Rory Fitzgerald
You are always in the middle of something critical when you get ‘the call from school’.
A surgeon might be about to make that vital incision when his mobile will bring with the news that a kid has a high temperature. A footballer might be about to score the winning goal in the FA Cup Final, when news comes through of an ailing toddler, in need of a parent’s comfort. Well, I exaggerate somewhat, but there seems to be some truth as to the invariably inconvenient timing of such ailments.
Nonetheless, whatever important grown-up thing we are doing is immediately dropped and we rush heroically to the sick child, our thoughts of them travelling ahead of us.
Yesterday, the call from school reached me – when on the way to an important meeting, of course – to say that our three-year-old was vomiting in pre-school. The meeting was cancelled, all else cleared from my diary, and I drove straight to pick her up. You’re never sure how serious things are, and so an element of parental anxiety kicks in. Your thoughts turn to the sick kid, and while driving along I found myself remembering flashbacks of her life, little things that melted the heart, and reminded me of the aching love I have for this little person.
Weak
Our normally vivacious and bubbly little girl was slumped on a mattress, pallid and weak. Sad blue eyes peeked out from under her blonde mop, gleaming a little with the delight that I had arrived. I remember similar moments from my own childhood. When a child is sick in school, the place seems alien and uncomforting; and the sight of a parent arriving to take you home is like the first sight of a rescue ship to a sailor lost at sea.
I gathered her up in my arms and drove her home, making promises that her favourite recuperative treat would be implemented: the “nest of comfort”. This involved a mattress and duvet laid out on the sitting room floor directly in front of the TV, surrounded by teddies, drinks and snacks as appropriate.
During an illness, all workaday screen time rules are abandoned temporarily: abundant televisual morphine dulls the small mind so the body can rest and recover.
(I was allowed similar luxuries when ill as a child in the 1980s; I was allowed to rest in my parents’ bed, where I could watch television and use the ‘remote control’ – a long rubber-tipped bamboo cane my father had fashioned – to switch at will between RTÉ1 and RTÉ2. In Cork, we were well ahead of the technological curve at the time.)
I brought her into the house and gently closed the front door. She stood and looked up at me wanly before suddenly, and impressively, vomiting all over the hall floor, and herself. There followed a flurry of dettol, kitchen paper, bed linen, new clothes, and towels, but before too long a clean child was placed into the nest of comfort, newly set up on the living room floor.
I braced myself for days of vomit and the bug working its way slowly through the entire household. In the event, fortunately, within two hours, one little pyjama-clad toddler was sighted spinning around upside down on the swing the garden, in an extremely nausea-inducing fashion. She then strode merrily indoors, with colour in her cheeks, demanding pizza.
Such are the curative powers of the nest of comfort.