By Joy Netanya Thompson 
@JoyNetanyaThompson

“I’m going to a hotel to sit by the pool and recharge my batteries,” I told my daughter, Zadie. My getaway had been on the calendar for months, but in the week beforehand, Zadie fell ill. I hated seeing her sick, but I was secretly devastated about the possibility of canceling my trip. The day I was scheduled to leave, my husband and I decided together she seemed like she was on the mend; I could go away for the night as planned.

What kind of mother leaves her sick child to hang out by the pool? I asked myself, pulling out of the driveway. 

But as the miles stretched on and I sped toward my hotel in the desert, I let my guilt unfurl behind me on the highway. That evening I lounged by the pool and stared at the palm trees reaching up into the dusky purple sky, stoned on my temporary freedom. I ordered room service and chose a movie my husband would never agree to watch. I sprawled on the king-sized bed like a starfish and drifted off to sleep without setting an alarm.

The next morning, I stretched out on a lounge chair when a text from my husband pinged: “We barely slept last night. Zadie was in so much pain and kept asking for you. I’m taking her to urgent care.” The courtyard’s sparkling water and bright pink bougainvillea seemed to darken. After an agonizing hour, he called. “They want us to take her to the ER to rule out appendicitis.” 

In minutes I’d changed out of my swimsuit and thrown my things into my suitcase. Ten hours later, we waited in a little room in the Emergency Department of Children’s Hospital. The doctor pulled back the curtain and squatted down to our level where my husband and I sat in plastic chairs. She looked like a friendly waitress about to take our order. 

“Well, it is appendicitis,” she said calmly. “And it looks like her appendix has already ruptured.” 

Tears sprang to my eyes. “When?” I asked. 

“We can’t be sure,” said the doctor. But I knew. Her appendix had ruptured when my daughter was writhing in pain, asking for me while I slept alone in a hotel 100 miles away. I’d failed her again.

***

“I’m in the hospital bed, propped up by pillows, holding my baby and thinking, ‘I can’t do this,’” I say.

My eyes are closed and my therapist sits across from me, tapping rhythmically on my knees as we engage in a therapeutic practice called EMDR. I called her because I was having flashbacks to Zadie’s birth. Four years have passed since I tried to give birth without drugs only to experience a 40-hour saga that ended with an emergency c-section. My baby is now in preschool, but the memory is still fresh.

As my therapist and I excavate my memories of those first days in the hospital, we find them soaked in feelings of failure and regret. Giving birth was my first real act as a mother, and as I see it, I’ve failed miserably. Could I be trusted to be a mother at all? 

When my husband went back to work one week after we became parents, I pretended I knew how to spend an entire day alone caring for a newborn. But I was terrified. My sister flew out for three days to help. A mom of two toddlers, most of her tips were practical—like parking near a cart return so I didn’t have to strain my c-section stitches lugging an infant seat. 

One afternoon as we sat on the couch while I nursed Zadie, I said, “I just can’t get over how much work this is. It’s like every day I run an entire marathon, and instead of getting a medal at the end, I just have to wake up the next day and do it all over again.” 

My sister nodded. “It doesn’t get easier. But the sooner you can accept this is your life now, the better off you’ll be.”

Although I felt I was only pretending to be a mother, I convinced everyone around me that I was managing. Given enough time, anyone can succeed at caring for a baby. You can master nap routines, quick diaper changes in public restrooms, and learn to carry a week’s worth of groceries up three flights of stairs with an infant strapped to your chest. 

By the time Zadie started kindergarten, my impostor syndrome had waned. I navigated teething, baby-led weaning, and daylight savings sleep disruptions. I managed tantrums and sick days and screen time. I fielded questions about God and death and disability. Yet the specter of failure was never far away, ready to rise up any time I lost my temper or felt desperate for a break from caregiving. 

***

After receiving the doctor’s diagnosis of appendicitis in the ER, we moved to a room on the fifth floor. The hospital’s beige and mauve motif instantly transported me to that other hospital where my daughter was born. We were preparing for my five-year-old’s first surgery, but I kept thinking about the c-section, which had been mine. I remembered sitting up in the hospital bed with Zadie in my arms, stunned that I’d ever thought I could be a good mom. She latched onto my breast, the action accompanied by an electric shock of pain; my uterus cramped as she nursed and I looked with disbelief at my mom and my husband, who drank coffee and chatted like it was a regular Tuesday. 

Now it was Zadie on the hospital bed. She’d entered a peaceful sleep thanks to an IV of fluids and pain medication, such a difference from earlier that day when she’d cried out in pain, saying to me, “I wish I was you.” I understood what she meant. “I would switch places with you in one second if I could,” I reassured her. 

That week in the hospital after her appendectomy mimicked the haze of newborn days—never really sleeping, feeling dependent on the team of nurses while also desperate to get home, the hours both flying and crawling by as we rode the roller coaster of every bit of progress and every small setback. 

One day, my mom stayed with Zadie while I had a telephone appointment with my therapist. I tucked myself into the back corner of a restaurant’s patio, hoping the sound of a trickling fountain would offer some privacy. I wept as I confessed my guilt over not being there when my child was in the height of her pain. I told my therapist how much this week felt like my postpartum experience, completely unconvinced that I was cut out for being a mother. She gave me a mantra to repeat to myself as I walked down the hill back to the hospital: “I’m an adult, and I can handle this.” 

Less than a month after her discharge from the hospital, Zadie was trick or treating for Halloween, running from house to house with her blue wig flying behind her, three tiny appendectomy scars hidden underneath her costume. She was carefree, but those weeks of her illness still haunted me. How I wished I could have been like Marmee from Little Women, drawing from an endless well of patience as I graciously tended to my ailing daughter. I may have had a few Marmee moments, but most of my caregiving was done through tears or gritted teeth. 

Sometimes I wonder what Zadie will remember about those three weeks of pain and hospitalization. I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t there the night her appendix ruptured. But will she remember that I waited with her in hard plastic chairs in the ER for four hours? Will she remember how I held her hand in pre-op; that I was the first face she saw after surgery? Then there are the things she’ll never know unless I tell her, like walking down the hill toward the hospital trying to convince myself that I was capable of being her mother. 

I recently heard writer Anna Quindlen say that when a woman becomes a mother she ceases, on some level, to be an individual. “You become iconic … that's not your job for them to know you as a person,” she said. “It’s your job for them to know you as a kind of bedrock to their existence.” 

My daughter may never need to know the internal war I wage as I learn to be her mother, the way I struggle as I put one foot in front of the other in this relentless marathon of parenting. She doesn’t need to know that, after a night at home, I had to convince myself to drive back to the hospital so I could spend the day trying to get her to eat something, to drink water, or to take slow, painful laps around the floor, holding the other side of her IV stand as she cried and berated me for going too fast or too slow. 

If it’s my job to provide a sturdy foundation for Zadie’s life, failure would equate to absence. But even when it felt completely impossible, or like the last thing I’ve wanted to do, I have been present—physically and emotionally. Every moment I nursed her as an infant, each time I’ve picked her up from school, brought her water in the middle of the night, considered her questions, and laughed at her jokes, I’ve reinforced her belief that she has a bedrock on which to build her life, a place from which she can become herself, knowing she started on the firm ground of a mother’s unshakeable love. 

Guest essay written by Joy Netanya Thompson. Joy has been writing since she was a 6-year-old spinning stories about the family dog’s world travels. Her work has appeared in Kveller, Motherwell, Sojo.net, RELEVANT, The Art of Simple, The MOPS Blog, and elsewhere. She works full-time in higher education and lives on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County with her husband, her one and only child, and her codependent Bichon Frise.