Sick

We’ve all been sick. The experience of all the members of our household taking ill in overlapping sequence has made it feel in my memory like all of us have all been sick for the entire year so far. That is not factually accurate but it feels true in a way that is all at once outrageous and deeply, self-pityingly satisfying.

I keep trying to find someone to blame. In my small, bitter heart I am sure it was those kids who came over to play with my kids two weeks ago last Friday. We started to get sick the very next day, I am sure of it. My wife disagrees, but then she’s friends with those kids’ parents and hates when I am right. I don’t know why I do this. It might be because I am angry - about being sick, but also just in general, as a default setting, and I want somewhere to hang that anger. But why get angry about being sick? I am slowly coming to admit, at least to some extent, that my emotions are activities I enact, at least to some extent, and so I could change them, at least to some extent. This is so far entirely a theoretical matter, to be fair. I am also beginning to wonder if perhaps I can’t always tell the difference between when I am angry and when I am afraid. Fight and flight feel similar as impulses, at a gut level, I think, at least if you’re cornered anyway, and when have I ever not been cornered?

I am no longer sure of the order in which my family fell ill. I believe it went oldest child, middle child, wife, youngest child, oldest child, wife, me. It seems to be (at least) two different bugs, one a nasty cold and the other something else. I will also note that while I appear in that list only once, I spent most of December and the very first few days of January sick with a persistent and painful chest cold. Not that anyone ought to be keeping score here, but I am absofuckinglutely keeping score here.

My oldest kid, taking after me, poor thing, is angry that she got a flu shot and got sick anyway. We all got them, and I feel the same way. I told her the Centers for Disease Control say there’s a flu outbreak on here at the moment and a different strain than usual which may be why we got sick despite the shot. I didn’t tell her that this flu is, the CDC site says, relatively mild compared to normal, as she’d only be offended. (I have to say, I am annoyed that ‘Centers for Disease Control say’ and ‘CDC says’ are both what my ear demands when my brain insists that only one can be in fact right. You may find pedantry tiresome if you are on the receiving end, but I bet you rarely consider the weight shouldered by those of us called, and it is a calling, to dedicate ourselves to pursuit of the pedantic arts. Shame on you.)

What I didn’t tell her is that despite that this strain has a higher mortality rate for children, didn’t mention the panic I could feel beginning to boil when her sisters both had high fevers and lay mostly limp on the couch. It might not be the flu. The nurse said it might also be RSV. The uncertainty could be alleviated by tests she says aren’t worth the cost and trouble at this time.

My youngest isn’t a baby anymore, though she still calls herself ‘baba’ sometimes. She’s two and change, and precociously verbal and social, wants to be big and in the mix just like her sisters. Sometimes I want another kid when I notice her decidedly non-baby qualities. I don’t think I could handle it though, in any capacity, money, health, sanity, etc. My wife doesn’t share my doubts. She is absolutely certain that she and I both can not handle a fourth, so we are finished having babies. The baba has been more baba-like this week as she’s been sick, and that helps confirm the wisdom of making sure she’s going to be our final baba.

When she was three or four days old she got pneumonia and wound up in the neonatal intensive care unit for about ten days. My wife’s mother stayed with the big kids and my wife and I took turns being at the hospital watching the baba breathe through tubes, holding her, watching her vital signs that needed to improve before they’d let us take her home. It wasn’t all scary in that most scary of ways as a parent, and probably people who understand, at least to some extent, that their emotions are activities they enact, at least to some extent, and control their emotions, at least to some extent, wouldn’t have gone to those darkest possibilities as often as I did. I don’t know. I’ve only ever been me, and read a few novels, I don’t really know what it’s like to be anyone else. My mind went to those scary possibilities a lot in that time.

For her first year and change every time she got a chest cold it was scary because of the worry that she’d end up back in the hospital. It was hard being away from the big girls, hard being home with them without my wife who they missed a lot, hard being in the hospital watching the baba with all the tubes and wires and trying to hold her and walk with her. Every chest cold I got a bit scared of going back to that. Partly in response to that fear I leave my phone on constantly now, because when the baba first got sick I had it off for an hour while at a work event and my wife couldn’t reach me while she was trying to tell me that the three day old tiny fragile baba needed to go in to the hospital because she wasn’t breathing right. There’s also a kind of meta-fear, of returning to life on the edge of those worst fears. It’s not a fear of something terrible happening so much as it’s a fear of returning to the mental (and whole body, quivering, jittery, sour stomached) state that is fear of something terrible happening. Is that narcissistic? My usual query. Is it self-absorbed, an ‘I’m the real victim here’ kind of thing, to have a strong part of my reaction being not just concern for the welfare of my child but rather a concern to avoid repeating the experience of painfully heightened concern for the welfare of my child? All this rattled in my head as the middle child and the baba fevered up and limped out this week. It sucked. They’re now back to normal bad cold illness, thankfully - unpleasant but not scary.

A silver lining has been a relaxing of our routines, a reprioritizing of the basics - provide them food, comfort them, be together - and a partial deprioritizing of work (work’s a bear right now though so I am limited to only a partial shift of priorities, and I feel so guilty for that), plus a lot of cuddling and watching cartoons together. The kids are more receptive to all of that, being a bit more lethargic and differently demanding.

In that down time while cuddling the children I’ve read a bit. I’ve fallen off of leisure reading to a big extent, which feels like a loss, due to being ground down and dragged behind the pace of my work and family life. The public library has some contest this year to get you to read a range of books in different categories, and you get entered into some drawing for a gift card or something. My wife has been quite animated about it, considering her options. She’s charismatic and smart, infectiously so (cough), and I’ve caught the bug off her a bit, listening to her talk about what she might read for the work in translation category, the work published the year you were born category, the debut book category, and so on.

Inspired, I got Ling Ma’s book Severance out. I’d gotten it a while back - actually my wife had gotten it for me, put it on hold via the library web site, saying “I read a review of it, it sounds like your kind of thing, a couple of your kinds of things simultaneously.” I read some of it, liked it, kept going but slowly due to limited time and energy and I was only about halfway through by the time it was due back. I couldn’t renew it so I had to return it unfinished. I think that was in June maybe? Anyway, I got it back out again and finished it. The book’s good and I’m glad I read it.First book merit badge of 2020: earned.

The book’s set during and immediately after an apocalypse, specifically an apocalypse due to an illness that wipes out huge parts of the population. parental concern over a child’s well-being figure prominently in the story. I flinched a lot as I read it, those combinations drawing me back to the neighborhood of the awfulness of the past two weeks and the bigger anxieties related to them about the baba’s early day. Worries breed worries as well, or an outbreak of one will manage to unlock the others I’d temporarily tethered in my brain-cellar, and then it’s a full on mutiny. For instance I find myself thinking things like “the climate predictions are so dire, and I want to have grand kids!” So, yeah, it’s a good read, if you like books, uh, check it out.

My oldest perked up tonight. She had a long nap today, and spent an hour and a half in the bath tub, filling it initially by running the shower, to breathe in the steam and ease her congestion. She sat in there listening to podcasts and drinking the cups of tea I brought her. She got out just before bedtime, after her sisters and my wife had all turned in. She wasn’t in the discomfort she’d been in before and wasn’t angry about it. It felt good to see her in better spirits. My heart swelled a bit when she smiled big when I said it was my night to read her bedtime stories.

For our bedtime reading we’re reading an adventure story written and set in England in 1910 or so, about time traveling children from a noble family that has lost its fortune. It’s good fun, and the author’s a socialist who makes the occasional funny and cutting bit of social commentary in an aside. It’s a nice way to cap the day, just immersing myself in bringing her a blanket and another cup of tea, just sitting next to her on the couch, the two of us getting our minds off being sick and suspending our anger and need to blame by snuggling and by reading something escapist, something infused with hope, written before the 100 year catastrophe that was the 20th century, and smiling together not thinking about the next 100 year catastrophe.