Surviving the flu (with kids)

by silly_sad_machine

Being sick was never work before I had a child. For as long as I can remember, in fact, being sick was the only excuse for not working. My father could drive slaves with the best of them, but even he would concede a little down time for someone with the crouping cough or the muddy scours (both colloquial terms of my father's, for pneumonia and diarrhea, respectively). If your ailment fell under the categorical heading "flesh wound," however, a-working you would go.

These days I'm the dad around the house, though, and categorizing illnesses and injuries has become unnecessary. I don't work the way my father did - mainly because I don't have a farm, a couple of herds of cattle and 20-some-odd miles of fence to mend. My workload consists of a blank Word document, and I think it's safe to say I'll never breed simply for the purposes of creating free labor.

Shrugging off my father's blue collar mantle does nothing to make being sick any easier, however. In fact, as the stay-at-home father of a 2-year-old, catching a bug has become twice as debilitating as it was when I was younger. Back then my mother waited on me, I got a free pass to lounge on the couch watching TV all day, and everyone in the house was just a little bit nicer to me.

Now there's no one to wait on me. Just the opposite, actually - I'm forced to wait on someone else. It's like being called into work even though you're on death's doorstep. Cough, cough, change a diaper. Cough, sneeze, make lunch. Hack, hack, hack, read a book to your girl. Break fever, take medicine. Repeat.

As if it wasn't bad enough in the first place, nature comes along and spreads the misery around. Me sick = unhappy. Me sick and taking care of my daughter = miserable. Me sick and taking care of my newly sick daughter = unimaginable agony. If ever there was an advertisement for birth control, this is it.

Another hand around the house would be a blessing, right? Two sick adults versus one sick kid is a shoe-in for the grownups, right? Well, that depends on what house you live in. In this house, the second hand is a hypochondriac. Two sick adults versus one sick kid is actually written like this: "one sick adult versus one sick kid and one languid, dying wife."

(I will give her credit, however. I came down sick first, and for that initial day she treated me like a king. It was as close to being a sick child and being tended to by a concerned parent as I've been in many, many years. When she's on her game, no one beats my wife at being tender.)

So, what used to be a two-day, back-on-my-feet illness has ballooned far beyond anything I had imagined. The effects are staggered ... first I get it, and two days later when I'm feeling somewhat better, my daughter gets it. Two more days and my wife gets it. What would've been simple becomes a week-and-a-half long disaster of coughing, fever, triage, cartoon-watching, dirty diapers, Vics, deathbed languishing, uncomfortable pooping and disturbingly dizzy headaches.

Thanks, circle of life.