Not every Mommy does.

We've had a rough week here; with sickness and Snowmageddon 2011, Eliot and I have not left the house in three full days. I'm feeling better, but he is still coughing and streaming snot from out his nose. Last night he was up a half a billion times. He'd start talking nonsense, stringing random words together into unintelligible sentences until he'd wake up crying uncontrollably. I keenly remembered the way it was caring for him when he was a newborn infant, and by keenly remembered, I mean my body remembered the movements that it kept making even after I had passed the point of exhaustion. Sitting in the rocking chair, my arms wrapped around his little body, my face pressed into his sweet smelling hair, it's difficult to believe there will come a night when he doesn't call out for me.

At some point in the night, after hours of only fitful resting in my bed, Eliot looked up at me, his cheeks flushed pink with fever and said, "I think I'm ready to go back to my own bed. But if I go, Mom, will you turn on my fan and pull the cover up and tuck me?"

"Of course I will." I said, "That's what Mommies do."

Eliot frowned and shook his head. "Well, not ALL Mommies do."

I smiled at him as I lifted him out of bed and into my arms. "Well then," I told him, "You're just an especially lucky boy, because THIS Mommy always does."

Our conversation made me think of the children's book Love You Forever, where the mom drives across town and sneaks into his house to rock her grown son.

Someone bought this book for my youngest sister Libby when she was a baby, and Mom always thought it was kind of creepy. LOL.

"I'll love you forever
I'll like you for always
As long as I'm living
My baby you'll be."

Then when she is old and sick, he in turn rocks her:

I want to be rocked like that when I am an old woman. And I want my cover pulled up and tucked. But leave my fan off, if you please.