The Other Side
After writing all that nice stuff about loving my kids and appreciating them that much more because of our own personal tragedy, today I present one of the negatives.
Kids get sick. Kids don't just get sick when it's convenient, and they don't often tough it out the way some adults do. They don't always provide a lot of warning either. In fact, some of them will get sick, seem to get better, and then get sick again when they are spending the night at someone's house, and you, poor parent, will get a call a little after three in the morning that sends your heart into a frenzy and your brain through the list of relatives who are most likely to cause middle of the night phone calls to find that it's only your own child who is sick once more and needs to be picked up because he managed to puke his big Thanksgiving dinner all over the carpet and recliner of the other person's house. Oh yes, this could be you. And if you are particularly lucky, one of the people in that house will have a disease that has required many surgeries on the colon and digestive tract in general and this person could be highly susceptible to intestinal viruses, and those viruses could potentially send this person to the hospital.
So you stay up fretting while your husband drives to pick up the child because you don't like the idea of driving through the area of the city most frequently featured on the news for shootings, because your life insurance isn't as good as his is, and really, you don't want to go pick him up anyway, because you were the one who told your husband he was a hardass when he didn't want to let the kid spend the night in the first place, and you would probably be inclined to find a 24 hour steam cleaner rental center on Thanksgiving night, so you could just take care of that mess for them right quick, and you would apologize a gazillion times while fumigating the entire household in Lysol and promise to never, ever allow your germ-infested offspring to set foot in that house again, and just for good measure, you wouldn't allow those children to ever get sick again within a 30 mile radius of them. Instead you sit at home while you really wish you had told the husband to make sure to apologize profusely and maybe stop by a convenient store and see what kind of disinfecting gift baskets it had in stock on his way there, and really, you hope he at least remembers to apologize, because it would be just like him to pick up the kid and leave without saying more than hello and goodbye. So you plot how you will take your carpet cleaner over there in the morning as an apology for the husband not saying sorry.
Then the kid walks in and goes right into the bathroom. The husband trudges past you, drops into the bed in the sweatpants he wore and falls back asleep before he's even fully horizontal. You lay in bed, but you can't sleep, because you're too busy thinking and feeling guilty, so you start talking to the husband and asking him questions. He tries really hard to answer you, but he doesn't love you that much and succumbs to the grip of deep sleep.
You check on sick child to make sure he hasn't drowned in the bath he's taking, because he's been awfully quiet in there, hasn't he? He might be eleven years old, but it's now 4 AM, and you've been known to fall asleep in the bathtub yourself in the middle of the damn day, but you're too fat to drown in it, because you displace too much water, so you start opening the door after listening for noise in there and hearing nothing only to be met with a loud, defensive "what?" so you stop before you see more than you need to be seeing and tell the kid to get out of the tub and into the bed. You lie back down and listen for the kid to climb into bed before going to sleep with your guilt and worry.
The next morning, you pick up where you left off and start thinking about loading the carpet cleaner into the truck, but your stomach is feeling mighty crampy this morning too, and you are making far-too-frequent visits to the bathroom, so you decide you better not bring your germy self to add to the problem. You don't call either, because you don't know what to say and figure it's better you just lay low for a while, but one person of the unfortunate barf site will call to check on your child and inform the husband who answered the phone because you were avoiding doing so that someone did get sick, but it wasn't the susceptible one. So far. And even though you know someone can't have gotten sick from your child in a matter of hours unless the child is infected with ebola, which doesn't seem very likely at this point, you know not everyone knows that, and you and your sick, pukey child will be blamed. You consider looking up web sites on gestation periods for illnesses to prove you are not responsible for the germs, but you know that would be wrong, so you secretly celebrate the fact that even though your child might have brought a nasty virus into their household, there was one already there, so you aren't fully responsible now.
But you still wallow in misery all day long wearing your pig pajamas because someone else still had to clean up your kid's puke, and you loaf, watching your favorite college football team get spanked on TV, and you kiss your plans goodbye to go out and see your husband's band play tonight, because you canceled the sitter knowing that if you left the house the sick kid who hasn't barfed again and, in fact, ate all day long, will most assuredly throw up as soon as you get to your destination, but he sure-as-hell won't do it with you home, nosiree.
You spend the evening watching cartoons with the kids until they go to bed, and then you watch Renee Zellweger who is supposed to be fat in this movie but doesn't look fat to you, especially after seeing how you look in those stupid, now-ripe pig pajamas. So you turn on some pathetic dance music and put on a halter-top and a sarong, because you're not going outside or anything and then you can say you actually got dressed that day, and you sit at the computer and write a droning journal entry that is sure to make any sane person pity you and any childless person re-think parenthood. But you're happy, because you're going to go take a bubble bath and then hog the bed until your husband gets home.
NaNoWriMo Update
WORD COUNT: 19,960
I can write 1,177 words for my journal, but I obviously can't write anything I'm supposed to write.
Today I got rid of:
Half a garbage can of receipts and bank slips I shredded
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One year ago - Pumpkin Head
A little of this and that.
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One Year Ago Today:
