When a Mother Is Most Needed

“Hold me?” my four-year-old daughter whispers from a pile of blankets in the middle of the hide-a-bed.

She’s been out here in the living room for twenty-four hours now with a flu bug.

First, she’d been pale and stoic, retching so often over a seven-hour period that I quit counting after she hit the double digits.

Next, she and I spent a steel bar in the back kind of night side-by-side on the hide-a-bed while my husband and son slept together in the master bedroom, steering clear of our makeshift infirmary.

Today, with cheeks flushed and forehead hot, she’s laid on the hide-a-bed alternating between short naps and long stares at different objects in the room — the Christmas tree, the guitar, the fish tank — scaring me with the questions she whispers: “Are the fish going to live very long? And if they die, are we just going to get new ones?”

Between cups of coffee and trips to the laundry room, I lean over her and kiss her warm cheeks.

“Hold me, momma?”

There it is again.

I sweep aside the blankets, stack some pillows behind me, and stretch my body the length of the bed.

“Come here, darlin’,” I say quietly, pulling her toward me and curling her against me.

And with her head tucked under my chin, her ear to my chest, we’re back to that familiar position we established in her infancy — back to the ultimate comfort, that primal whisper, the heartbeat.

By Anjie Reynolds