When the children are sick, I do my personal best to nurse them back to health. I cancel appointments, rearrange my schedule, and stand guard as I wait at their beck and call.
“Get some rest,” I’ll tell them as I kiss their brow, “and remember, Mommy loves!”
But things were different when the flu bug invaded my body recently. With my throat swollen shut and my eyes feeling like sandpaper, I surrendered my duties and headed to the couch.
I swallowed a capful of nighttime cold medicine, piled the blankets up to my chin, and then properly smeared an abundance of Metholatum on my nose. I’m quite certain that I was a vision of loveliness.
As the children filed in the front door from their various events, they stopped to gaze upon me. I lay there wishing that instead of staring, one of them would bring me a glass of water.
“What is that?” I heard my eldest son inquire as he pointed in my direction.
“I think it’s Mom,” said my second in line.
“What? Is she like sick or something?”
“I’ll bet she’s faking.”
“Why would she fake? It’s not like she has to go to school or anything.”
The second in line placed a hand on my forehead, turned it over for confirmation and said, “Well, she doesn’t have a fever, so I’ll bet she’s faking.”
Like he could determine whether or not I had a fever.
Up until that moment, his medical knowledge had been limited to scab picking and bandage placement.
Just then my youngest child appeared at my side with a look of sympathy in his eyes.
“Are you sick, Mom?” he asked with love. He patted my arm, pulled my blankets up tight and, looking like the little angel that he is, he placed his little hand on my face. “Oh, you’re hot,” he said as he shook his head with sympathy.
“Just wait right here and I’ll go and get some stuff to fix you.”
“Mom,” said Lawrence, my darling number three son, “you promised we could finish up my Invent America project tonight. I’ve laid out all of the supplies, mapped out the details, now I just need you to come and do the cutting. Oh! And you might have to glue some stuff.”
“Grandma is on the phone,” said a voice in the distance, “I told her you were sick or something. She said she’d come and help you except that she doesn’t want to catch anything. She says she’s too busy to be sick.”
“C’mon Mom,” a voice exclaimed somewhere near, “you said you’d take me to practice. I need to get there early so I can practice on my hoops.”
“Here,” said child number two as he dropped a can of soup in my lap, “Grandma said that you should heat this up and eat it to get your strength back.”
“Mom,” my eldest son said as he leaned over me, “Huey needs to get to basketball practice and since you’re sick, I’ll take him for you. Don’t you suppose that an effort like that is worth at least $20?”
“I have a whole bunch of stuff here that will make you feel better,” said the youngest as pushed his way through the crowd to get close to me. “Here, now open your eyes so I can look into your eyeballs. Um, hmm, um, hmmm, uh hmm. Just as I suspected. OK, now stick out your tongue, Oh! OK, put that away. Let’s listen to your heart.”
“Charlie, that ain’t her heart.”
“Yes it is, you idiot!”
“Well if her heart is in her stomach then she’s sicker than we thought.”
“If Mom has the flu then I’m going to make her feel better.”
“Well, I don’t think that sticking the dog’s chewy-bone in her mouth is going to fix her.”
“Be quiet!”
“No, you be quiet!”
“No, you be quiet!”
“Mom, Mrs. Trinket just called to remind you that it’s your turn to carpool the kids to practice tonight. For a mere $25, I can make this all go away. I’ll even take young Marcus Welby M.D. with me.”
He must have taken my lack of an answer as a yes because the next thing I knew, he was pulling money from my purse and rounding up the troops. “All right, men!” I heard him exclaim as his brothers fell into line. “Let’s get out of the house and allow Typhoid Mary to get some rest.”
And to think I would have settled for a glass of water.
Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons and the author of the book “Are We There Yet?” You can reach her at www.loriclinch.com.