102 degrees and An Affirming Choice

I had watched attentively as the thermometer ticked past 100 degrees and then 101, closely followed by 102. It finally stopped at 103.7 and I did everything I could to make my daughter comfortable while her fever worked to destroy the invaders.

“Well, she’s definitely not going to school,” my husband told me while I heated water for her tea. “We’d better keep her home the whole week just in case. Nobody wants to catch this.”

Immediately my thoughts turned to my own experiences. He said “the whole week” so casually, but only once in my life had I been home sick for a week—during a bout of chicken pox in first grade. If I was walking and talking, I went to school. At most I was allowed to miss two days at a time. Now I see it was the fear of getting “too far behind” that motivated the decision to send me back prematurely even when I was miserable and contagious.

Days later, once my daughter was feeling better, we dug into her backpack and picked up where we left off the week before. As we tucked into poetry, I sat there with a sense of peace that I never would have experienced if we had chosen another option for our children.  I am the teacher, I know all the subjects, and I know exactly what needs to be done.

While I listened to her little chirping voice (spaced by the occasional sniffle from a runny nose), I couldn’t help feeling that Regina Mater was the best choice for our family.

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