Most+Proud+Of

“I didn’t go to college for four years to be a stay at home mom”, I would say to my parents. My mom often told me how nice it would be if I didn’t have to work full-time and I should look at the cost of daycare. Was it really worth working? That didn’t matter to me, I love my job, and I had been working on my career in Human Resources for seven years. Providing jobs for people, giving them medical benefits (some for the first time), training employees, and helping them when they went out on disability were all exciting! Yet it was the investigations and unemployment hearings that excited me the most! I was looking out for the company and rule following employees. I wasn’t going to let the bad apples get over! That is what I do….or so I thought.
 * My Center of Gravity**

Seven weeks after the birth of my daughter, Natalie, I returned to work. I didn’t cry leaving the babysitters house as everyone warned I would. They looked at me strange - what was wrong with me? I couldn’t believe I was not crying. I think I may have even tried to make myself cry, but I was excited to return to work! I jumped back into my job as if I had never left. We had a daily routine and I was a working mom. It was great!

It was late November 2005; three days before Thanksgiving, and my babysitter called to tell me Natalie was running a fever. I logged off my computer and raced out of my office. My stomach turned, my baby was sick. Not an experience I was sure how to handle.

That night, she felt warm so I decided to give her a cool bath. That’s what they say helps. Doctors discourage medicine before 6 months. “Let it run its course,” they would say. She was smiling as I took her out of the tub bundled in her green and yellow duck towel. Laying her underneath her pastel colored walls full of ladybugs and dragonflies, panic ran through me. Her eyes began to roll back, her teeth clenched, her mouth foaming. An image you might see on a movie, an image that tore this mother to shreds. In shock I whisked her into my arms, flew down the stairs, screaming to my husband, “Call 911! Call 911! Please HURRY!” The minutes anticipating the paramedic’s arrival were agonizing. As I lay her on the kitchen floor and stroked my helpless child, I fell to pieces inside. Firemen and paramedics soon came and put my mind and heart at ease. She began to come out of her seizure as they entered the house carrying her brown Tommy moose with a red knit sweater. The paramedics checked her over and in a few minutes she was her bright cheery self again.

After leaving the Emergency Room, we learned she had febrile seizures that would happen unexpectedly until she was 6 years old. Five days later, she experienced a 4-minute seizure; two months later, a 4 minute and 30 second seizure. Three months later, I became a stay at home mom. Suddenly the world turned and this little person was more important than fulfilling any dream or standard. Working 14-15 hour days was not worth the cost of me not being there to help her through the four minutes of her seizures. Six years later, I have comfort knowing she will not have seizures anymore. I am slowly returning to the workforce, but now have a joy of teaching children to become great people. I hope to teach my daughters to be ambitions and strive to be their best, but they will always know how important family will always be.