Sick Day

Raise your hand if you've ever done the parent calculus of I'm sick but how much time can I spend on being sick. This is how it goes done at my house when mom comes down with something.


They mean well. I'm 100% sure of that. But without mom running the show, well, things go sideways. Sometimes this happens because mom is intent on debugging a problematic spreadsheet. Often it happens because mom is delving deep into a new sector and needs to concentrate on learning the lingo. Nonprofit legalese anyone? I can give you a primer now.

Sometimes things run amok because hardworking "eat something, coffee is not a vegetable" mom succumbs to the realities of immunology. Poor sleep, poor diet (look coffee is a fruit extract that has to count for something!), stress (duh), allergy season, plus children and adults who don't do as well with the hand-washing and cough/sneeze covering as they could. Mom didn't really stand a chance.

So here I am, trying not to cough up a lung and what not (five pregnancies, five births, no c-sections that's all I'm saying), wondering how much time I can afford to spend on recovering before the rest of the family reaches the point of critical chaos and everyone loses their damn minds. An ill advised foray to the kitchen for ice water suggests mom's sick time is up, my ailing body doesn't get a say in the matter. No clean cups left, no clean pots either but mysteriously no food to eat. How did the pots get dirty? A mystery for the ages. Or the hungry teenagers. And the little ones are going through growth spurts.

I place the Cloak of Invisibility over the Hydra, my affectionate pet name for the laundry, in its various stages of not done. If I don't see it maybe it will go away one its own this time. That strategy's never worked before. Maybe I need a better invisibility cloak? Anyone have one to spare? How about a fairy godmother to enchant the neighborhood wildlife to clean the house for me? No? All right. Where's my broom (stick)?

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