Love the child that holds your hand Friday, 03 February 2012 23:24

The Peninsula is serialising every week Rachel Hajar’s My Life in Doha: Between Dream And Reality, published by Strategic Book Group.

A good pediatrician is like chicken soup —comforting and reassuring. In the first four years of my life in Doha, I missed our pediatrician in the U.S.A. the most. She was a very competent and gracious lady who made herself available for consultation at all hours, giving us a number to call anytime, when any of our children got sick and we were worried. She was just a phone call away, reassuring us. One weekend Hajar and I had been worried when our son had a fever and was lethargic. Should we take him to be seen in the emergency room? We had called her, and after listening to the history and asking a few questions, she reassured us that there was nothing to worry about. She advised us to give him acetaminophen (an antipyretic) every four hours, round the clock to keep his temperature down. If he perked up, most likely he was just having a viral syndrome. As she had predicted, after two doses of the medicine, our son was wide-awake and playing. We felt at ease and had good rapport with her, which was important because the relationship between parent and pediatrician may affect the welfare of the child.

I shall never forget the time when, at the age of four months, our son fell off the bed, greatly surprising us. Hajar had hurriedly laid him on the bed after a grocer- shopping trip but he had scooted over to the edge and promptly fallen with a dull thud onto the floor, which was fortunately carpeted. He let out a blood-curdling scream. Perhaps to punish us for leaving him unattended, he held his breath and turned blue. Breath-holding spells usually occur when a young child is angry, frustrated, in pain, or afraid. The spell is a reflex and not a deliberate behavior on the child’s part. It is a fairly common pediatric problem but nothing in the world makes a mother’s heart stop beating than a hysterical child who stops breathing, staging a color transformation from pink to blue. Fortunately for us, that scary incident was never repeated, so we must have done something right at the right time, like not panicking but projecting a resolute calmness while our hearts were melting like ice on a hot summer day.

Even though my husband and I were certain that the color transformation was a breath-holding spell, we had consulted our pediatrician for reassurance. She said breath-holding spells occurred in about 27 percent or more of healthy children. It was usually benign and self-limiting. The episodes, however, were often frightening to parents, even to parents who were physicians. She had reassured us at the next well-baby visit that our son was in perfect health.

When we arrived in Qatar, there were no Well Baby Clinics. You brought your child to the emergency room when your child was sick or, if you knew a general pediatrician, you brought your child to his office. There was no health education awareness campaign and many mothers were ignorant about immunization to prevent common childhood infectious diseases such as measles, polio, mumps and smallpox. I often wondered, in those early years in Qatar, about the status of child and maternal health in the country. The older generation of mothers were uneducated and lacked rudimentary “health knowledge” (beliefs about disease causation). Several researches have shown that there is a strong and significant effect of education on child mortality. Studies have shown that both primary education and secondary schooling significantly decrease the probability of child death, while literacy played an insignificant role.

With the evolution in health care services in Qatar and with the opening of the modern Hamad General Hospital in 1982, well-trained and competent pediatricians were recruited, contributing to the improvement in pediatric health care services. For me with young children at that time, it was a great relief to entrust the care of my children when they got sick to capable, knowledgeable, and experienced pediatricians. I shall always be grateful to the superbly competent pediatricians who patted my hand and reassured me when any of my children was sick.

Child experts say that each child is unique, each one having a distinctive personality. Right-ho! But experts don’t tell you that babies have personalities the moment they’re born. One of my children wrecked carefully laid out feeding schedules, crying for milk every two hours instead of the standard three or four-hour feedings. And when he wanted his milk, it had better be there instantly otherwise he would let out a bellow loud enough to wake the dead.

Like all children, my children went through the usual child development stages from infancy to adolescence. I recall well those challenging years and the memorable phases in their personality development when “NO!” was the word of the day along with . . . “I dunno” . . . “Leave me alone” . . . “Mine and don’t anybody dare touch it” . . . “Really” . . . “I’m bored.”

I found out that the child rearing books I bought were not of much help. I retired them. Countless great — and good — men and women were raised by mothers without the guidance of books on child psychology. For example, Hammurabi, Hatshepsut, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur . . . the list is long.

Gradually, I came to realize that a mother had only to love her children coupled with understanding, trust—and a lot of patience. Throw into the brew encouragement, reassurance, and praise, and the kids will turn out just fine. At least, theoretically, they should. Still, with all my good intentions, there were times when I was voted Worst Mother of the Year:

“Gosh mommy, why can’t you do anything right?”

“There’s something wrong with your thought processes.”

“Do you always have to say the wrong thing at the wrong time?”

“What’s the matter with your hair? You look as though somebody mentally retarded cut your hair.”

“Why do you want to watch the news again? You watched it yesterday.”

“I hate it when you tell me to study.”

Sometimes though, the pendulum swung the other way, making me Mother of the Year and once they anointed me Mother of the Century. That was the time when our cook went away on holiday and I cooked lunch and dinner for the family. My first day in the kitchen, I felt like an apprentice at a circus. The children came to look, curious, repeatedly asking, “You’re going to cook? What will you cook?” Children’s memories were certainly short on good deeds and long on imagined neglect. They had forgotten that long before we employed a cook I used to cook for them, in addition to working full time. After two days my performance was evaluated. All recommended unanimously that I should stay home to cook for them. I had passed the critical scrutiny of the most discriminating taste buds!

They made some earthshaking discoveries too, like, “Did you know Mommy that Daddy is not always right?” And they went through a phase moaning grievances:

“I feel like a prisoner in this house. Nobody ever respects my rights.”

“I can’t study without the TV on.”

“The teachers don’t know how to teach!”

“I did not study for this kind of grade!”

“I have no freedom in this house.”

“Why must I tell you where I’m going and what time I’ll be back?”

From the safe distance of time, I can smile at the memory but those were intensely difficult years. Yet, there are myriad cherished moments in a mother’s life. I remember well those precious moments . . . sleepy, dreamy eyes struggling to stay awake as I read their favorite bedtime stories—Peter Rabbit, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Little Mermaid, Snow White . . . tiny hands clasping my hand as nightmares were chased away and sleep finally triumphed . . . crying and then beaming as a bump or a bruise was kissed away . . . little faces breathless with excitement, running to me, and clutching a bunch of flowers picked from the garden, “For you Mommy”. . . staying up all night soothing feverish little angels . . . little hands ripping through gift-wrapped toys . . . little faces smiling radiantly, on top of the world, on a merry-go-round . . . my youngest telling me with wide eyes “Mommy I love to sleep when it’s noisy” when she fell asleep during a folklore dance and drum show . . . a trail of flour on the kitchen floor, tables, and chairs and painted faces shouting, whooping, screaming, intent at playing Indians . . . presenting me with their first wedding anniversary gift, “a vase to put your flowers in” and bought with their pooled pocket money, my youngest clasping my hand and putting it under her cheek at bedtime and telling me, “We wanted to get for you that thing that you get from oysters, what is it called, pearls, but they were very, very expensive” and me kissing her, assuring her that their gift was better than pearls or diamonds.

(to be continued)