Parenting is an extreme sport, and the only parents who do not know this are a) blessed with perfect health and/or b) blessed with perfect marriages, and if there is anybody out there who meets this description, please contact me. Certainly single parents know this. Married parents know it when one of them gets sick, which is what happened to us this weekend.
The sick one is me, and the symptoms arrived right on cue on Saturday morning: headache, incredibly sore throat, cough, stuffy nose, watery eyes, pain in joints that made me feel like the garbage truck had run over me, backed up, and run over me again. Heroically, I took Suzanne to a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese.
Here, I shall digress: I have been in a psych ward, and I have been to Chuck E Cheese, and I can tell you now that the only differences between the two is that at Chuck E Cheese they do not participate with Blue Cross and, due to fire regulations, they do not lock the doors. Otherwise, the exact same barely controlled bedlam: persons running around screaming, foul food, indifferent caregivers/waitpersons, six-foot-tall rodents.... Actually, Chuck E Cheese could improve on its business model by just hiring people who would point a gun at your kneecaps and say, "Fork it over," because this buying tokens to play games to earn tickets to "buy" prizes makes a Mafia loanshark look like your kindly old Aunt Eda. While Suzanne was scarfing down her pizza and cake and communing with the Giant Rodent, I bought $5 worth of tokens and attempted to distract myself from the ballpeen hammer whanging against my head by playing some skeeball. I am pretty good at skeeball and I won over 100 tickets. This, it turns out, was enough to knock all of 80 cents off the price of the Barbie make-up kit which Suzanne demanded before we left. Let's see: I pay them $5, they give me 80 cents....that's a return on investment of 84 percent. Come to think of it, their business model works fine. Why waste money on guns?
But anyway, so I was sick, and when Suzanne and I got back home I went straight to bed. Woke up at 7 feeling worse. Called the local doc-in-a-box and, in a perverse version of Famiy Night Out, we all loaded up in the minivan so David could take the kids to the mall across the street while mom was left at the doc-in-a-box to find out which germ would be memorialized on her tombstone. Diagnosis: viral upper respiratory infection of nameless origin. "You'll probably feel bad for about a week," says the doctor cheerfully, who then added the obligatory "We've been seeing a lot of this." I relay this news to David, who (I can tell) is royally pissed at me for getting sick on a weekend. This sounds churlish, but if the shoe were on the other foot, I'd be unhappy too. Two kids plus one rainy weekend plus one sick parent=insanity, with household squalor thrown in as a bonus. This is where the extreme sport metaphor comes in, because if you were part of a team climbing Mount Everest with two kids in tow, and one of you broke his/her leg, you wouldn't be solicitous and caring. You'd be, "I don't CARE if your leg bends in four places now, let's get going or we will DIE."
It is now Sunday night and the only way we have made it through the weekend without homicide or divorce is that I finally dragged my butt out of bed and called up my friend Ann and begged her to take Suzanne off our hands. A nine-year-old can amuse herself, but a five-year-old...well, let's just say Suzanne has an Inquiring Mind and she Wants to Know. Everything. Right Now. And she asks questions that are not only unanswerable but inscrutable, such as "Mommy, what happens in the spring?" Once I kept count in the car: in ten minutes, she asked me 20 questions. It's enough to drive a healthy person off a cliff, and I am not well. Which is where I started this, so I will quit now. And so to bed.