Desperation and Grace

I've been mentally writing an entry here for days. I keep trying to say something profound and compassionate and wise about mothering sick children for days on end, about how it's brought me to the edge of my sanity, as well as all the ways my family has been shown incredible love and grace by some really wonderful people.

But then what I come up with is all blah blah blah, everything is doomed and none of us are ever going to be healthy again and we're just going to keep passing around the same horrible viruses and I will lose my job because I miss so many days staying home and also now is my spring break and I'm still home with sick kids and I don't have enough mom friends here who understand how truly lonely I feel and Suzannah has got to be sick to death of me by now and this is all very, very terrible and DOOM FOREVER and whiiiiiiine.

Today was the first really decent day after thirteen or fourteen consecutive days of illness here, which is mostly why I've been so quiet. I know it must seem like I'm always writing about my children being sick; it's really not that they're sick so terribly often, it's that it feels so consuming when they are. This one has been rough. Suzannah especially has had us worried; she went from feeling fine one day to a fever of 102 and total lethargy the next. She ate hardly anything for several days and it was all we could do to bully her into drinking a few sips of water or grape juice or orange juice or anything. She even admitted that her throat hurt, and for my little girl to admit that something hurts is pretty significant. So I took her to the doctor, where she tested positive for the flu. Wonderful. I spent the rest of the day in varying states of total distress -- how would I keep my young son from catching it? How would I keep all of the rest of us healthy? How would I handle staying home from school the week before spring break when I've already missed so much time with my classes due to the senior IB orals, which took over a week to finish? And then I couldn't get her to even take the Tamiflu, because she threw up her first dose (straight into my hands, which meant I did not need to clean the carpet -- a victory!) and the sight of the bottle made her cry after that.

It wasn't difficult to keep her away from Isaac, really. She was so sick that she had little interest in doing anything other than lying in her bed or on the couch. She had her own bag for her used tissues. I disinfected everything constantly, and I've been washing my hands so often that my knuckles are bleeding. After crying in defeat on Saturday night, I managed to rustle up just the tiniest bit of optimism over the next couple of days when the rest of us appeared to still feel perfectly fine.

But Suzannah didn't get better over the weekend, and last Tuesday her fever was still holding steady at 101-102. I stayed home with her on Monday; Matt arranged to stay with her on Tuesday and Wednesday. I took shameless advantage of this to head out for wine and appetizers after school Tuesday -- I needed it. Some honest conversation, some adult company, some camaraderie. But as I headed to my car, I received the call I'd been dreading: Isaac had a fever and apparently rivers of green snot, so could I come and pick him up? I called Matt and nearly sobbed this unfortunate little update.

"I'll go get him," he said. "You should still go out." He sounded tired, too, and resigned. He was, I think, just being generous and considerate -- he was home, he was five minutes away from Isaac anyway and it wouldn't be such a huge deal to buckle Suzannah into the car and pick up her little brother. Of course, what I actually heard was something more along the lines of, "We are completely effed, so you might as well go enjoy a couple glasses of wine."

When I arrived at home a couple of hours later, Isaac was actually in pretty good spirits, acting more or less normally. Suzannah was passed out on the family room floor. Snoring. Would you care to guess how many times my little girl has fallen asleep on the floor? The answer to that would be zero. It was deeply unsettling. The next day her fever was holding steady and she was refusing food; she couldn't even be persuaded to play The Ladybug Game, which is her new favorite board game and for which she can rouse herself from near-death. On Tuesday, she still wanted to play The Ladybug Game.

So we went back to the doctor. He wanted to rule out secondary infections -- pneumonia, obviously, or strep. And just for fun, we had Isaac tested for all that stuff, too.

Sidenote: Isaac really dislikes nurses right now. He watched his big sister step onto the scale, and I thought that when she did not burst into flame he could be coaxed into copying her. Instead, he backed away, his eyes filling with tears, until he backed right into a cart or a table or whatever was behind him in the hallway. I sat him on the baby scale instead, and he sobbed as though I'd plopped him in a bowl of scorpions. Afterwards he clung to me, eyeing the nurse with great suspicion, his lower lip jutting out in a truly spectacular pout. If I hadn't been so worried and exhausted I'd have found it funny. (What was funny was that later, as we were leaving, we passed the same nurse -- who, incidentally, was fantastic -- and he waved jovially and said "BUH-BYE.")

Isaac tested negative for the flu. His ears were fine. His throat was fine. He didn't even have a fever, actually, so the verdict was "just" a virus. Suzannah's throat was raw -- possibly from coughing -- but the strep test was negative, and her lungs sounded fine. And yet, she was still so sick that she didn't even have enough energy to walk from the doctor's office to the car. She went to bed as soon as we got home, and after that I paced around and around our study, crying into my hands. It isn't that I thought she was so desperately ill, although it was beyond horrible to see her so sick, so listless and miserable and so not at all herself. It was just that I was exhausted, and I felt utterly powerless. I couldn't do anything to make her feel better. Bullying her to take her medicine resulted in tears, for both of us. Convincing her to drink anything was almost as bad. Worrying about Isaac was all-consuming, and worrying that we'd get sick as well just filled me with a deep, insidious dread. And worrying about how in the world we could keep everything going -- our jobs, obviously, but also stupid things like cooking dinner and keeping up with the laundry -- made me want to lie on the floor and sob.

Isaac's illness, in the end, was less worrisome in that he wasn't completely listless or completely miserable to the point where he just wanted to sleep all day long. His fever went up and down, and his appetite went up and down. He did worry us one night with a fever of 103; he just laid down on the living room floor with his blanket until we put him to bed. That was not at all normal, and I hated it, but his fever broke overnight and he seemed so much better the next day. The day after that, he spiked another fever, possibly had a febrile seizure (which would have worried me more except that I know what they are and have watched other mamas go through them with their children), and wandered around with dark circles under his eyes. Finally, finally, a week after his first sign of illness and nearly two weeks after Suzannah's, I'm beginning to believe we'll come through this.

People suffer so much worse, and I know that. More than once in the last two weeks Matt has wrapped his arms around me and said, "We'll get through this. Because people do." He sounded so sure, and mostly, I believed him. But I still posted a semi-hysterical Facebook message about how overwhelmed and despairing I felt, because I just needed those feelings to go somewhere. What happened after that, though, was that a handful of people sensed my desperation and asked, immediately, what they could do to help.

I can't even begin to describe how much that actually meant to me. It's very, very difficult for me to ask for help.

But even as I continued to not really ask for help, the offers came: a wonderful lady from our church offered to go grocery shopping for us (which she did, and delivered the necessities along with a delicious pasta salad and loaf of zucchini bread, plus treats for the kids), and a few more friends made us dinners and delivered them to our house on Friday and Saturday night. Real food, comfort food, with vegetables, cookies, a plant, fresh bread. It was such a huge, huge blessing not to have to think about cooking for a few days but still nourish our weary selves with something other than, say, three days' worth of pizza or reheated Thai food. Love and grace taste exactly like those dinners.

Somewhere in there, I realized how much time I've wasted wishing for other people, or other relationships, whatever they are, to somehow be better or more than they are. I've really driven myself crazy doing that sometimes and probably allowed myself to hurt more than is strictly necessary. And not only that, but the sad truth is that once you start dissecting all the ways other people have failed you, or all the ways they somehow haven't come through like you may have hoped, at some point, you have to come right back to yourself.

Children are really mirrors, in so many ways, and these experiences -- like, say, parenting children through illness, among other things -- show us the best and worst of ourselves. It's so much easier and more gratifying to focus on the worst in other people; I can be all self-righteous and wounded and blame other people when I'm hurting or lonely. However, when I try to talk this over with Jesus in the midst of my more visceral "Please, just let everything be okay" prayers, I tend to want to leave the conversation, because who wants to be told that she should probably work through her own sh*t a bit more before she becomes the expert in everyone else's?

I really think Jesus must be pretty exasperated with me quite a bit of the time.

(By the way, I would like everyone to know that I wrote "sh*t" instead of the actual word because my husband may have expressed just the tiniest bit of discomfort at my casual use of the word "fuckup" in my last entry, mostly because our parents read this blog, and then I accused him of censoring me and suggested that he go and start his own blog for everyone to read, and then he insisted emphatically that he was not in any way censoring me and that I could write what I wanted, that he was just feeling a little weird about it, and I said good, because that was the only appropriate word in that context and if I'm not going to be honest I might as well just shut this whole thing down but I said I would try to be good in the next entry.)

I feel like I may have started writing this with a point in mind, but I'm sure I lost that a long time ago. Maybe just this: that the last two weeks have shown me (again, because I never learn things the first time) that it is an incredibly freeing thing, to put down the burdens of my disappointments. Of my expectations. Those things shut me right down, make me just want to curl into my own tight little ball of worry and hurt. When I can leave myself open, when I can accept the deep kindness of others who took the time from their busy lives to show us a little grace when we desperately needed it, I'd like to think I'm more equipped to show that kind of love and grace as well. And that's really what it's about, isn't it? Helping each other through this life when we can?