Missed The Mother of the Year Award Again!

Last Monday I travel to New England with my three younger children and a teenager in need of a ride. Tuesday I find myself with my father at his regular breakfast haunt. My husband calls and I roll my eyes. "Uh, Lynn, I'm, huh, having breakfast with my Dad... Can this wait?"

This husband of mine calls me all the time, we talk all the time, we see each other all the time and lest you think I mind this, I don't. It's just that when I am with someone else who I am rarely with then I'm frankly, bothered.

Lynn waits on the other end and begins, "Kathryn has been up since four in the morning with pain on her left side, it's probably not appendicitis. She says it is also near her bellybutton."

Everything stops. The breakfast table floats off, the people blur, the moment halts.

"Let me talk to her, Lynn."
"Kathryn, what hurts?"

I am a six hour car ride from home. My three younger children are clueless as to what is brewing at home, all they know is that soon they will be going to a football size island with their cousins facing a week of water fun. How am I going to face them with the news that their vacation is pending. How am I going to get to my daughter in pain with the lightning speed my insides are screaming for?

It takes me five seconds listening to Kathryn and I say to Lynn, "She needs to be seen by our pediatrician quick." The man moves into action and fully operates in his most fatherly maternal mode. He is known for this!

I call Kathryn's sister, Robyn, who is at West Chester University, forty minutes away, and she assures me that as soon as she knows where her dad and her sister will be landing she will be there. Chris our son is at Reading Area Community College for his first day of classes. But He prepares to kick into action.

I am six hours away from my daughter and my emotions are pulled. I want to just hop in the car but I am assured by Robyn that they can handle this.

We travel to the Island and get the children settled, my mom will keep them if I must travel home. My mind is lumbering down a hospital corridor with the sickest of sick. I am imagining the worst uttered from a doctor's mouth. Not Kathryn. I am wishing for it to be appendicitis. These are the unknown moments, anything is possible, the options are strewn randomly over the table.

So many families have a day in particular when all changes and nothing will be the same. Lynn keeps me updated with each step being followed. The ultrasound is not conclusive, not enough liquid or body fat to compress to reveal. (Another reason to put off the diet) She endures a CT scan that brings her to tears. Robyn is with her during this process providing the missing female/mom component .

Lynn calls, he's worried. He's beginning to wonder. Are they telling him everything. This could be it, the dreaded moment in time when everything swirls, the foundation shifts and the landscape is unfamiliar.

The day took longer than twenty-four hours, I'm sure. The cell phone rings for the millionth time and if it were human it would have been kissed a thousand times over and embraced. "Her appendicts was swollen, it needed to come out and the surgery went well."

Chris, Robyn, and her father were there for her recovery, I was not. Three little kids waiting for the news were relieved, of course for Kathryn but in their kidway, mainly because they didn't have to hop back in the car for six long hours.

Maybe I wasn't even one of the contenders for the Mother of the Year Award, but if I was, I missed it!