“Check on me!” one of my young children beseeches me on an almost nightly basis, after shema time and the routinely allotted resting period I have in each child’s bed. “Check on me in like seven minutes….” Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
Admittedly, it is hard to pause in the early moments of my newfound freedom when I am heavily engrossed in liberating activities such as scraping food off the floor or collecting toys from the under the table, to come running back upstairs for this child-determined appointment. If I find my way back up to return a solitary shoe to its proper home, I poke my head into her room and announce, “Just checking on you!”
“Come again at 8:47! Or maybe at 9:05,” she begs, and I tell her 9:05 so that maybe by then she will be sleeping. Sometimes she is, sometimes she is not. If she is not, and I am in the vicinity of her room, she will wonder out loud why I have not come by and I will get a verbal reminder.
It is not my favorite thing to do. Some of my children are easier to get to bed. We have a nice closure to our days together, and then my free time begins, but with her, she dabbles on into my night, taking a little bit extra here and there. I give it because, I guess, she needs it. It is like putting coins into a piggy bank, dropping them in one by one until it is full. Some coin banks are larger than others, requiring more input, and hers falls under that category. It is an investment into her well-being.
Because then there was the time when I had a long drawn-out illness for several weeks. And even though I tried to hide it from the kids so that they wouldn’t be concerned, there were some mornings when I felt ill or had to stay in bed. It was a weekend away at my in-laws, and the kids were distracted and entertained by the onslaught of family that was around. I thought nobody would notice that I was missing, but this daughter ventured downstairs to find me lying in bed during the later hours of the morning.
“Why don’t you download a game on your phone so you can play?” she suggested, “or take your computer and write a story?” I was too feverish to really care about doing anything, but I feigned interest for her sake, and we talked about what might be a good game for me to get. She climbed into bed with me, curled up next to me, and we decided that we would do a game together in a notebook (like we sometimes do at night), where we create a comic or a story and take turns adding to it. She ran upstairs to get the notebook.
“Everyone is going for pizza now, but I’ll stay here with you,” she said when she returned. Her big eyes seemed to widen and glow, like she had taken it upon herself to be my caretaker, to “check on me” like I do for her. We were suddenly in this role-reversal position. It was the money in the piggy bank that suddenly came spilling out, and I dipped into the abundant coins.
“Please go for pizza,” I begged her, but she wouldn’t budge from her perch on the bed. I didn’t want her to miss out, and I knew that it would be best—for many reasons—if she went, but she insisted on staying with me.
In the end, she did go, because the house was being cleaned for Pesach and there was no lunch being served at home for the kids, so she had no choice. But an hour and a half later, when they returned, she came straight downstairs to find me out of bed and getting dressed, feeling a little better. “Look Mommy, we got ice cream!” she said, with excitement in her voice. It was a cone, dipped in chocolate, still in a wrapper, but she had opened the top and she pulled apart the plastic so that we could admire the contents. “Why don’t you have it?”
I refused to eat it, and after some back and forth discussion about this, she eventually took it upstairs where it was promptly devoured. And when I came up and sat down to have my own lunch, she took out the notebook and we drew some comics together. She hovered back and forth between playing on the floor with the other kids and checking on me, splitting her time and straddling both worlds—already an adult, but still mostly a child.
There are a few moments, splashed into the many long days of stress, arguments, and discipline, where my children make me achingly proud, where I can see a kernel of good buried underneath the whining, tantrums, and strong-willed remarks that sometimes cloak their natures in an artful disguise. This gives me hope. I know now that all those nights that I paused in my own routines to check on my child to reassure her that all would be okay fueled the spark that allowed her to check on me back. And I loved every minute of it.
Sarah Abenaim is a freelance writer living with her husband and four children in Teaneck. She is working on her first book. More of her essays can be read at www.writersblackout.wordpress.com.
By Sarah Abenaim
