Motherhood is certainly not for the fainthearted

I’m not going to lie. I used to be a drama mama. Between the ages of zero and two years, my kid was in and out of casualty for a long list of ailments that seemed potentially fatal when we were leaving the house. But they all turned out to be non-threatening, and some of them were even non-illnesses.

Things like, ‘oh, her chest wasn’t rising and falling like it usually does and I feared she wasn’t getting enough oxygen’, and ‘she was blinking really fast and I thought she was having a seizure’. My most frequent ‘emergency’ was a temperature spike.

Her temp would rise by a fraction of a degree and I’d be at the hospital talking about, ‘oh, my daughter has a fever, I think she needs an ice bath’! By the way, these hospital trips were usually made between 3am and 5am, when the likelihood of mama drama is at its peak.

I became so notorious that I’d literally be stepping on the eyeballs of paediatric nurses as I walked through the door. That’s how hard they would roll them when they saw me approaching. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, ‘What is it this time?’ They would never say it to my face, but I’m sure they were thinking, ‘Yeah, what is it? A heart attack? Stroke? Aneurism?’ Thing is, I knew I was being ridiculous but I couldn’t help myself. I was still coming to terms with my heart running around outside my chest.

Some point

Still, I didn’t appreciate being mocked. Not even the time when my house girl called in a panic and said that the girl-child fell off the counter and was unresponsive. When I got home, I found her alert and awake, that is responsive. But I still rushed her to hospital. Why? Because she had been unresponsive at some point. I ran in with a conscious child in my arms yelling that she had fallen, hit her head and could having concussion, brain bleed, or pressure on her cranium.

Doctors and nurses sprung into action to save the injured child only to find out that her vitals were normal and she had little more than a bump on the head. But like I said, I still didn’t appreciate being treated like a nut case just because I could be a little dramatic every once in a while.

Come on now, new mothers should have a margin of terror. Luckily for me, with the passage of time, and as my child got older, I became a bit more laid back. With the exception of the one time in 2019 when she had to be admitted, I haven’t charged into an emergency room in years. That is, until Sunday evening when she clocked a 38.5 degrees temp, and I had to drag myself out of bed to take her to the hospital.

Drama hiatus

She’d been complaining about every ache imaginable from her stomach, to her eyes, to the tip of her pinky toe, and I had assumed she just didn’t want to go to school on opening day. Turns out she was genuinely unwell. By the time we got to casualty, she was at 38.9 degrees Celsius.

She definitely had an illness, and it was certainly life threatening. Because of my multiple-year drama hiatus, and also because the child was visibly ailing, I put my drama mama hat on and proceeded to cause a fuss of 2020 proportions.

I could feel the triage nurse giving me a smirky side-eye but I was not for turning, mockery or not. Eventually, my daughter was seen by the doctor and diagnosed with tonsillitis, which sounds benign but can escalate really quickly to the point that a child may have to be intubated. And to my credit, we got there at 8.12pm (yes, I checked), rather than our usual witching hour, and the good doctor commending me for coming as soon I did, because, "If you had come at say 3am when her fever was much worse, it would have been a different story."

So yes. This mama and her baby have both grown. I’ve managed to keep the child alive despite an unorthodox parenting style, and she’s been a beacon of divine light that continues to clear the path to the authenticity of my human experience. Because she lives, I can face tomorrow, even when other loved ones die.

Like my friend and colleague Edward Gichigo Nderi who passed away on the first day of this year. He was just 35, and brimming with passion, promise and potential. May the road rise to meet you, Eddie. We will miss you.

Ms Masiga is Peace and Security Editor, The Conversation Africa