The Fire and the Glory

It started on Tuesday. One child has a fever. Immediately all plans of holy hours and music classes are wiped away. I battle anger as she has caught it from playmates who came sick.

Within a couple days multiple children are sick with high fevers, coughs, congestion. When children are sick they are so very needy. My husband gets sick and I try to make one last dash to clean the house despite the aches and cough beginning. He loads up on meds and leaves to go on the road and sure enough, I spark a fever.

While he is gone for two days I try to hold the house together. 5 of my 6 children, the oldest 9 and the youngest 5 months, are all horribly sick. We are passed out in the living room or in our beds in rotation, watching endless movies while the one non-sick person, the 2 year old, floods the bathroom and climbs all over creation. I can’t put my fevered baby down. We are saved because my 5-year-old who was sick first is now feeling a little better and for a while is able to get people toast and water.

The aches are horrific, reminding me of back labor in childbirth. None of us sleep the first night. I talk to the children about offering up our suffering to Jesus for the salvation of the world. I try to keep myself from breaking down by repeating “this too shall pass” and remembering what it’s like when everyone is well.

That second night all the children want to sleep in my bed so we all sleep every which way in the great big king bed and literally every hour a child wakes up crying. My 5 month old baby can’t nurse well and keeps grunting and crying hysterically despite the cool mist humidifier and saline spray. I can’t find any of my bulb syringes.

Toward dawn, at the end of our nocturnal agony, I realize there are stars all over the ceiling. My son says, “Mama, do you like my strobe light?” I tell him how much I love it, that it reminds me of Mary’s mantle covering me. It makes me cry. He says it reminds him of that too. Then I realize in the mess of blankets I’ve gathered to combat everyone’s horrible chills, I have the Our Lady of Guadalupe blanket too. I feel God’s love so powerfully, feel my Mother’s arms around me.

My husband texts me a reel of Fr Mark Goring listing the five reasons housewives achieve sanctity. He misses the crux of the housewife holiness though. Most cannot fathom the suffering one can undergo as a mother of many littles. Here in this pressure cooker of sickness and whining babies one can find the holiest of moments that can become the sanctification of the mother.

When you are totally insufficient. You feel horrible, your house is wrecked, you have more children than you have hands all crying and needing you at once, all while you are holding a heavy hot baby. And you love them all so much and you know that it is the greatest gift of their all-encompassing love and desire for you that also leads to their great dependence upon you in their need. You are scooped out, sacrificed alive, poured out as a libation.

And all you can do is cry, Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!!!

My husband gets home that evening and immediately his fresh energy gives us a second wind. He tells me how he heard of a vision of St Bridget of Sweden’s where Jesus tells her that suffering is a sign of His love. That one day of suffering on earth is worth years of suffering in purgatory. That the prosperity of evil men is actually the deadly silence of God. God chastens those he loves and he is near to the brokenhearted. He sees outside of time….he sees all at once the fire and the crown, the pain and the glory.