Motherhood with the Flu; It Doesn’t Get Much Lower Than This

Sometimes blog posts are hard to write. The truth is I’ve just been exhausted.

I got the flu. Not a cold—I’ve been dealt a lot of those lately. But the kind of sick I haven’t had in years, where you can’t get out of bed. I threw up everything I ate, and I couldn’t even keep water down. The pain in my stomach was so jarring that I was constantly having flashbacks to an episode of The X-Files, paranoid that some creature/bug/alien would emerge from my belly.

Being sick when you’re a parent puts a whole different spin on it; you can’t just relax and recover. There are little people who depend on you for food and water, for hugs and for songs. They don’t take no for an answer. And even when my three-year-old tucked me into her bed, pulled the sheet up over my head and called me “Sweetie”, it could not ease the nausea.

My life-saver of a husband took a day off of work (on the worst day of my flu) and took total control. He tamed the masses and brought me curly fries and Pedialite. But his job, like of us out there, doesn’t allow him a lot of flexibility. There are so such things as “paid days off” in our household.  So the next day, back to work he went.

I threw up while making the kids’ oatmeal  (never did I realize that the smell of maple and brown sugar is so sickly sweet), and I’m pretty sure that they ate more food than normal off of the floor.

Needless to say, it was a turbulent week.

As past posts have shown, parenting shines a whole new light on things you may have once been humiliated about. Being a mother has conditioned me to be less embarrassed about natural bodily occurrences, which is why I am not ashamed to share this tidbit with you:

On day four of this wonderful adventure, I thought there was nothing left in me to cause an issue—all I had tolerated was some juice, water, and two fries. Lying in bed, I shifted to release what I thought was some air and sharted.

You know you have had a rough couple of days when you shit your pants and think, “This really isn’t the worst thing I have experienced lately.”

I wasn’t planning on telling my husband. I thought maybe I could retain what little dignity I had left. But when he found me in the shower, viciously rubbing the shame and shit off my body, it did not take him very long to figure out what had happened.

He stood in the doorway and did the math. I could almost hear his thoughts: You are taking a shower. But it’s 7 pm and you hate night showers. And you’re sick. And lathered in soap. And there’s a terrible smell coming from…LIGHT BULB.

“You pooped your pants, didn’t you?”

“Sure did,” I muttered.

Welcome to married life with influenza and young children; where all self-respect and majesty have gone to die. And yet, oddly, the transparency leaves you feeling comforted. Because truth be told, you know there ain’t much lower that you can get.