Things I’ve Apologized to My Mom For

I’m starting a new series of posts called “Things I’ve Apologized to My Mom For.”

Reva Coley

I think it’s pretty safe to say that almost every woman who has grown up and had children of her own eventually finds herself thinking back to when she was the child and what she must have put her mom through in similar circumstances.

I can remember so many things that I have wound up apologizing to my mom for along the way. The first came with my oldest daughter, Casey; she had asthma as an infant. So many nights I would wind up sleeping while sitting up and holding her to my chest. It was the only way I knew to regulate her breathing and keep her propped up enough where she wouldn’t wake up choking or worse, stop breathing. There wasn’t much time that would go by where it didn’t cross my mind how much my mom had to have worried over me as a child with asthma.

Back when I was a child the instructions from the doctor were to keep a really clean house, keep stuffed animals at a minimum as they carried dust, and use vaporizer tents. I hated those vaporizer tents. The tents were made of broomsticks and bed sheets tied to the corners of the bed with a vaporizer pumping fog into the tent so that I could breathe. Looking back now, I am not sure this was the best treatment, but it seemed to work for me, though there were many days, nights, and weeks I spent in those tents coughing and wheezing and wishing I was anywhere else.

It took me nine long months before I could convince the doctor that my daughter had asthma. The doctor just simply refused to believe an infant could have asthma that young. She kept on telling me that it must be something else, an allergy, my imagination, something, anything but asthma. Excuse me, but as an asthma survivor I recognized the symptoms. Finally, Casey was diagnosed by a new doctor that had come on with the group she was going to see. He immediately diagnosed her as having asthma and got her a nebulizer and Albuterol. Finally, there was relief in sight!

Yes, I apologized to my mom for fighting her and hating to go in the vaporizer tents. I sympathized with her for having to hold me in the warm steam of the bathroom even as I rocked my infant the same way. I thanked her for all the nights she stayed up just to watch me breathe and hold me as I did later with my daughter. So many things you just don’t think about until you experience them for yourself. It’s not like my mom would have remembered to tell me all she experienced when we were growing up, no, it’s a passing down of knowledge thing that happens when your child ceases to be a child and becomes a parent instead.