a la mama

Honorée had a fever last night, poor budgie. At one point she said, “Mom, the bed feels like it keeps on getting higher and higher, and it’s scary.” I rubbed her feet with lavender and peppermint oil…at around midnight, I gave her a bath infused with peppermint, lavender, and Young Living Thieves oil blend. She noticed that she was now as long as the tub. That’s a big moment, isn’t it? Her eyes seemed huge in her small white face, but she had a certain placidity. I never enjoy being sick but there’s something about fevers that feels very enlightening and related to altered states of consciousness. Purifying, raising the temperature to drive out what is not the essence. In Sanskrit, tapasya means “heat,” and is used to describe spiritual ecstasy, spiritual suffering, and “essential energy.”

This morning, she woke up chatty, famished and thirsty, and ate dry Mighty Bites cereal faster than I wanted her to. She had a brief, low flare-up of fever and then mellowed out again. 

It was hard for me to fall asleep because I was worried about her. I came in at one point and put my hand on her chest to feel the rise and fall of her breathing. I used to do it when she was a baby, but haven’t done it much lately. Sometimes, to me, being a mother feels like being at an amusement park five minutes before it closes. So much there, so much to do, so much I want to be present to but as I am present, I become aware of what I have not been present to in the past, what I’ve missed, what I’m missing right now, what I will not have the omnipresent superpower to soak up in the next five minutes and for all time. Breathe…

I love.