A Mother’s Day Tribute from a pediatric nurse

The first time I worked on Mother’s Day, I saw the day through a different lens. My patient’s mother usually came in every morning after her night shift job and passed out on the hospital sleeper chair for a few hours. But that morning, she arrived wearing her Sunday best and her finest pearls. In her hand was a camera, and a satin dress for the baby. She wanted a picture with her daughter, and asked if we could do everything possible to make her look less like a patient and more like a “normal” child.
Her daughter was an 11 month-old baby who had been born prematurely. Her entire little life was spent bouncing back and forth between our hospital and a rehab facility, with her mom at her side. For the picture, we momentarily removed her intravenous nutrition lines, stripped off the hospital gown, and worked our way around the tubes and catheters to get the dress on. We briefly disconnected her breathing tube from the ventilator, and the mom held her in her arms for a few precious seconds, smiling with pride. I snapped the photo and we quickly placed her back in the crib and reattached all of her lifelines. The mom beamed at the picture, and a few days later she hung a print copy of it in front of the crib.
I guess I didn’t know what to expect that day. Maybe I thought that there was no worse way to spend Mother’s Day than with your child in a hospital, and why would anyone want to celebrate it in a situation like that? It’s typically a day for families to show gratitude to the mother. This single mom had no one to give her thanks, and her developmentally delayed baby didn’t have the ability to make eye contact, let alone give her a smile. But for her, it was a day to be thankful to be a mother–to be able to feel that love for a child who is yours. It was a different approach–the only approach she had a choice to take. And she took it with so much grace that it amazed me.
She is one of the many, many mothers I have come across at my job who have amazed me. I work as a nurse in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Through the new diagnoses, the surgeries, the intubations, the pain, the resuscitations, the deaths–through it all–I have witnessed the powerful extent a mother’s love can reach.
I’ll never forget the mother of a young girl who was in her last days of life. Her disease had crippled her to the point where she had a fully intact mind but was trapped in a body she couldn’t move–with the exception of her eyebrows. To communicate, her mother would recite every letter from A to Z until her daughter raised her eyebrows at the letter she wanted to use. The mother would write the letter down, then start the alphabet over until she formed a word, and eventually a sentence. And like this, an unconventional conversation developed. It was sweet to see what the girl wondered about. One time, after more than an hour, we realized that she was asking how her brother’s date went last week, and if the family liked his new girlfriend (turns out they didn’t). Despite how slow and tedious this method could be, her mother never lost patience and did this with her, day in and day out. There is a Quranic term that comes to mind when I think of these mothers — “sabrun jameel,” which means beautiful patience. Happy Mother’s Day to these mothers who, despite the paralyzing circumstances of their sick children, endure everything with a beautiful patience.