The 19th reason for not crying during your daughter’s senior year of high school is sick days. Sick days are a nuisance and a struggle. Sick days require heated negotiations with spouses about work schedules and doctor appointments. Sick days force the cancelling and rescheduling of obligations and holing up in a house that gets increasingly messier as illness lingers. No matter how the distribution of time off work and duties at home are distributed, it is always a hassle and an exercise in guilt management. Sick days are to be avoided and minimized at all costs. They are not a reason to cry.
Last Saturday morning, Clayton erupted in an unusual streak of obstinacy and crabbiness over a make up basketball game. He complained and whined and argued about attending his game, about his lunch, about wearing shoes, about the weather, about every solitary thing he could think to act up about. He is normally a relatively easy going kid, so his behavior was a mystery. Until after the game later that day, when he crawled in alongside where I lay elevating my sore foot, wrapped his skinny arm around me, and fell deep asleep. He woke hours later, burning with fever, his eyes bright with misery. He remained this way for the better part of 3 days—snuggly and sluggish, his only symptoms a nearly constant fever and an utter lack of appetite and energy. I couldn’t help but remember a similar day years ago when Grace and I were both sick—suffering a violent stomach bug simultaneously. I remember lying together, miserable but utterly, effortlessly connected—watching some movie with Miley Cyrus and a beach. Was there a sick dad or something? I can’t remember, but I remember her skinny body twined with mine, a shared bottle of sprite we could each barely stomach. She was miles away last weekend, competing in another volleyball tournament, and my boy and I spent most of the weekend cuddled under the covers or in front of the fire. I didn’t miss Grace, or remember the days and hours I’d spent caring for her when she fell ill, my body and my presence the most preferred of all medicine. Not crying.
Clay’s illness struck over a holiday weekend when the older girls had, once again, scattered to separate corners of the Midwest for sports’ tournaments. He and I took long afternoon naps all three days while the lives of the others came and went around us. Lucy went to a friend’s house and Chad took her snowmobiling for the better part of one afternoon. Sam went out for lunch with friends and then to basketball practice. Chad went to work and to the grocery store. Clay and I snuggled and watched the clock for our medicine—Tylenol for him, still occasional pain meds for me. Grace was utterly absent. She never called and only texted twice—once with a practical question about a prescription she’s taking, once with the briefest of updates about the tournament. I didn’t linger on memories of her skinny little girl body snuggled to mine because it was obviously better for her to be far away avoiding the germs. Not crying.
I know moms with smaller families than mine give up their big kids to college, but I never can quite figure out how that works, exactly. How do you give up your big kid without a little one to wrap his skinny arms around you when he’s not feeling the greatest? How do you give up those easy, endless afternoons of snuggles and soup when illness strikes and you somehow find a pocket of time in which to doze with their sweet limbs tangled with yours, their hot breath on your neck, their sweaty heads on your shoulder? Not crying.
I vividly remember the first time they called me from daycare to come get my sick baby Grace. Who could forget the livid red cheeks, the fever bright eyes, the desperate relief when she caught sight of me rushing towards her aching with guilt and sorrow for her lonely suffering among strangers? She was my first, and so many of the events of her life are etched irreparably on my heart. I couldn’t tell you the first time any of the others were called out of daycare—a working mom learns to live with those steady doses of guilt and regret. But I remember Grace’s blonde curls plastered to her little round head, and her chubby arms reaching eagerly to me. I remember how she sagged against me and my heart filled with the exact same measure of relief. Those were simultaneously the worst and the best moments of working motherhood—getting the dreaded call to come retrieve an ill child and having to rearrange and reorganize a tightly scheduled life on the fly. But then the sweet, unfamiliar quiet of a home seldom visited in the middle of a weekday—the sense that you and she had carved out a tiny bubble of solitude and calm right in the middle of your normally wild, noisy world. And the impossible dearness of a busy child, content—nay, desperate—for the comfort of constant contact with your body, a fuzzy head tucked beneath your chin, two powerful hearts beating chest to chest. Not crying.
In so many ways, I’ve grown a bit numb to these hassles and heartaches of daily life. A family with two working parents settles into and around such predictable disruptions in daily routine. The discussions have been remarkably similar for the better part of two decades—“I can cover until noon, and then I have to be in the office by 1; I can be home by three; I have to go in at seven, I have a presentation, an interview, a delivery, a conference call, a meeting with my boss, a meeting with the bank, can your mom do it? What about your mom? I can call my dad...“. We figured it out, day after day and year after year. We are still figuring it out for the littles, but we’ve gradually emerged on the other side of the sick day gauntlet for the three biggest. Just a week ago, my other big girl suffered from the same illness as Clay, and insisted on staying alone. “I’m fine, mom” she assured me. And she was. We texted a few times. I brought her Tylenol when I got home from work. She maintained control of the remote and enjoyed the silence of our never quiet home for many hours. She didn’t need me. Grace hasn’t needed me for much when she’s sick for many years. It certainly didn’t escape my notice that last weekend, as I was essentially joined at the hip to her littlest brother, my biggest girl was miles away and utterly un-homesick. Not crying.
But my sick boy needed me. I relished the feel of his heavy, tousled head on my chest. I even savored the two, long, restless nights when we tucked his feverish body between us in our bed. The years are so short. Grace will probably never, ever, climb between her dad and I for comfort from a fever dream or an aching head again. She won’t lay her head across my body in such an utterly unselfconscious quest for comfort. She still needs me. She still loves me. But when she’s sick, she retreats to the quiet of her own room, hustles my bustling concern out the door in the mornings for the promise of solitude and silence through the entirety of a work day. Not crying.
Of course I know it’s better this way. I shudder to imagine all the hours and days of work I have missed in caring for sick little ones. Having big kids, not the least of whom is my biggest kid, who prefer to stay alone is so much less disruptive than having clinging little ones. I spent years wishing I wasn’t perpetually wakened in the night by the tossing and turning of a small third body in a bed built for two. It is so much easier to care for a child who needs an occasional drink refill or medicine dose or text message and not constant physical contact for days at a time. Next year, when Grace gets sick, she’ll call to ask my advice on insurance and cough medicine, but she won’t need me for snuggles or middle of the night comfort. It’s just sick days and couch time and bottles of sprite. It’s just sleepless nights that are likely over for good, good riddance. It’s just a precious little body—now big and strong and no longer wholly mine—that occasionally suffers an annoying battle with some minor bug and finally, finally, leaves me alone. I’m not crying, you’re crying.
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