The constant is change. We all know this, right? I’m trying to remind myself.

This is not forever, this week of sick children.

Sadie has progressed from sleeping on my lap all day, to being cranky and miserable and awake all day. Not welcome progress exactly, but one imagines it’s a step closer to healthy, and thus necessary. Audrey no longer has a fever but still needs steam periodically to quell the coughing. They both sleep at night, but intermittently and not mostly at the same time. Which means I do not sleep at night. But it is not forever.

It does begin to seem like forever, like I must have made some egregious parenting error that led them to give up sleep and regular meals and normal play in favor of coughing and runny noses and ear pain. I know, on some rational level, that it’s just germs. Very slow-going germs, but germs nonetheless. And yet reality, the kind that existed last week, seems more and more like a dream. This, this week of moving from one discomfort to the next, begins to seem like all that ever will be, the only thing to be believed.

This is not our new normal. This is temporary. Soon they will be playful again, cheerful again, able to run around again. Soon I will be able to walk from one room to the next without my momentary absence causing anybody to melt into a puddle of tears. (Mostly.)

Nothing lasts forever, least of all this.

I am trying to remember.