We’ve all been sick around here for weeks.
I guess I shouldn’t have made fun of my husband and his Man Flu last week, as the response to my teasing had a lightning bolt attached to it.
For weeks it’s been one person then the next, one sickness melding into another one,
leaving me feeling like I should nail off our door with a sign that says “Undead Inside” on it.
Though she is a terrible patient, staying home for days on end in pajamas very well suits my homebody ten-year-old, Paige, who would just as soon be cattle prodded as she would take a trip to Target, or to the mall to just browse for things.
Our couch bears a divot we call her “nest” where she loves to sit and draw for hours, or just play video games.
Once she started to feel better from her own illness this time, and I told her she was well enough to return to school, she tried passing off her theory that, since there had been so much sickness going around, she was sure there wouldn’t be many kids there anyway,
and her teacher would have been exposed, too.
This would mean an increased chance of them bringing in a substitute,
and at this rate, who knows? The substitute may even be compromised!
So, it didn’t really make sense for her to go, really.
The morning after this suggestion, she awoke in Turbo Excuse Mode, and tried her hand at telling me that it was actually ME who had said her teacher would definitely be sick, and that there would be a sub.
Ah. Nothing like gaslighting before coffee!
Nice try, Kid. Get your shoes.
The mornings were tense for several days, with lots of crying, and her pretending not to be awake yet when I got up.
Every day a new malady.
Her stomach ached, and her head hurt. She said she’d “hardly slept,”
and then last Wednesday I found out what the real issue was.
She finally confessed to me she had a presentation of a project that day that she was afraid to do.
Her partner, she described as “flaky,” but no one expects a fifth-grade boy with perpetual bedhead to be the class’ Crown Jewel.
What if she messed it up?
What if she couldn’t find the words?
Before long that morning, she had worked herself up into a full-blown panic attack.
With two minutes to spare until we needed to leave she ran down the hall and locked herself in her room. She called out that she couldn’t go, and how angry she was that she was
“never understood.”
What she didn’t know was that me understanding so well would be the exact thing that prompted me to force her to get in the car,
wishing she wouldn’t feel betrayed by me in that moment,
but knowing that she would.
I had to tell her that it only causes greater harm to avoid what feels uncomfortable.
It just transfers yesterday’s worries to another day; Bigger, and more powerful.
It felt awful pulling into the drop-off circle that morning, watching her climb out of the car with puffy eyes and a look of pain that said she felt like I hadn’t been there for her.
“Just show up. Just be there,” is my motherhood motto.
Some day she’d see past how it felt right then to the way it actually was.
My own stomach was in a knot, too, as I wound back down the road and through the fog towards home.
Had I done just what I wanted, I would have let her stay in her nest;
The physical and the mental one.
Pencil scratches on rough paper, snack wrappers all around, never forced to do a scary thing, doing only what she loves the best, no need to conquer, or move on;
But, because I’ve walked that same road of paralyzing panic and anxiety,
I knew that avoiding the thing that scares you only makes it grow,
Not go away.
I sent her off to school that day to face a world that sometimes scares her with the thought that I’ve been trying to focus on, myself, lately:
Let the day surprise you.
It’s not going to be all bad, all scary, all a confirmation of your dread.
As she closed the door, face still bitter, I told her that I couldn’t wait to hear about some of the good things that happened that day, and how it went better than she had planned.
Sometimes the best twists happen when you least expect them.
Sometimes you’re afraid you’ll mess it all up,
but then you grow instead.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
