "restart" her stomach lining ...

Again, I know many children go through much worse, but considering how simple the solution was to our problem, I should have been able to discover it much sooner and save her from all those terrors. 

Many people have given me excellent advice on what I need to do to forgive myself and move on from all of that, but I really feel like it was my fault that the first few months of her life were filled with pain. That's something I don't see myself getting over anytime soon, and any little sniffle takes me right back there. 

Aside from all of that damage, I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but every little sickness sends me to that place -- that place where I realize there are oh-so-many things I cannot control and there are so so many things that are going to hurt my little girl, and there is nothing I can do about many (most) of those things.

For (a very weird) example, Jeremy and I are REALLY over renting, and we have been looking at houses and looking at neighborhoods and researching schools and all of that jazz. It is S-L-O-W, to say the least. Yesterday, while driving home from doing errands, Josephine and I drove past one of the houses we looked at recently, and since it is in one of the neighborhoods we don't know much about yet, I couldn't help but play one of the (many, ridiculous, constant) possible future scenarios in my head: We live in that house, and Josephine is in school, and tells a classmate where she lives, and that brat says something about her living on the wrong side of town.

Tangent: In school we once had to do this whole big project about our hometown and get in groups and make up songs and blah blah blah, and one group got up and sang their song, and one of the lines was "Although everything north of the tracks goes downhill." Guess who lived north of the train tracks? Yeah. Me. And seriously, this town was like10 blocks by 4 blocks, and only two of the blocks were north of the tracks, and there was actually NO "bad" part of town. To be fair, there was some less-than-lovely homes North of the track and WEST of main street, but EAST of main street (MY neighborhood) was LOVELY, and even the not-so-lovely homes were PRETTY nice. Instead of being like, "Whatever, they're fools," I was SO EMBARRASSED. I was crushed beyond belief, and was CERTAIN that all four of those people were staring right at me when they sang the song, and were talking about me when they wrote it. 

It was a stupid thing to get upset about, but that didn't stop me from feeling upset. And I imagined some brat kid saying something like to Josephine, and my stomach started churning.

If I stopped and thought about it, I could think of plenty of appropriate responses to the situation, but my first instinct was cuddle Josephine until she falls into a blissful slumber and then hunt down that child and punch him in the face. INappropriate. But this is how my mind works. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that either. I have a feeling there are plenty of other moms who are normally non-violent and logical who also imagine punching kids. PLEASE tell me there are other people who feel like this.

AND ... this all came from Josephine being a little sick. I weep for my future if this is how crazy I have become since becoming a mother.

If you have any sort of compassion, I would adore a comment telling me you can commiserate. :)