I am coming up to the end of my last placement for my B.NSci(other than an a 2 week elective) and I have spent the past 6 weeks in a pediatric hospital. The whole hospital is full of similar cases, CF, CP, MD, cancers, etc. As I walk up and down the corridor I watch the fathers following their kids as they push the wheelchairs, as they wipe mouths of their children with disabilities, thinking that no one is watching. And there is sadness in their eyes.

We see a lot of the mothers, as they are generally the ones who stay by the beds, and although they don't look happy, it is not the sadness that the fathers seem to portray.

It is not that they are resentful or don't love their children, it is just they hadn't planed for this, they had just dreamed of kicking footies and curfews.

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'Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiselingand scraping and polishing. - BC Forbes'

I think dads have a harder time when it comes to sick children because men, on a whole, are never taught how to express their emotions. They bottle everything up, and suffer in silence. It is truly heartbreaking to watch.

MJ

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Sanity is madness put to good use. George Santayana.

http://nurse-ratcheds.blogspot.com

MJ may be right, but I'm sure there is more. Dads have a different protective role (in the historical and Jungian sense of a meta-role)than moms. Having their children sick or injured is a failure of that role. "I've let my child down." The kind of deep nurturing that Mom has been doing since the first day of conception gives her a different kind of fortitude and patience.

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Mordechai Y. Scher
ER nurse, SVRMC, Santa Fe, NM USA
Flight Paramedic, MedFlight Air Ambulance, ABQ, NM USA