It was late on a Tuesday evening when my 23 year old daughter texted me that she had been having chills, a 101 degree fever, and a rash had broken out all over her body. She was 1,000 miles away in a town I\u2019d never seen, doing her required summer internship between her first and second years of graduate school.<\/p>\n
The week before, she\u2019d been put on an antibiotic for a bacterial skin infection. That time, she\u2019d gone to an Urgent Care. This time, I thought she should go to the Emergency Room.<\/p>\n
She wasn\u2019t sure what she wanted to do, and was hoping to wait everything out until morning when she could go to a dermatologist the Urgent Care had recommended.\u00a0 Since she is 23, and an adult, I couldn\u2019t force her. But I urged her, and once I found out the name of the antibiotic she\u2019d been on \u2013 one my mother and I are both allergic to \u2013 I knew she was having an allergic reaction to it and needed to be seen immediately.<\/p>\n
Before she\u2019d left to go on her internship, I had given her the name and number of a \u201cfriend,\u201d Renee \u2013 someone I knew vaguely from a Jewish writers group online \u2013 a nice woman with similarly aged kids who\u2019d said she\u2019d be happy to help should anything come up and only lived five minutes from my daughter\u2019s new apartment. I\u2019d taken her number willingly and passed it on to my daughter, sure she wouldn\u2019t need Renee.\u00a0 My daughter is fiercely independent and makes good choices \u2013 this would be just another few months that she would be away from home, just like all of her college years had been, just like her study abroad had been.<\/p>\n
This, though, was something different. When my daughter started to get so sick so rapidly, I immediately looked up flights to see if I could go to her. They would cost $1,000 and there was no way I could be there before the next day. That wouldn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n
I had to rely on Renee, whom I only knew from posts on our common Jewish writers\u2019 Facebook group, where subject matter ranges from Shabbat dinner prep to Israeli politics to mothering our Jewish children. Within minutes, she arranged to drop everything and pick up my daughter to get her help. She sought out friends for references about which ERs were the best in the area. Then she went in with her to the exam and messaged me as the doctor was examining my daughter.\u00a0 She needs IV antibiotics. She needs IV Benadryl. They\u2019re putting her on a heart monitor.\u00a0 She\u2019s fine. She really fine. Here\u2019s a picture of her. See how she\u2019s really fine?<\/p>\n
She waited at the ER with my daughter for hours, staying connected to me, helping both of us with our frayed nerves.\u00a0 Finally, they released my daughter, with orders of medication and to go home and rest.\u00a0 The next day, my new \u201cbest\u201d friend picked up my daughter and brought her to the pharmacy to get her meds \u2013 my daughter, who didn\u2019t have a car where she was, had simply thought she could do the 15-minute walk to the pharmacy on her own. Renee then checked on my daughter regularly for several days and made an appointment for her to see her own internist the following week for a checkup. Renee brought her there and back, taking her for a meal in between.<\/p>\n
Who does all this<\/em>, I asked myself, as I thought about what I could possibly give Renee to thank her. How do you express thankfulness to someone who has literally saved your daughter, especially when she barely knew you or your child?\u00a0 I started with a Trader Joe\u2019s gift card but that couldn\u2019t be enough. I wrote her a heartfelt thank you note, but that didn\u2019t feel like enough, either.<\/p>\n She keeps insisting it was no big deal.\u00a0 She has kids the same age and would want the same for them. But it\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0a big deal. For that moment, even though my daughter is an adult, I was not capable of mothering her. I couldn\u2019t hold her hand while an IV was stuck in her arm; I couldn\u2019t help her decipher whether she should get that chest x-ray that the Emergency Room was pushing. I couldn\u2019t do the job I had assigned myself twenty-three years ago when she was born.<\/p>\n Everything turned out well, thank goodness. My daughter rested for a few days, took some medicine, and was herself again. She went back to work just two days after the incident.\u00a0 But it was a learning experience for both of us. She had to learn how to take care of herself \u2013 how to decide you\u2019re sick enough to go see a doctor, or to go to a hospital, or to seek other help \u2013 and I had to learn that I will not always be there to mother her the way I want. Sometimes other people will mother her, like this person I barely knew, had. Sometimes she will mother herself.\u00a0 Someday she will be a mother, and maybe at some point someone else will need to mother her child, and she will know the helplessness I felt that night.<\/p>\n The next time my daughter needs mothering, I hope I\u2019ll be right there to do it. If not, I have to hope there is someone as kind and giving as Renee \u00a0— obviously a true\u00a0mensch —\u00a0was for me this time around. And now I know that I will always reach out to mother those who need it.<\/p>\n Judy Mollen Walters is the author of five novels featuring struggling families.\u00a0 They can all be found on Amazon. She is also an essayist whose work has appeared on WashPo, HuffPo, Kveller, The Forward, and many other sites. She lives in New Jersey with her family.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was late on a Tuesday evening when my 23 year old daughter texted me that she had been having chills, a 101 degree fever, and a rash had broken out all over her body. She was 1,000 miles away in a town I\u2019d never seen, doing her required summer internship between her first and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133491,"featured_media":58471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-parenting"],"yoast_head":"\n