Current Date: June 27, 2059
Character: Shiyuri Hastur
Race: Shifter – Panda
Age: 79, physically about 24
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Being a mother was a challenge. Let’s not lie to ourselves, I never imagined myself being a mother, but I have no regrets. Three beautiful children who have grown up into wonderful adults and who know that my door is always open to them. They visit often, of that I am very pleased, and when they visit, it is rarely because they do need this door of mine—ours—to be open for them out of necessity.
All the while with my stomach getting bigger and my thoughts going round and round, especially that first time, I often thought about all the women—the mothers, especially—I had crossed while I spent more time at the hospital than I did at home. I met more than my fair share of them and while all of them were wildly different from one another, quite a few of them had the same worries I found myself dealing with.
Or, more aptly on that front when I was pregnant with Katheryn, worries that I found myself going over again and again and again even before I had to deal with any of them.
Would I hold her right? Would I know when to feed her? How to burp her? When to change her? Would it be easy for me to tell when she needed to sleep and when I had to stop trying to mother her because she had to learn to sleep through her nights? A lot of the questions were some that I shouldn’t even have worried about. It came easily. Changing her when it was time, feeding her when it was time, holding her just so, to burp her. Little things, simple things.
That didn’t stop me from thinking about everything else and worrying that I would do it all absolutely wrong. Thankfully, Dominick was more than patient and I’d like to believe that we learned most of it together. Though to be fair, I was probably a little on the naive side of things back then too and I wouldn’t have been surprised that certain things I learned along the way were things he was already well aware of.
I don’t remember my own parents, maybe it has to do with my mindset back then. Not that it matters much at this point, I’d like to think we were good parents, and we did our very best for these kids of ours. I still don’t have the answers to everything. I don’t think I ever will. On that note, I’ve come to understand that believing that anyone has all the answers is foolish, no matter who they might have been.
Be that a mother of multiple kids or a new mother who is bringing her first child into the world, neither one of them will have all the answers and no one should think that they do. It feels as though it would put a certain amount of unpleasant stress on a person. This doesn’t only apply to mothers, parents, or anyone else in a family setting.
I’ve seen a lot while I was spending all that time in the hospital. It wasn’t just veteran mothers—so to speak—who were looked upon as though they had all the answers, some of them were just as lost as everyone else. But nurses that had been around a while, doctors with specific knowledge of things, people at times seemed to assume that these people would have all the answers as far as certain situations were concerned and while it could have been true at times, more often than not, it just wasn’t.
Stressed family members and friends of someone in an emergency situation turning to the first nurse that comes their way, demanding to know what’s going on when that nurse has no idea as to what anything is about because that very nurse is not the one overseeing the patient. I’ve seen that a lot back then. People who seemed to think that repeating themselves to a new person they were seeing in the hospital was moot because, clearly, all they’d already talked about had to have been told to them, right?
Not fully, notes are taken, sent in, and added to files but you’ll always have to repeat yourself a few times, at least, that was my experience and maybe it was just me. Maybe I was just the ditz who didn’t know any better, but I doubt it. Not that there are any hospitals left to check except ours and I know how ours works, since I do volunteer now and again.
There might be hospitals left out there, but I very much so doubt that they’re anything like what they used to be just before the world went dark.
Works of JD Beckett 