Apocalypse Last Weekend.

Sometimes it is tiring, being me, the way I manage to make even the simplest everyday occurrence into an ordeal. Like on Friday: We have cleaning people, a fact I have yet to stop feeling guilty about. They are from a reputable service (That uses green materials! They sweep with hay and scrub with fish scales!), and we pay them well. Simone’s respiratory issues demand that we maintain a level of cleanliness that is simply not realistic for us without help from trained professionals. I’m not proud of that, but there it is. Cleaning people: we have them.
The two-person team that comes to our apartment every other Friday is made up of two sweet, older Mexican women, and just to twist the guilt knife further, one of them has a grandson who was a preemie, and I have deduced from our linguistically garbled conversations that he had NEC and lives with an ostomy. They are perfectly delightful, and I have no reason to believe they wish me ill, but I cannot STAND to be in the house while they work, because of the guilt, and because I inevitably convince myself that they are mocking me in their native tongue. As well they should, because our house is filthy, even with the pre-cleaning-people cleaning I do before they arrive.

But this last Friday, they showed up early—at nine a.m. There had been no pre-cleaning-people cleaning. And so I shoved a befuddled Simone into her snowsuit and said loudly “I’M TAKING BABY TO THE DOCTOR NOW!” while rocking a faux baby and putting my hand on my forehead as if to feel for fever. The cleaning people smiled and nodded and I bolted out the door wondering where in the HELL I was going to go. Simone, you will recall, cannot go inside stores, restaurants, or, well, anywhere because of RSV season.
There is a drive-through coffee shop near my doctor’s office, across the river in West St. Paul, and we drove there, slowly. Simone started to cry, and I gave her an old crumpled receipt to play with (she loves paper, that baby). At the drive-through, I was so busy trying to decide where to go next that I forgot to order at the little speaker and instead sat dumbly in the line of cars until I pulled up to the window where you are supposed to receive your drink, only then blithely requesting a latte. The man was very nice about the whole thing, helpfully pointing out that my baby seemed to have gotten ahold of a piece of paper and was licking it, which news I pretended to be surprised by.

We crept home. It had been 38 minutes. Even I knew that 38 minutes wasn’t enough time to maintain my sad little “doctor’s appointment” charade, so I parked a few blocks away and sat, drinking my latte. Simone tired of her receipt and began to howl. I drove down the block and back. Wow, I really had to pee. I could see four or five establishments with bathrooms from where I was parked, but could go into none of them, because of the baby. I called Scott, who was at work—back across the river and 20 minutes away. When he finished sighing at my obvious insanity, he agreed that if I drove to his office, he would come downstairs to say hello. Though another idea, he pointed out, would be for me to go home and face the two harmless 60-year-old Mexican women like a man.

I think you know which option I chose.

So that was Friday. In the early hours of Saturday, I awoke with what was either food poisoning or some sort of flu. Scott seemed to have a much milder version, though whether his sickness was caused by an actual organism or by my using the phrase “throw up” instead of his preferred, less nauseating code word (“SAY ‘LAMBADA!’ SAY ‘LAMBADA!’” he cried all day) is unclear. At any rate, by Sunday morning, when I fainted dead away on Simone’s play mat, we were in pitiful shape. My temperature, which normally runs at a chilly 97.2, was 101, and I dropped my only child onto her head because my grasp was too weak to hold her writhing body.

I have felt poorly a few times since we’ve had Simone: sniffles, stomach aches, a migraine or two. But this was the first time that I was the kind of sick where the bathroom floor seems luxurious, where even standing upright requires an effort you cannot muster. I broke into my pregnancy stash of Zofran, I had panic attacks, and just to ensure that no organ was left unmolested, I got my period. I ate nothing but saltines until Saturday evening after a nap, when I bravely sipped at some chicken soup that turned my stomach so soundly I went straight back to bed. It was bad, is what I am trying to say, and being that sick when you have a child to take care of is an experience that defies characterization. No, I lied, I can characterize it just fine: BLLLAAAAARGHH.

Single parents are obviously robots. Even with Scott semi-well for most of Saturday, we just managed to cobble together some shoddy, Elizabethan orphanage level of care.

But we are fine now, having recuperated by watching lots of television and balancing things on the baby:





And how was your weekend?