Going Viral (Not the Good Kind)

I like the idea and the reality of a family. You have company without having to get out of pyjamas. You get to be around somebody who has seen you at your absolute worst and still thinks you’re pretty awesome. You have in-jokes and non-secret codes. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet deal.

That is, until somebody gets sick. This week that person was me. I was the evil carrier monkey that brought this flu into our home. And then spread it to all and sundry. But even before I’d started to spread the misery, certain things break down. Like the pile of dishes that doesn’t have the decency to do itself when I’m not feeling well, or the piles of clothes in the bathroom, or the unmade dinner or all manner of other things that I would normally do during the day.

There’s a big problem with getting sick and looking after a toddler. For starters, unlimited energy goes a long way. And I’m running on negative energy. Somehow the ‘let’s fall asleep together on the couch’ game isn’t as exciting to the toddler as it is to me. The other problem is that they are entirely intuitive creatures, so if you’re not feeling well, they’re likely to pick up on it and be miserable themselves. So instead of being sick and having a jolly toddler. You are sick and have an irate, grumpy, demanding, sensitive toddler.

Then of course, the husband gets home after a hard day at work and a long commute and is faced with a tantruming toddler a bleary eyed wife who only vaguely resembles the woman he married thanks to the snotty, coughing, exhausted mess she’s been replaced with, and a pile of dishes that looks about double what it was when he left in the morning. It disrupts the balance. The delicate, delicate, domesticity balance. Because I might be sick, or I might just be a relatively ugly lazy person who refuses to get out of her pyjamas.

And then of course, the nail in the coffin happens when EVERYONE gets sick. I get more sick and start to feel like I should be researching head transplant options, the toddler starts to get sick, and the husband gets very sick (because women can never be as sick as men. It’s like a fact or something). And instead of a well oiled machine, you’re left with a crash site and grumpy people who are unable to get to sleep because someone, somewhere is always sneezing, spluttering or coughing up a lung. And despite the toddler being poorly – it doesn’t stop her from bouncing or running or crash tackling. Because she’s sick, not dead.

The best you can really hope for is that you don’t get better at different times and then re-infect one another. That’s the dream of family life – that we don’t reinfect one another.

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Tagged as: cold, family, flu, illness