The daughters and I have a routine that works pretty well. I still wash their laundry, because I hate to run partial loads, which is what would happen if everyone’s wash were done separately. So, instead, I have them fold their own. We do it all together in my bedroom while we watch shows we’ve recorded off Discovery Health Channel (or sometimes HGTV, if we’re so inclined). So we’re watching one with this woman who’s got all these unrelated symptoms, the doctors can’t figure it out, they treat her for the various things they think it might be. They finally figure out what it is, and all the other things they did helped her survive long enough for them to treat the thing it actually was, and once they’re pretty sure that if anything is going to help her get better, they’ve done it, so now it’s a waiting game to see if she comes out of her coma. The family, meanwhile, is praying and making deals with god. You know, if you make her better, I promise I’ll do this or that. So the mom prays and prays and prays. She says to her husband that she asked god to give her a sign that the woman would survive. So the doctors, having done all they could and cleaned the woman up some, let the parents in to see her. She leans over her daughter and talks to her, and asks her to please open her eyes. Hallelujah! She opens her eyes! The mother is all over the goddidit thing, crediting her prayers with the healing of her daughter. Ummmm. . .the doctors gave her fluids, drugs, dialysis, put her in a medically induced coma to slow the spread of whatever it was, ran test after test after test until they found out what her problem was, and then gave her the treatment for that problem. The mother could have prayed until she turned blue, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. In fact, if she really wanted to see the power of prayer, she could have left the daughter at home instead of letting her go to the hospital, and see how well that worked. I feel bad for the doctors, putting in all that time and effort, years in school, internship, and residency, working crazy hours and doing even more time and research each time a problematic patient comes in, only to have all of that yanked out from under them, reduced to irrelevancy each time the credit for success goes to an invisible guy in the sky.

So we’re folding laundry and watching this, and I start yelling at the TV. The girls got an earful, but I think they’ve gotten used to it, because they just laughed. What a way to bond with your kids, eh?