I Still Want My Mommy

In case you don't know, or don't read Dogwood Girl regularly, parenting is hard as fuck. The hardest part, by far, is the worry in the back of your mind that something might happen to one of your children. It is constant. It never goes away. One can imagine losing a parent, sibling, or spouse. Losing a child is unimaginable. There is a saying, and I'm not sure to whom it is attributed, that having a child is forever having your heart walk around outside your body. You are helpless in protecting it. I can imagine no more frightening exercise in letting go of one's fear than seeing a child walk away from you for the first time, or seeing a child drive away alone in a car.

The second hardest part is the sheer relentlessness of the physical requirements of caring for a child. You can schedule it to death, but the unscheduled will occur, and you will have to take care of it, right then and there. You can plan to write for an hour while the children watch Sesame Street, but they will make countless requests for snacks, diaper changes, channel changes, outfit changes, toy dispute reconciliations, and the occasional refereeing of to-the-death grudge matches. Having children means that things that usually take one minute will take ten. Things that take an hour will take at least two hours. It is a job that starts around 7a.m., but might start at 5:30 a.m. some mornings. (No advance notice is given if that is the case, but you can rest assured that if you stay out dancing with the girls until 5:30 a.m. the night before, that your son will wake up at 5:30 the next morning.) You do not get a breakfast, lunch or dinner break. You do not get an anything break. You are lucky if you get to take a shit by yourself, or if you do not have to cut that short to make sure that after you heard that shattering glass noise your child is not now eating glass. You are lucky if you get to wipe before getting up from the toilet. I have actually stood up from the toilet and not had the time to pull up my pants before rushing out of the bathroom to check on the latest catastrophe, my pants still around my ankles. The day usually ends at 7:30 or eight for us, but if someone is sick, or teething, or scared, or cold, or wets the bed, then you might have wakeup calls at any hour of the evening. And you still might have to get up at 5:30 a.m. the next day. So, you have anywhere from 12 to 14 hour days, with no breaks, and with being on call 24 hours a day. And weekends. In a good, healthy, sane week, you might work about 85 hours. Unpaid, but for the satisfaction of a snuggle here or a kiss or hug there. There is also the laughter. Kids say some damn funny stuff, and you have to appreciate that the laughter is part of the payoff, or you would be left with nothing.

And here is what to me is the next hardest part of parenting: Being sick while you are a parent. It sucks the biggest cock EVER.

It started Friday. Rollie was being a total shit, and even had to be taken out of the restaurant at dinner for his behavior. I should have known what was up, because he wouldn't eat anything at dinner, including french fries, which is Mommy 101 for "You are going to be up all night with a puking kid." Sure enough, we put the kids down Friday night at the Lakehouse, where we were staying because we were having the downstairs walls in our house painted. Now, the heat died this fall at the Lakehouse, so it is heated by only gas logs, but if you dress like lumberjacks and keep the logs on all the time, and sleep in two or three quilts at night, you are okay. It is not, however, conducive to being a sickhouse, where one has to get up out of bed multiple times in a night to clean up pukey kids, change puked-on sheets, and make up clean beds. Todd shivered the night away on the couch next to a drafty window, while I slept in his bed, and got up with Tiller who awoke crying multiple times. We made it through the night, thought maybe Rollie had just had too much chocolate milk at dinner, then he puked up his breakfast. Did I mention that the Lake has a washer, but no dryer? We dry the clothes on the line outside. It was about 30 degrees and cloudy. Time to go home. Todd packed up Rollie, while I cleaned up at the house with the help of my Dad, then followed with the still-healthy Tiller.

We came back to the house, and unpacked everything, starting to do laundry, while William, our painter, finished up painting downstairs. Todd and I, in our great wisdom, do not have a television in our bedroom. We feel it promotes a healthy marriage, where we talk or read before going to bed, rather than flipping through channels, or one of us watching something downstairs, while the other watches t.v. in bed.

We are idiots. It is pure hell to be stuck in a sickroom with two puking kids, and NO TELEVISION. Pure. Hell. Yep, Tiller went down for a nap at about 2 pm and woke up screaming bloody murder five minutes later. Covered in puke. I almost threw out her pitiful Hello Kitty doll, the one where kitty is wearing a Jackie-O pillbox hat, and carrying a cute pocketbook, and has a poodle on a leash. Very cute. Doesn't machine wash. (Note to non-parents: Gifts that do not machine-wash end up in the trash.)

Diarrhea began not long after that. That was Saturday. No more puke out of either of them, but diarrhea continued through Sunday at 5 pm, when I started puking.

You know when you are really sick? I mean uncontrollable puking until the dry heaves hit, and you are still nauseated, when you start throwing up bile and possibly cracking ribs in the process? That's when the diarrhea hits, and there is a lovely crossover period where you are sick from both ends, and you wish that your toilet was withing puking distance of your bathtub, so that you could do both at once. Then the vomiting subsides and you are left with an emptying diarrhea that lasts for hours and you shiver and are cold and you break out in a cold sweat and then the covers are too much, but it doesn't matter because you can't lie in bed for more than five minutes before having to rush back into the bathroom, and you are spent and so dehydrated and thirsty, but you are scared to drink anything, because every time something enters your mouth, it comes directly back out the other end.

Most of all, you want your Mommy, and unfortunately, you are the mommy.

Now imagine being that sick, and having two kids who are also sick. To give credit where credit is due, my dear husband took care of me and the kids while we were all sick this weekend, but just the guilt alone of being sick and not feeling like taking care of the little ones when they are sick is terrible. I was sick all night Sunday. I was weak and spent all day yesterday. The other bad part of being a sick family is when you are the non-sick one: All chores fell on Todd Sunday night and all day Monday. Not only are you responsible for puke and diarrhea cleanup, but you are responsible for planning and preparing meals (a land mine field of menu planning that dictates what kind of puke and diarrhea you will be cleaning up in the coming hours), laundry detail, and the gnawing fear that you have a toilet with your name on it in the future.

I started feeling better yesterday afternoon, but I was still weak and tired and unable to eat much. The kids seemed to be feeling better, but everyone was kind of laying around. Todd fixed dinner and Tiller puked it up. Both kids had more diarrhea after dinner. They had baths and went to bed. I made it till about 9 and then hit the hay myself, hoping to get a decent night's sleep and recoup some energy. Tiller puked at 10, awakening with a cry. It is hard to describe how pitiful kids are when they puke in their beds: They wake up scared and in the dark and covered in their own sick. It is also hard to describe the sinking feeling you get as a parent when your kids wake up sick. Let's just say that when I heard Todd utter "crap" upon checking on Tiller, I knew what had happened. She woke up puking again at 11. Luckily, she slept through the rest of the night uneventfully, because we only had one clean sheet left for her crib. Rollie crawled into bed with us at 6:30 a.m. All in all, a fairly decent night's sleep.

This morning? Both kids have had breakfast and still no puke or cha-chas. (My sister and I call diarrhea "cha-chas". We got it from Beavis and Butthead - they ridiculed their friend Daria by singing "Diarrhea Cha Cha Cha," and it stuck with us. It makes something terrible sound so much cuter, no?)

Anyway, wish us luck. Todd is still healthy. I think i am feeling better. Tiller is asleep on my lap, as I type this w1H.

But I still want my Mommy.