At first I engage in all-out battle: Echinacea, Emergen-C, the vaporizer, green tea, an early bedtime. But it’s no use. Surrender is inevitable.

So I wave the white flag: I cancel all my appointments and take up residence on the couch with the comforter and a stack of magazines.

I am lucky enough to be able to indulge in such a luxury. I won’t lose my job (since I’m self-employed, what can my boss do?). The loss of income hurts, but is not catastrophic. My kids are old enough now to fend for themselves.

I remember back to when they were sick and too young to be left alone with a stack of videos and a bottle of Tylenol to see them through the day. Who could best juggle an impossible schedule and skip work, me or my husband? (Answer: neither.) Could I dose them up and send them off without incurring the wrathful phone call from the school nurse as well as the bad-mother guilt? Always, I’d try to bargain my way through anything from minor sniffles to stomach aches.

“They probably just don’t want to go to school,” I’d rationalize. “Best not to encourage them to stay home every time their stomach hurts.”

Then I would lay low to avoid the accusatory comments of stay-at-home friends who just couldn’t imagine how anyone could send a sick child to school.

Sometimes, though, the fever would climb above one hundred, the cough and runny nose suggested that a TB sanitarium might well be in order. Even I could no longer deny reality. My frantic calculations about when the antihistamine would wear off and could I sneak medicine into their backpacks would give way to the calm certainty that I’d just have to forego all control and cancel my plans.

Then, as now, I would relish the surrender to the suspended world the sickbed demands. In fact, some of my favorite times with my daughters were spent curled up on the couch with them in a timeless cocoon, rubbing their fever-hot backs as they dozed, too glazed even to whine.

Now it’s just me, alone and sick on the couch. It’s not exactly a day at the spa, but again, surrender is weirdly delicious. No running on empty at one-hundred mph. The endless To-Do list will have to wait. I not only can, but should, sleep all day.

Without guilt.

By Lorrie Goldin

Labels: daughters, Echinacea, Emergen-C, green tea, Lorrie Goldin, Sick Mommies, sickbed, Tylenol

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