My oldest daughter, 17, was violently sick the other day, starting at 7 am. By 4:15 she was vomiting up Gatorade. She’s a bright kid and took the initiative to phone her pediatrician, who said, “Get to an ER so they can put in an IV and hydrate you.”
So she called me. I was picking up the little one from her nursery school but quickly rearranged my day to take her to the ER. It’s the kind of juggling act moms do all the time: recalibrating plans, finding a sitter on short notice, arriving to handle a difficult situation within fifteen minutes of hearing about it. I’ve become a woman who is no longer convinced that women’s liberation was a victory. The burden of child-rearing, physical and mental and logistical, still falls primarily on women, from what I can see. But now we’re expected to be brain surgeons or trial attorneys while we nurture and raise healthy children who have high self-esteem and good values. From my perspective, what women’s lib succeeded in was 1, making sure that women never sleep; 2, making sure women always feel guilty–because we feel guilty when we’re at work that we’re not with our babies, and we feel guilty when we’re mothering our children that we’re not at our jobs earning lots of money; and 3, adding the extra pressure of achieving in the world outside the home while the demands of home and child-rearing are as intense as they always have been.
And I do know that men take on this role sometimes. My little one has a friend whose dad is the mom, and I applaud him for it. Perhaps it should always have been about choice, not about making more burdens. There’s a reason for a division of labor within a family.
Back to the germ theory of children. The staff at the hospital took one look at my daughter’s drawn face and they got her into a room with an IV in her arm. The fear was appendicitis. But the pain she felt never localized into one place, that lower right quadrant of the abdomen. After five hours, three bags of saline solution and two different anti-nausea meds, the first of which made her flip out, requiring benedryl to counteract, she was discharged. “Probably a virus,” they said, “drink liquids.”
And a virus it must have been, because twelve hours later I was ill. And it wasn’t the first time. I was a little surprised fifteen years ago, when my oldest daughter first went to nursery school, that suddenly I was struggling with a cold every few weeks. By sixth grade, when my daughter had strep throat twice month and gave it to me every time, I was just thrilled when the doctor yanked her tonsils. Children are Typhoid Mary’s, every one of them. And now I just automatically include immune system boosting supplements into my diet. And whether or not the FDA sued airborne: that stuff works good! Figures the FDA would want to harass the maker. The FDA just wants us to buy medicines that only work for 60% of the people and have dreadful side-effects, so we have to buy more medicines. After all, the FDA protects big pharma, NOT the American people.
Speaking of Americans, why is so much of our television so bad? I’ve become a BBCA addict. MI5 is back, and better than ever! I am just in awe of the understated writing that is still suspenseful. Moments where what is left unsaid brims with excitement….