Fevers and Foreheads

I woke this morning with the memory of my mother kissing my forehead.

Not as a child, but the summer of my sophomore year in college.

The odd annual return to my parent’s house, a place I hadn’t really lived since leaving for boarding school at age 13. I worked working forty-five hour weeks split into two kid-filled jobs.

Nannying for two sweet broken-hearted babies whose parents spent the week back in the city working and divorcing while we colored at their grandparents’ kitchen table. I dropped them at camp and while they were swimming and sailing, and macrame-ing, I pushed even littler ones on swings and sang “twinkle, twinkle, little star.”

I wonder what she thought of me then — My mom. Did she take in my hustle, my need to be needed, and see young woman lost? Could she see me satisfy my need for adoration in the company of children, rather than the complex wants and demands of the young adult world? Was she proud of my work ethic of mystified by me? Did she feel me ill at ease in her house, under her gaze, amidst her life?

Those days, before anyone taught me boundaries, my heart was nearly always broken. By children’s divorcing parents. By summer camps whose members asked the teenage lifeguards not to let the dark-skinned men repairing the boathouse, swim to cool themselves in the same pond their children played in. By loneliness I couldn’t explain.

Somehow I came down with a fever.

I spent extra, unpaid hours tucking the bruised little ones, who were not mine, into bed. I read them separate chapter books, giving each my undivided attention. A gift my grandmother taught me years before — time just for me. I loved her for it. I drove home and crawled into my own bed.

I woke several times in the night. Once to strip off clothes I’d sweat through, once to get water. Once, I woke to my mother’s lips pressing on my forehead in the benediction kiss that both takes your temperature and seals you with love.

“You have a fever,” she said.

I mumbled a reply. Something about needing to be somewhere important the next day.

She hushed me. When I finally rose hours later, the sun bolding hanging in the sky, my fever was gone with my workday.

I came down to exactly one cup of coffee left in the pot and Entemann’s raspberry danish already cut, waiting for me on a small glass plate.

“I called you out sick,” read the scrap of a note tucked under the plate. It was signed with a small heart and an “M.” My mother’s perfect handwriting.

This morning I woke with the memory of my mother mothering me.

Such sweetness I didn’t expect.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis is a psychotherapist, author, wife, and mother of three. After losing both her parents within two years of each other she began Grief Is My Side Hustle. (www.griefismysidehustle.com).

Photo credit: Sonya Sanford