Oh, the sudden onset stomach bug. That was my later portion of Thursday evening. With that litany of words recalled when Saskia had her bout of vomiting on Monday, I thought I’d conjured all of ‘em. I neglected retch. Bingo.
To make the yucky part brief the retching episode was followed by stomach pains, the kind that wake you up just to moan for a little while and eventually pass out again. Fortunately, those were gone by midday Friday. I was left with a headache (Tylenol lifted that mid-afternoon) and total exhaustion. So, amazingly, I just stayed in bed and dozed and slept and dozed and slept. The sleep was punctuated by a few minutes awake here and there, just one tantrum (he shall remain nameless) and a post to the blog that was already written, a few crackers, some ginger ale.
I had one window shade open just a bit, enough to see the cloudiness beyond my bedroom. The day went by like a time lapsed film of the sky, you know, when the clouds move faster because they’ve been sped up and because it’s all you’re looking at. Each time I looked at the clock after I’d slept—twenty minutes or two hours—that sensation of time just passing by me was so palpable and amazing. This day, I thought, it’s melting. It’s like water through my hands. Would it snow? The sky seemed white-gray and broody. Eventually, snow fell. There wasn’t so much of it, but everything’s white.
**
The part that was hardest was this: realizing—as the act of vomiting brings me back to some miserable morning—make that all day and night—sickness (three pregnancies’ worth)—how vulnerable feeling ill renders a person. It’s so all consuming. It’s so out of our control. It’s so much stronger than our wills.
There’s a silver lining to that vulnerability, when forced to give in to it: I stayed in bed all day long and felt cared for (mostly, that meant I was left alone, sometimes the most caring gesture possible). Sure, I couldn’t get out of bed if I tried, but how wonderful that I didn’t have to. I got how big a gift that was. With luck, I rested in an espresso strength manner, out of sheer gratitude.
Mending is a tender kind of relief.
It’s not like the next day I was up and running. I was up a little bit and not doing much. But I was up a little bit. And I was garnering strength again.
**
In terms of my take 2011 by the horns with both hands, this little eddy of illness was a reminder that life is no race—or if it is, the tortoise and the hare provide a wise parable. You get there, wherever there is, as you do, at your own pace. You can’t sprint through life. Even if you could, you’d miss seeing the clouds fill in wait of snow. And that was such a pretty sight.
