On the Mend, with Optimism

Blog, blog. I've missed you, sort of. This will be abbreviated because I've only taken two of my antibiotic pills and am operating at about 50% capacity just in the past few hours. I also have an uneasy feeling that this is my 100th post, although I can't seem to tell for sure. I am going to pretend it's tomorrow's though, regardless, as I think 100 is a pretty significant milestone, and I am hoping to be at least 75% after my third pill.

I guess what I'd like to say, however briefly, is that being sick is truly horrendous. This is the sickest I have been in a long time. The doctor said I have bronchitis, and a bad case of it, and that I may have pneumonia, but she doesn't want to do a chest X-ray unless I don't get better, as she thinks it more likely it's just the bronchitis. What made being sick this time so much worse than it has been in the past (although don't get me wrong; it's always bad), is that until today when I literally couldn't get out of bed in the morning and just lay there, drenched in sweat, shivering, coughing and even crying a little, was that I couldn't actually really be sick.

It makes Lily really upset and confused when I am sick, and although she is so self-sufficient, she is only four. And I have a baby. And a husband who travels for work and who would readily admit that tending to the sick is not a particular talent or even ability. And so, over the past five days or so, I made myself sicker; I knew in the back of my mind I was doing it even as I was doing it. The night Annika couldn't sleep and I had a fever but stayed up rocking her nonetheless was the lowest point, although I will say it was one of those nights I emerged from thinking: If I know nothing else, I know I can take care of these children.

I don't mean to make myself out to be a martyr here. First of all, I am not a martyr. It is not a role I enjoy or seek out. And my point is actually a selfish one, or at least a realization that does make me feel, just a little bit, sorry for myself, especially as I sit here surrounded by wads of crumpled Kleenex, still a little feverish sweat on the brow, and a body gone limp from days of existence on water and tea. In this incarnation of mother, which I have signed on to for life, I can't be sick in the same way I used to be sick. For no matter how terrible I feel, how much my bones ache, head pounds, throat rages, sinuses pulse, there may at any moment in the middle of the night come a cry from someone who needs me, and I have no choice, if humanly possible, to get up out of that bed.

So here we are. I am sick, but getting better. I make the same pledge to myself tonight that I make every time in recent years I see health on the horizon after a grim experience: to take care of myself so I can take care of the girls, to appreciate my general good health when it returns. And I do it knowing that as soon as I am able--here I am now, at midnight, writing (and badly, I can tell, but it's my 99th post!)--I will go right back to packing what I can into the meager 24 hours of a day.

Don't write and tell me I need to take care of myself or about the oxygen mask metaphor or that I shouldn't feel badly about the posts I missed when I was sick. I know all this. And putting the care-taking needs of my children before my own doesn't make me special or worthy of praise. I know plenty of people who do it daily without so much as a peep for sympathy, and there are millions of people who do it every day in circumstances I cannot fathom without the merest soupcon of self-pity. All this makes a person is a loving parent.

All I want to say is that it's late. I'm still a little feverish, and my nose is running, and I do feel bad about the posts I missed, but I also feel glad that I knew I couldn't write them. And I also know that when both girls are a little older, it will be easier and easier to take care of them and myself with less self-pity and a more generous heart. And tomorrow morning, when Lily asks me, "Feeling better now, Mama?" as she will at about 6 in the morning, I will feel well enough to get up and make her oatmeal. And for one morning, maybe more, I will actively, clear-headedly appreciate the ability to do so.