It feels as if it will go on forever. Every day you wake up, you’re in purgatory: stuck in the endless loop of a viral infection as it sinuously makes its way through your daughter’s immune system.
 
Upper respiratory tract infection. It sounds downright innocuous when you think of the havoc it’s played on your routine.
 
Sure, she’s had high temperatures before, but not 39-40 degrees for four days straight. You know it’s back as soon as you pick her up from her nap. It’s the sustained blazing that troubles you. The disturbing sensation that her skin is scorching right through her clothes.
 
So you scramble for ear thermometers and spend hours waiting on doctors. The logical part of your brain tries to take over: Remember, you’re a first-time parent. You’re probably just over-reacting. All kids get fevers. It’s nothing to get worked up about.
 
But logic has no power over a mother’s heart.
 
Your child has never been this listless. Her skin is too pale. Her eyes are more enormous than usual. Her lips are so chapped they start to crack and bleed. You have watched her slump forward in her car seat and struggle to stay awake. You have heard her pitiful cries for water during the night.
 
Make this stop, make this stop.
 
You find yourself offering her anything to get her to drink, to eat. Juice, pop, chocolate milk. Cookies, chocolate, ice cream. All the usual treats are on the table, but she’s not interested despite her tummy rumblings and dry mouth. You observe the signs of dehydration set in with a sense of dread: the barely-wet diapers, the strange odour of her breath. It all scares you to death.
 
No, she’s not dying, but this common affliction still has you in its grips. You and your husband find yourselves at each other’s throats over what steps to take next. You both feel frightened, and powerless. As the days drag on, it seems as if all you do between doling out Tylenol and Advil is watch Dora on repeat.
 
You let your daughter sleep on your chest and in your bed. You employ anything and everything to stop the incessant crying and clinging. During the most trying moments, you aren’t allowed to leave the room or put her down.
 
Just when it all becomes too much, she will smush her face against yours and make you forget the fact you have to force liquid down her throat with a syringe.
 
When this four-day fever finally passes, it will leave little lessons in its wake. So try not too beat yourself up too much, and remember you did your best.
 
Soon the weight on your mother’s heart will begin to lift. A natural lightness will return to your step. You'll discover that your reserves of patience have increased. In the midst of the departing chaos, don’t forget to look down at that little face and remember you’re blessed.

Yesterday an old lady sat down next to me on the subway and quoted Albert Einstein. 

I was happily ensconced in my own world, reading a historical mystery and enjoying some quality time with myself. She got on at Bloor and made a beeline for me. 

"I apologize in advance, but I'm 76 years old and when I see someone reading, I just have to know what book it is."

At first I was annoyed. Oh no, she's one of those, I thought. A talker. Couldn't she see I was absorbed in my book?

Of course she could. That's why she was so curious.

Conscious of the strangers around me, I tried to summarize the somewhat-macabre plot of the book to the elderly woman without drawing attention to us. 

"It's about graves being disturbed. The hero and heroine are trying to figure out why someone would do such a thing."

When she started asking follow-up questions about the characters and their methodologies, I took off my sunglasses and let go of my preconceptions. I realized that I had been treating her as if she was bothering me, answering her queries in clipped tones to discourage further conversation.

But she wasn't a public transit nuisance to be ignored; she was a just human being who wanted to interact with another human being. She told me she lived at Mount Pleasant and Eglinton in a six-room house all by herself. She confessed she made a point to get out every single day. 

I named her Lillian in my head.

"It's important at my age," she said. "Especially since I'm not married -- yet."

I smiled and told her a little of my story. 

"Do you read to your daughter?" she asked suddenly.

"Yes. Every night before bed we read her stories in our bed and then she reads them back to us."

"You're telling me she's two and she does this?"

"Well, she's not really reading, she's just repeating phrases from memory."

"She's a genius. You better get on to MENSA straight away."

I shook my head and laughed at this. Then she pulled out the Albert Einstein:

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

"That makes sense," I said, even though my husband and I had not yet ventured into the fairy tale realm.

"But what is it about fairy tales, specifically?" she asked.

I stumbled for a reply. "I don't know, maybe the morals or lessons they contain?"

She nodded her head and said she'd only had two books growing up. She told me how she frequently went to the library but only checked out as much as she could carry home.

I studied her as she spoke: her face was guileless, her white hair pulled back by a light-blue headband. I wondered at the rest of her story. Did she have a great love? What was her biggest loss? Was this the only real conversation she was going to have today?

We only spent 10 minutes together on a train underground, this old lady and I, but the experience stuck with me as I continued the rest of my journey alone. In the moment, I had felt the universe offering me something with this encounter: a chance to meet someone new, a way to step outside my comfort zone. It was completely up to me whether I closed myself off or opened myself up to the opportunity.

​I'm happy I chose the latter.