Learning to just be with my kid

When my kid was sick in hospital, it taught me to just try to share his experience and help him feel less alone.

Before hospital happened, like most busy working parents, I would go to great lengths to fill the time I shared with my kid with activity, stimulation, education, and fun. I wanted our relationship to be all about sharing quality time together.

But a hospital is a really hard place for a parent to create quality time with their child.

You’re not in charge.

You’re not in charge of what happens next, or when it happens. You might get an estimate of 15–20 minutes before they’ll come to take you for an MRI scan and you think: great, that’s a perfect amount of time to do read a chapter of a book together.

But then the nurse and the orderly come after only ten minutes when you’re at a nail-biting moment in the story, or they come in two hours, and you long-ago finished that chapter and you’re fighting the urge to go up to the nursing station and ask for an update.

You’re not in charge of the order of the day.

Last night might have been really hard (the two of you might still smell slightly of vomit) but your kid is finally deeply asleep and you know sleep is a powerful healer. Suddenly it’s 6am and everybody’s got to wake up to get their temperature and blood pressure checked. You have no choice but to let them wake your kid up.

You’re not in charge of most of the diagnostic or treatment options.

Unless it’s a procedure serious enough to require parental consent or you have a religious exemption, your kid’s going to get a dreadful thing done to them. You can’t take your kid’s side and refuse an injection of fluorescent dye, insertion of a central line, or something even worse. Sometimes, you’re still struggling through the jargon and shock of what you’ve just been told by the nurse or a patronising doctor and the procedure is about to begin and you just have to ask your kid to trust that it will be OK.

Privacy is rare and laughter is not always welcome.

Sometimes, some sunshine might break through the clouds and both of you find something really funny for a moment, and you get a grim stare or worse from others in the room, or from the staff. There are very few times you can just be yourselves, because people visiting places full of sick people aren’t meant to be having fun.

When your kid is sick, their capacity for activity, stimulation, education, and fun is greatly reduced, and yet quality time in a hospital, on the rare occasion it happens, is usually unplanned, and often either abruptly interrupted or followed by an extended period of awfulness or boredom.

So, like a lot of parents, I started to get impatient, testy, and sometimes a little demanding, which embarrasses me to think about, because I worked in hospital all through university and I know what it’s like to be confronted by a pissed-off parent. I know how little influence any individual health worker has; they are as much another cog in the wheel as you are.

It was a natural and understandable reaction to the feelings of helplessness and lack of agency I felt but it didn’t change a thing about how hospitals work and it certainly wasn’t going to change anything for my son in any lasting or meaningful way.

No matter what I did to try to make quality time for us both, my kid spent a lot of time waiting, a lot of time worrying, and a lot of time feeling really unwell in hospital. But I wasn’t going anywhere, in case some new horridness happened and he needed me with him.

So like a lot of parents, I found myself bringing some of my work in to his bedside. I could still be present for him, right?

Wrong. I wasn’t really present with him if he was lying uncomfortably in bed, worrying about his future, missing his friends, while I was taking work calls and replying to emails. I was in the room but he was in hospital and I was at work.

So like a lot of parents who did that, I started feeling guilty, and had to stop entirely when my kid noticed it too. Argh.

Eventually I tried to develop a different mindset; he and I couldn’t speed up, slow down, escape, or stop what was happening. The best we could do with this experience was to really experience it together. We had to use this time to practice our patience, endurance and affection for each other.

We still had some good moments, some little interstital quality time between the times of awfulness, boredom, worry, and lack of privacy. But usually we just tried to be there for each other. Often, that was enough.

After two stays in hospital totalling about a month, my kid came home for good. Now it’s six years later, he’s better than OK, a young adult out there in the world.