Last week, my entire family spent several days together. Now,
this isn’t because we’re one of those families that just loves to
spend every waking moment with just our little family unit. No,
this was because all three of us were sick at the same time. In
case you don’t understand the gravity of the situation, let me
repeat: WE WERE ALL SICK AT THE SAME TIME.
I know. Horrifying, isn’t it?
Last week, my entire family spent several days together. Now, this isn’t because we’re one of those families that just loves to spend every waking moment with just our little family unit. No, this was because all three of us were sick at the same time. In case you don’t understand the gravity of the situation, let me repeat: WE WERE ALL SICK AT THE SAME TIME.
I know. Horrifying, isn’t it?
I don’t know what I did that was so awful that I deserved to be tortured like that. It’s bad enough to be sick with a pounding head, fever and all of the accompanying ick. But to have the entire family have pounding heads, fevers and accompanying ick is the worst.
For one thing, we don’t have enough bathrooms for all of us to be ill at the same time. We have two bathrooms for three people. This is normally an ideal ratio of bathrooms to people. Frankly, I like it because there are only two bathrooms I have to pretend to clean each week. But sick people prefer a 1:1 bathroom ratio. It’s easier that way. When you have one bathroom for every sick person in the house, nobody is stuck standing outside, pounding on the door, screaming, “For Pete’s sake, it’s an EMERGENCY!”
The other thing is that I’m not Doctor Mom. I don’t know why, but the nursing gene is missing from my mommy DNA. At the best of times, I’m a terrible nurse. But when I’m sick too, all I want to do is go to bed and sweat out whatever illness I have by drinking lots of tea and napping in a perfectly quiet house. I don’t want to be surrounded by sick people who expect me to suddenly recite the Hippocratic Oath and bring them back to health.
But because I am the Mommy, that’s what’s expected.
Honestly, I blame all the super moms out there who have the nursing gene for setting these unreasonably high expectations. These women, whom I like to call Doctor Mom, can feel a child’s forehead and immediately know that the child has a fever of 101.2 that has been steadily progressing for an hour. Heck, all I know from feeling Junior’s forehead is that he’s hot and sweaty.
In fact, because I’m not Doctor Mom, I have to use a thermometer, which I can never find. I buy them all the time, but I don’t know where they go. Last year, when Junior had a serious flu bug, I did manage to locate a thermometer in the back of the china cabinet behind a heavily tarnished silver gravy boat we got as wedding present but never used.
Unfortunately, it was a rectal thermometer, so I just put it back in its hiding place. There was no way Junior would have let me use it, even if I’d wanted to – which I didn’t, believe me.
And I can’t talk to my son, discover his symptoms, analyze them in 4.2 seconds and instantly and correctly conclude that he has developed a raging case of Awful Icky Virus that I can cure by rushing him to his bed and starting an IV of chicken soup and fever reducer.
I can’t tell the flu from malaria, for Pete’s sake. Only a Doctor Mom or a person who has actually attended medical school – and graduated – can tell the difference. And even if I could, the only fever-reducer I have on hand is a bottle of Infant’s Tylenol from 1998. Trust me when I say that isn’t going to help.
Frankly, it wouldn’t matter anyway. I’m never prepared for illness. Doctor Moms are. They hear a whisper on the playground about a virus going around and go home to prepare several quarts of homemade chicken soup just in case the virus strikes their house. They stock up on orange juice and green tea. They double their children’s vitamin C dose.
In the meantime, I’m blind-sided by the illness, frantically searching the pantry for some old cans of chicken noodle I picked up on sale in 2003, and hoping like heck that you can substitute orange soda for orange juice and still get the same healing effects.
But miraculously, my family has survived, despite my best efforts at nursing them. Once again, we are healthy. But just to be sure, I’m going to Nob Hill today to stock up on frozen OJ and chicken soup. It wouldn’t hurt to be prepared.
