Love

Even if it’s midnight, and you’re tired, and you can’t really draw so your attempt at barrel curls winds up looking like a follicular tsunami, I recommend you hide a love note in the lunch pail of any little boy heading off to his first school field trip. And, when he stays home sick and misses said field trip, let him find it when he later eats his lunch. I can almost guarantee the response will be priceless, and when you return to your desk after everyone is down for a nap, you just might find something like this on your keyboard.

It isn’t easy writing love notes when you barely know your sight words, but the message came through loud and clear for me. :)

Did Mama
Love Mama
Mikey Love Mama

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The Friday night of Labor Day weekend Mikey came down with a cold.  At his age a cold shouldn’t be much trouble, but Mikey isn’t one to do anything average, and that includes rhinitis.  First, we have the fevers.  Mikey runs fevers so high and so suddenly that you would think I delivered him in a mosquito infested swamp.  One minute he is sniffling and the next he is a glassy eyed fire-ball mumbling about ways to extract dinosaur DNA from bugs trapped in amber. (He watched this video 88393092 times Labor Day weekend.)

As if the fevers weren’t enough, there is something about the anatomy of his throat that causes it to swell when he is sick.  His pediatrician has explained this condition to me on countless occasions and has even called it by name, but these conversations have always occurred when I am dead to the world from exhaustion so the only thing I can recall is that it is essentially benign and something he will outgrow.  However, on the first night of every cold his throat will swell between 11:30pm and 2:30am (of course!) to such an extent that we can hear him wheezing in another room.  Except we are never in another room because before he wheezes he develops a barking, racking, whooping cough that accounts for 75% of my gray hair.  It’s a croupy cough so deep that the first few times it happened I could do nothing but stare at him open mouthed and whimper from the nerves.  So, we are never listening to him wheeze from a different room because we are with him, in the kitchen, sitting in front of an open refrigerator and freezer trying to create cool, humid air in the middle of a damn desert.  (We have humidifiers, but he is usually crying and tired and resistant to hovering over one.)

That was Friday.

By Monday he was feeling better, which is when Nicholas started to get sick.

Nicholas isn’t a fever runner.  He runs your normal 99.9, maybe 101.  He nose does run like a faucet, though, which means at night it will run down the back of his throat and produce coughing attacks violent enough to make him gag and retch.  This also occurs between 11:30pm and 2:30am.  (of course!)  It almost never occurs during the day, and on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning when he was scampering around the house silent as a mouse except to ask for cookies, it was all I could do to keep from lifting him up by the collar and demanding he act sick.

I’m lucky enough to have The Mister, who plays a very active role parenting the boys with me, especially when they are sick.  He stays up late into the night with me, checking on the boys frequently and rocking them both to sleep after their coughing attacks.  When Mikey’s throat closes up, he sits on Daddy’s lap in front of the refrigerator while I pace the kitchen and rip apart my cuticles.  When Nicholas coughs until he vomits purple Tryaminic, it’s The Mister who rocks him back to sleep while I change the sheets or pace the nursery and rip apart my cuticles.

So, despite a week of exhaustion and ragged cuticles, I was at least satisfied knowing The Mister was exhausted, too.  Misery enjoys company, which is why we called each other frequently during the week just to recount how little sleep we received the night before.  By Friday it had become a point of pride to see who could brush their teeth without rinsing with a caffeinated beverage.  I was looking forward to recovering from a very long week.

And then The Mister turned to me on Friday night and said, “I think my throat hurts.”

And that is when I admitted defeat.  I think you know why.  No, I know you know why.  There isn’t a woman out their who doesn’t already know that no matter how sick your children are, no matter how high their fevers runs, how tight their throats swell, or how loudly they retch from coughing, they will never be more sick than a middle aged man with the sniffles.

It begins with a cough.  Not a wracking cough like Nicholas, or a croupy cough like Mikey.  It is the shallow, weak cough of a 92 year old man with congestive heart failure.  heh-heh-heh.  heh-heh-heh.  heh.  heh. Anemic bursts of air all through the day and night.  I once suggested to The Mister that he put his all into his coughs,  maybe get three or four wimpy ones for the price of one good hack (and a few minutes of peace and quiet).  My suggestions continue to be ignored.

The coughs are then followed by long stretches of sleep typically seen in cats.  The Mister went to bed early Friday night (wisely), knowing we had the first soccer game of the season the next morning.  We showed up, he coached, and then we went home so he and Nicholas could collapse into bed for four hours, lulled to sleep by dueling coughs.  They both woke up just in time to eat dinner.  Nicholas went back to bed, and The Mister spent the rest of the night dozing in front of war movies on T.V., opening his eyes only to make sure I was watching him die slowly.

Then come the patient progress reports.  At some point early, early Sunday morning I woke up as The Mister returned to bed after getting a glass of water to sooth his shattered throat. [<---sarcasm.]

“How are you feeling?”  I ask, as if I don’t already know the report will be grave, near death, or plague like.

“It’s…in…my…chest.  heh-heh-heh.  heh-heh. heh. heh.” He gasped as he crashed into bed in a tangle of arms and legs and covers.

“Oh.  Okay, well, sorry to hear it.  Just keep sleeping {as if  you won’t!} and maybe when you wake up you’ll feel better.”  Roll over.  Shut eyes.  Ignore cough.  Fall asleep.

A scant three hours later Mikey was up and ready to go.  Because his Daddy was so very, very sick {sigh} he wanted to make him breakfast in bed.  Twenty minutes later we were back in my room presenting to our patient a plate of scrambled eggs, two pieces of toast, a banana, and some apple juice.

“Thanks, guys.  You didn’t have to do that,” he said, barely lifting his head two inches before letting it drop again on the pillow.

Uh huh.

The Mister finished his breakfast in record time and was back frolicking in dreamland before I made it out of the room with the empty tray.

He woke up some time later and agreed he needed some fresh air.  We left for IKEA shortly thereafter at the crack of noon and were back home within a couple of hours so that he could rest.  Again.

By Sunday evening The Grim Reaper had showed up at our front door three times.  I have to say, by the third time I almost felt sorry for the guy, walking around in that black hooded cloak in the heat of September with an expectant gleam in his hollow eyes.  I said almost.  Surely as a harbinger of death he should know that despite the moans and groans and proclamations of imminent death he was no doubt receiving that this was a false alarm.  Braxton Hicks.  The ultimate tease, if you will.

I was nice about it, but finally had to suggest that he come back when someone is actually running a fever or, wait for it, has a cold severe enough to require a tissue.  But what do I know?

Some time later I was cleaning the kitchen before dinner so that I could mess it all up again when I felt a hand on my shoulder.  I looked up and found The Mister staring at me sheepishly.

“Sorry I’ve been so lazy the the last couple of days,” sniff-sniff.  heh-heh-heh. Then he left the kitchen and asked the boys to help him set the table for me.  I turned back to the pile of dishes in the sink and smiled.  I heard The Mister sneeze, and felt the teensiest bit guilty for giving him such a hard time about being sick.

“Christ!  I think I just cracked a rib with that sneeze!”

Sigh.

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