A tired kid, a worried mom and a makeup mystery | THE MOM STOP

I was working late one night recently when my husband called. He asked if I could pick up our 7-year-old daughter from the football field, where she had been playing while her older brother had football practice. It was almost dark and it was getting close to her bed time.

“She’s wiped out,” my husband said on the phone. “You can tell it in her eyes.”

As I drove up at the practice fields, I opened the minivan’s side door and my second-grader hopped in. She had her iPad in tow and she let out a long, drawn-out yawn.

“I’m so tired,” she complained.

Having little time to prepare dinner, we drove through McDonald’s to pick up Happy Meals and quickly went home to get ready for bedtime. And once I saw my daughter in the light inside our home, I realized my husband was right. Our sweet girl looked off. Her face was white and she had dark circles under her eyes. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

And perhaps it was a lack of sleep. Our girl has an active imagination, which sometimes means bad dreams that wake her up at night. Often that means that she wakes me up at 2 a.m. to tell me that she can’t go back to sleep, and the I tell her to go get in bed with her brother or her sister, without waking them up. No use waking up the entire house.

But I worried it might be something more. Could she be sick? I questioned whether the flu season had started or if I needed to give her a COVID test. But she had no cough, no fever and no other symptoms, besides being tired and having dark circles under her eyes.

Later that evening, my husband questioned whether our girl could be anemic. Could that cause instant lethargy? I mentally made the note to cook more red meat for dinner and to make sure she takes her gummy vitamins.

And then my mind started to go off into a list of other, more scarier possibilities for sickly looking skin and malaise. I was about to turn to Google — never a good idea, especially when you are worried about your health or your children's health — when I realized it was almost my daughter’s bedtime. I ran her a hot bath, complete with bubbles, and told her to be quick. She yawned again, but complied.

I was mentally telling myself to consider making an appointment with her pediatrician to get to the bottom of what was going on when I washed the shampoo out of my young daughter’s hair. As the water ran down her face, so too did streaks of brown and blue from around her eyes, making her look a bit like someone who had been crying with mascara on.

“Are you wearing makeup?” I asked my 7-year-old girl. She gave a smirk, and then yawned again.

“I put it on after school,” she replied.

On the counter behind me was a large pallet of brightly colored eyeshadows in a rainbow of shades, which belongs to my 13-year-old daughter.

“Did you get into your big sister’s makeup?” I asked.

My youngest child gave another guilty smile, before asking me not to tell anyone.

And so I washed off the eye makeup, relieved that my little girl’s tiredness was likely because she had woken up the night before had trouble falling back to sleep. It was a reminder not to let my mind wander too much, or get too worried, because sometimes, the answer is right in front of us. Sometimes, it’s best not to make a mountain out of a molehill.

After her bath and fresh pajamas, my 7-year-old curled up into bed and I lay down next her to read her a book she picked out — our nightly routine. But it was somewhere around the fourth page of reading about a creaky old tractor that I looked over to find my little girl already asleep on the pillow next to me, glasses still on.

And I couldn’t help but feel grateful, makeup and all.

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Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at momstopcolumn@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: A tired kid, a worried mom and a makeup mystery | THE MOM STOP