One of the things I dreaded as a child was getting sick. Even a cough worried me because my mother disapproved of illness. She took great care to make sure I received all my proper vaccinations, and regularly took me for checkups. She served me healthy, nutritious food and any illness on my part would mean a failure on her role as a mother. She didn’t tolerate that kind of weakness, for she was a strong, sturdy woman and had lived through much in her life to be put down by a cold.
I remember when I had those terrible coughs, the ones that continue to grow loud until you are out of breath and wheezing, and I prayed that they would stop. My mother always took an afternoon nap, and though her room wasn’t close to the kitchen, she always heard, no matter how much I tried to subdue them. She yelled, in her sleepy, but intimidating voice, “Stop that cough!” And I would try to find, amongst the many medicinal herbs in the cabinets, a remedy to my unrelenting coughs.
The herbs we had were the worse possible kind for a child. There were no flavors, no choice of picking strawberry over orange, because these medicines were from the ground. They got the job done, but they made me nauseous in the process. It was usually after dinner when she would sit me down, and force-feed me with one I hated in particular, a warm, grey-color liquid that you swallowed.
When I got sick, which was often in childhood, and almost never in adulthood, I feared my mother the worst. It wasn’t a time to be cute, and want her to feel bad and sweet-talk you back to health. It wasn’t a time to cry and be silly, but rather to find a way to get better before she got angrier. These days when I tell her how she used to be, she laughs and throws me a you-are-exaggurating look. I suppose my reasoning is when you are kid, everything appears 10 times worse that it may really be.
To this day, I hardly get sick, and unless it’s a viral flu and contagious,I suppress it before it gets out of hand. I look at pills not as saviors, but as emergency remedies if I have terrible pain on occasion, and I never tell my mother. Once I asked her to buy me a big bottle of aspirin, and upon handing it to me, she said disapprovingly, “Why do you need this? This is not good for you.”
On occasions that I feel a cold coming, I find myself rummaging through the isles of the nearest pharmacy, buying all kinds of things to relieve pain and suppress a cold. So far, I have succeeded, and since I no longer live with my mother, I have no worries. I consult with my sister, who is a public health nurse, and she listens readily to my minuscule pains.
I thank my mother, however, for inevitably raising me to be strong, and to care for myself. When I call home, her voice is soothing, and she says she misses me. And I miss her. I even miss the way she was, and the way we both were once, a long long time ago.