Parenting sick children: Why looking after your kids can make you feel good

Taking care of your sick kids is tough but it can also be rewarding.

OPINION

I woke at 2am to my 8-year-old shaking me, her face over mine, saying, “Daddy, I don’t feel well.” The shot of fear was followed by a shot of adrenaline. I was immediately fully alert, knowing from experience that, at any moment, that adorable face could erupt with vomit, which would cover not just me, but also the bedclothes, carpet, walls, toys and a variety of other surfaces and objects including some that no one had seen in months.

If I was to avoid several hours of work – picking up chunks in the dark, wiping, scrubbing, washing, throwing stuff out and so on – the next few seconds were crucial.

The first step was to get a bowl. I ran to the kitchen, praying that she could hold on. By the time I got back, I could see the saliva building up in her mouth and I knew she was close. I led her to the bathroom and got her a hair tie. She hunched over the bowl. The worst had been averted. We were out of the woods. I was flooded with relief

She lurched forward at regular intervals, but without output. She told me she really didn’t want to vomit. Sometimes I said soothing things like, “Oh, darling, it’s no fun is it?” but mostly I sat silently, stroking her back or doing nothing at all.

I thought, as I always do in this situation, about my mum, and how she would sit with me in exactly this way during my own childhood night vomitings, and how good that felt: Just the two of us against the sickness, while the world slept.

At the time, I felt bad about keeping her up, but now that I have been in her place, I understand that she was also deriving pleasure from it: The bonding, the selflessness, the fact of being needed, the subjugation of the self. Perhaps more than any other moment, comforting a child vomiting in the night captures the essence of what it is to be a parent.

I don’t remember my dad getting up to me in the night even once. I don’t resent him for that: He was a man of his generation, and also often drunk.

I sat with my daughter in front of the toilet for 20 minutes. I would have happily stayed there all night, but her vomit impulse eventually receded and she said she wanted to go back to bed. Just as she was in the process of lying back down, she bounced violently straight back up, launched herself from the bed and began running for the bathroom.

It erupted from her just as she was pushing the door open. It flew across the bathroom, across the cabinetry, over the towels, into the bath, into the bucket of bath toys, and onto the spare toilet rolls on the floor. Only one thing in the bathroom remained untouched by her vomit: The toilet.

I couldn’t believe it. It felt like a sick joke. All those warm feelings about bonding in the night were washed away by the pungent yellow river I would soon have to clean up. For now, though, all I could do was fall to my knees and hold her hair as she continued to empty her guts.

Then just as she was finishing up, the door opened and there, like an angel from the darkness, appeared her mother; laden with cloths, wipes, disinfectant and a bucket. I began to take them from her, but she said, “I’ll do it. Just take her back to bed.”

I could have wept with joy. I had never been so in love. As I lay down in bed and cuddled our sick daughter, I reflected on the fact that much of parenting can be done by one parent, but it’s much easier with two.