Sick Days

Our week has been like this:

I went to bed before nine o'clock on Saturday night and stayed there for fifteen hours. It was a drugged, fitful sleep, but I am convinced those fifteen hours are the reason I was able to find a few functional brain cells by Monday morning...at which point Isaac woke up with a fever, so really there was no need to snap back into Teacher Mode anyway, because I needed to stay home with him. (I have not mentioned Sunday, because Sunday is a bit of a blur. I'd planned to grade things. I can't think of a single thing I actually did, though.) On Monday evening Matt called on his way home and sounded awful. Last night -- was last night still Monday? Is it really only Tuesday? -- desperate for restful sleep, knowing Matt needed it too and wouldn't get it with me rolling him over every few minutes because of his sinusy snoring, I made up a bed on the futon in the study.

(It is strangely disorienting to sleep in a different part of the house all night, even in this house I have known so intimately for ten years. It's different than falling asleep during a movie or taking a nap in the afternoon. I do not hear cars drive by on the street from our bedroom with its window into the backyard. Shadows fall differently through the window shades. When I woke for a drink of water, another dose of cough medicine, a cough drop, I had to think about where to find these things. When my alarm went off this morning I couldn't reach it right away.)

(That said, I slept pretty deeply.)

It has been a week of juggling schedules. Who can stay home with a sick child, and for how many hours? What arrangements need to be made? Who can sacrifice which days? It's seven o'clock in the morning and one wakes up with a fever -- time for a rousing game of Who Can Stay Home Today? When one is good at this game, one learns to figure in the possibility of tomorrow, and the next day -- if I stay home today, what will happen tomorrow? If I promise to stay home tomorrow, can you take today? If I make the doctor's appointment, can you take the other child to school?

This is the season of life we are in. When I share this with more seasoned mothers, the ones who are long past this stage, invariably they smile. It's a smile with no ulterior motive, no superiority or smugness or agenda; it's merely a smile of solidarity: I've been there. And this is how I know we, too, will get through it. That even though we're both tense, we're both still feeling under the weather ourselves, we're worried about how we'll take care of all the things we're supposed to take care of in these other lives we live during the day, it will all be okay. I try to remember how I felt two years ago, when I went from stressed about missing school to terrified about my young son's eighth day of a high fever and his elevated white count -- how little it mattered, the details of sick days and how many I had to lose. (Which, I realize, is a privilege -- that I can let go of that worry more easily than many mothers.) Just recently more than one friend has found herself sitting up with a sick baby in a hospital room, sacrificing her own sleep so her child could sleep in her arms. It is the season of the flu and RSV and pneumonia. We are lucky when it's a cold, a sinus infection, an ear infection, even when we're all miserable.

This is the season of life we are in -- a season of being all up in each other's business all the time. We can wash our hands until our knuckles are cracked and bleeding, and we can all use separate hand towels, and I can try to keep my children apart as much as possible, but the reality is that we share hugs and kisses and tears and someone will inevitably sneeze on someone else no matter how well trained we all are in the practice of sneezing into our elbows instead of our hands and every now and then all of that leads us right to this point, to this week in late January. And it's comforting to know how many Januaries have come before this one, both in my own family's narrative -- this is not our first germy winter -- and in those shared in the sympathetic eyes of the other mothers. I am walking a well-traveled road. And someday, I hope I can offer a little comforting solidarity to a tired young mother, stressed about the little things which seem so huge when they're buried under mounds of Kleenex and Clorox wipes and fatigue and despair, and I can say, I've been there. You'll get through it.