Every night we have a ritual at our house. I walk the ten footsteps down the hall to my son’s room, hug him as he sits in his desk chair, doing his forever-homework, and say, “Good night, I love you!” He sometimes mumbles the words back to me, but his arms squeeze around mine.

And then I walk fifteen steps more down the hall to my daughter’s room, where I say it again: “Good night I love you!” and she, at 14, still lifts her head up to me, hugs me, and says the words back to me, as she has for so many years now, “Good night, Mommy, I love you!” And I think of all the times, when she was so small, we said our nighttime hug-words in a rocking chair, over and over again, as I rocked her to sleep. Today, sometimes the words come out so fast it’s “goodnightmomluvu.” She is a teenager. And the new Taylor Swift album, or her science project video, call. But her eyes are on mine.

I carry those hugs back to my bedroom. Whether they are full, long hugs or short brief hugs with distracted teens. Either way, I carry them.

For the last four or five days I’ve been down with the flu and not able to post. For me, this is a dicey thing, the stomach flu. But I won’t go into that here. I want to talk about hugs instead. The last few nights the ritual has been reversed. I had a high fever and would wake occasionally to my beautiful 14-year-old daughter leaning over me, holding my hand, “Are you okay mom?” she would say. And an hour later, “Mommy here’s some ginger ale.” And at some point I could mark day from night because she came those same twenty-five steps to my room and said, “Good night mommy I love you!” before she went back to her room, and to bed.

And my son coming in, my dimly viewing him, his hand on my arm, my shoulder. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.

This morning he said, “Mom I kept coming in and standing here, checking on you, but you didn’t know I was here.”

“I knew,” I said. “I knew you were here.”

“I love you mom. Feel better, mom,” he said this morning, standing at the doorway to my room. A few minutes later I heard him downstairs, getting himself and his sister breakfast, and out the door to catch the school bus down the road.

My husband spent much of the past four days beside me, rubbing my back, bringing me whatever I needed, but mostly love, often in the form of bowls of his homemade chicken soup which he hoped I’d eat.

They were each in their own way, giving me a hug. Physically, mentally, the hug was visceral. And every possible piece of literature tells us that these healing touches matter. And that matters to me, because the stomach flu is not the friend of people with my autoimmune history.

Those 25 steps down the hall, one direction or the other, they really matter.