The days are long (and so is this cold)

Original thoughts about a totally unique and original experience! (not really - but that's the point)

A parent of a toddler in daycare talking about being sick? How innovative, I know. To be honest, I hesitated writing this one for that very reason.

But as I worked on other essay ideas that I have for the month of March, I kept coming back to this, finding myself self-editing and having no inspiration for the topics I was trying to focus on. Essays about the start of spring, living in the Bay Area, and my digital detox all found their way back to me talking about being sick.

All of that was pretty telling: this parent of a toddler in daycare, despite her best efforts, wants to talk about being sick. Don’t we all? To my credit, I’ve gotten sick twice in a two-week period. If I may whine for a moment, that feels particularly unfair!

Before I had kids, getting sick meant locking the door to life and responsibilities for a few days, curling up on the couch while marathoning TV in between naps. Those were the days.

If you’re sick of hearing about parents of kids complaining about sickness (both parents and non-parents alike, I don’t blame you), here’s a quick TL;DR for you: being sick while parenting sucks, it’s hard, and I often wonder how I’m going to get through the next ~decade of this.

I mean, I know it gets better (right???). Kids get older, they get better at self-entertaining (I know my millennials have memories of watching Jerry Springer, Maury, and Ricki Lake while home sick), and immune systems strengthen. But right now, as I’m hacking away and coughing up phlegm after losing a weekend to “just” a cold, the end does not feel like it’s in sight.

Last year, when our son first started daycare, we were home with a new illness every two to three weeks. I remember talking to a co-worker with older kids, and he said to me “it feels constant, but one day you wake up and realize it’s been a while since they’ve been sick”.

“That’s reassuring,” I replied. “When does that happen?” I asked, expecting the answer to be just wait for spring.

“When they’re about six or seven years old,” he replied, not missing a beat and not intending to tell a joke. But to me, that was a punch line if I’d ever heard one.

This conversation reminded me of another moment I had somewhere between three and seven weeks postpartum¹. I was talking to two of my mom friends, my closest mom friends (at that point, my only mom friends), who both live about ~seven hours away (one by plane, in the Bay Area, and one by car, in Rochester). I’d had a particularly difficult night or moment or whatever, and proclaimed in the group chat, “this is really hard”.

“I know,” my friend in the Bay Area said. “It’ll get better by the twelve-week mark”.

At whatever week-marker that was, twelve weeks felt like a lifetime away. Twelve?! I either said or thought. It’s like this for five to nine more weeks?!? I thought I couldn’t survive that. Of course, I could and I did, and that period of time is a blip on the radar (so much of a blip, I can barely remember exactly when it happened).

Having been through that, this comment from my coworker was an easier pill to swallow. Six to seven years feel long, but I guess it’ll fly by. It very much reminded me of a phrase another coworker said to me before I gave birth, and since then I’ve heard dozens of times: the days are long, but the years are short. When you’re in the thick of it, the days feel like they’re never-ending, the issue and struggles of the moment feel all-encompassing. But when we take a step back, time is actually passing by rapidly, and in a (perhaps twisted) way, we may look back on those tough times—dare I say—fondly.

I hold on to this idea a lot whenever I go through something tough in parenting. I try to remember other times that felt never-ending, all-encompassing, and then think about how long ago that now seems. A twinge of nostalgia creeps up, which feels oddly comforting.

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The first illness was of the fever-and-gastro variety (I spent two days in bed with a fever and one day in the bathroom). Luckily, I was the only one in the household that got sick and I wouldn’t have wished this one on anyone. As I was recovering, I kept thinking “at least I’m the only one sick”. My husband did all of the daycare drop offs/pickups for days, and while I was present, he took a huge chunk of the responsibility. This experience spoiled me, and I wasn’t prepared to get sick again so quickly—nor was I ready to have us all go through it together a second time around.

The second was one of the worst head colds (which turned into a chest cold for me) that I remember having in recent history. Our kid came down with it first—we kept him home from day care on Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, the game was mostly ensuring we were doing our delicate song-and-dance of covering each other so we could get enough work done but also do our fair share of the parenting.

By Friday morning, my husband and I were swapping tales of the ‘tickles’ in our throats. By evening, we decided to order ramen because we thought we might be fighting something. A few hours later, we accepted our fate—we were sick, and our symptoms were progressing at the exact same rate.

Great, I thought. The lack of separation between our symptoms was really, for me, the icing on the cake. Being sick is par for the course as a parent, I know this, but do we have to be the same exact level of sick at the same exact time? Can’t one of us get it a day earlier, so we can share the parenting responsibilities a bit more? Not this time, as it turns out.

We woke up Saturday both feeling particularly awful and parenting through it together. We gave our kid breakfast and laid on the couch while our kid watched Bluey. We took turns taking care of our own runny noses while wiping away our kid’s. We made it to nap time, and then each attempted our own naps (in a big turn-of-the-tables, me, the nap queen, couldn’t nap. My husband, Mr. No Nap, took a two-hour nap). We brought our kid back into bed with books and snacks, while we kept resting. Imperfect, but got us through.

At one point, our kid asked for ‘outside’, which broke my heart a bit, poor kid. I thought about it for a second — could we muster all of our energy and walk the two blocks to our local park? Maybe. But it wasn’t going to happen. The weekend went on and we all got better and healthier, slowly but surely.

While writing this post, I put out a CTA via Substack Notes² for parents to share anything regarding parenting while sick, or parenting sick kids (or both).

Break Free From the Internet gave some good advice based on their experiences parenting sick kids:

Particularly, this nugget stuck out to me:

I know a lot of parents will say “just let go of rules, let them watch all the shows,” but here’s what I’ve learned by doing this (at least with my kids) — you’ll always pay for that decision on the other end.

I definitely felt that. My kid is much younger than theirs, and we’re just breaking into TV-land, but on Sunday night, after avoiding Bluey all day, my kid asked to watch TV³, unprompted. This moment had me reflect on how we can not only better balance screen time when he’s not sick but also limit it when he—or we—are sick.

“Not tonight,” I said, “we’re done watching TV this weekend”. The tears (his, not mine) started immediately, and as a compromise I played the Bluey theme song⁴ fifteen times on repeat, while he played his bongos. That seemed to scratch his itch, but I’m not sure how long I’ll get away with that one.

Screen time was particularly fresh on my mind—I was just days away from finishing Break Free From the Internet’s digital detox as we managed this sickness. When I’m sick, all I want to do is lie in bed and watch my shows. I didn’t get to do that for either sickness due to the detox, which felt particularly cruel.

I’ve thought (and written) about my own relationship with screen time, and while I have very few answers right now, one thing I know for certain is that neither strict rules nor an open season when it comes to screens serves anyone in the long run. The name of the game for this bout of sickness was survival, and survive we did. We’ll figure this balance out as time goes on, and we’ll probably fumble a lot along the way.

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Our collective lack of energy already had us doing far more than we typically would want to do while sick—we barely felt capable of taking care of ourselves, but we’re parents with responsibilities after all. We ordered supplies and groceries and soups to get us through the weekend, the dishes piled up high, the laundry went undone.

The havoc that a family cold wreaks on our bodies and immune systems is one thing, but the effect that a cold has on our routines, to me, is sometimes what takes the longest to recover from.

I was feeling particularly good about certain routines I’d built and maintained recently, specifically when it came to keeping the house decently tidy. Things weren’t perfect (they never are), but there was a rhythm and rhyme at play.

This last weekend completely threw us, and I said to my husband on Tuesday that while I think I’ll physically recover soon, I think it’ll take our household through the weekend to get back to ‘normal’.

“Oh, at least,” he said with a knowing sigh. We commiserated about how we both tried to empty the same dishwasher at different times over the course of the weekend and neither of us could get to it. We both had thoughts of taking out the recycling and getting a load of laundry in but were very much on the same page about how not necessary for survival those tasks were. And again, we were in a bit of a survival mode.

I take being sick really personally, even though I know it’s just life. It’s a personal attack on my life, on my routines, on my day-to-day. Part of this is because of my ADHD—routines are hard for me to build, hard for me to maintain, and really easy for me to fall off of. They’re also really hard for me to ‘bounce back’ from.

So when I’m sick (or I get injured, or I travel, or I have a weekend where I’m mostly out of the home), coming back to the routine I so carefully crafted can take a long time. When I have to break a routine because of something not in my control, it honestly makes me mad.

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This is just another layer as to why some of this feels so difficult, and I’m realizing it’s not just about the physical manifestation of the illness but the aftermath. As we all start feeling better, we’ll slowly find our way back—a load of laundry after work, getting the dishes taken care of, making sure we don’t miss trash night again. The toys in the living room might take a bit longer to clear, but we’ll get there.

The state of the living room for the past five days.

I guess I should mention that I don’t really have a ‘point’ or a ‘thesis’ beyond the fact that this is hard (and probably should’ve mentioned that earlier, sorry if you’ve stuck around this long waiting for me to make some grand point). Parenting sick, parenting sick kids, having everyone sick, etc: none of it is novel or unique and I’m far from the first person to come up with these thoughts and feelings.

The fact that these experiences are so universal makes me both want to keep sharing them, so we can realize just how universal they are, but also makes me feel like a big stupid baby for complaining (and for doing so for almost 3,000 words, at that).

As parents, we just deal with this. We know it’s the worst, and we just deal with it anyway. We have our systems and tools and ways of coping, and we just deal. We commiserate with each other but we also just accept it as fact.

There’s something comforting there, but also the fact that I feel like I need to preface my feelings and apologize for complaining is a bit sad. Just because this has become an accepted fact of life, does that make it less hard?

I can’t guarantee much, but I do know that I’ll get sick again, and will absolutely have to parent while sick again. I’ll have to parent a sick kid, and we’ll go through this cycle all over again. It might not get easier, but what can we do?

All I can hope for is that next time, I’ll get to be the only sick one in the house. A girl can dream.

1. The fact that this period of time is such a blur is really an evolutionary phenomenon. At that point, three and seven weeks postpartum could not have felt like more different eras in my life, but now I can barely tell them apart.

2. I know I didn’t keep this note up long enough to marinate, so if you have advice please still throw it in :).

3. He actually asked to “wash your tv”. He doesn’t quite know the difference between wash and watch yet, so his new thing, that started over this sick weekend, is he rubs his hands together, like he does when he is talking about washing his hands, and walks towards the living room when he wants to watch TV, which is both adorable and terrifying.

4. This version is an absolute banger. We love yelling GUITAARRRRR.