The Privilege of Sick Days

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

My body does this really fun thing where it powers through stressful situations and then crashes immediately afterwards. The first time I remember this happening was after I got married, returned from my honeymoon, and my new husband went back to work. Despite relaxing on the beach for several days and having a couple more to acclimate to married life, it was as if my body was running on adrenaline until the moment his truck pulled out of the driveway and the second I was alone, all the stress of wedding planning and moving left my body, making room for the sickness to swoop in.

Never before having experienced this, I was alarmed, but thankfully my illness didn’t last long. The pattern, however, remained. Or maybe it had always been present, but I had never noticed until the day I was truly alone and still with nothing besides obviously stressful events to which I could trace my symptoms back.

So it came as no surprise when I marathon napped the day after my sister’s wedding last week. Or when my throat began to tickle. Or the sneezes escaped my mouth one after the other. Or when Saturday’s marathon nap extended to Monday, Tuesday, and beyond. By now I was more than familiar with the pattern of burn out.

//

I’m curled up in the fetal position on my bed, willing the pounding in the back of my head to stop and reasoning with my stomach to hold onto what little contents are left inside. Outside the door, Luke takes work calls from his home office while my mother-in-law paces around the living room with my screaming infant, Lullaby Renditions of Drake mixing with her cries in an attempt to pacify her spirit, but to no avail. Maybe if I stay very still, I think, they’ll forget I’m in here. But a minute passes, maybe two, and the door cracks open. My husband wears an apologetic look on his face as he hands me the baby and mouths “she must be hungry”¹ while his phone is perched between his ear and his shoulder. He lays her across my chest and as she nurses, her cries finally stop, and mine start to flow. Will I ever be able to have a sick day again?

As soon as she is done eating I call Luke back into our room to take her and attempt another nap before she wants to nurse or I need to throw up again, whichever comes first. I lay there and think back to a few weeks earlier when he and the rest of his family caught Covid over Christmas while my daughter and I remained well. He went to his parent’s house to quarantine so we wouldn’t get sick and the rage I felt when we would FaceTime and check in was unmatched. He laid curled up on his parent’s couch, watching Netflix, napping at his leisure, while I was stuck responding to our four month old’s every beck and call. I knew it was unreasonable to be jealous of someone getting Covid, I knew he was still working and wasn’t actually napping all the time, but in my sleep deprived postpartum state, all I wanted was to rest whenever I wanted and now here I was, finally sick, and I couldn’t even have that. Not because I didn’t have help, but because my baby didn’t want anyone other than me. Would I ever be able to have a sick day again?

//

While my daughter is the spitting image of me in the looks department, she also clearly has my sleeping genes because on Tuesday morning, we both sleep in past 9:30 and spend the majority of the day on the couch. We anticipated my in laws would take her from the wedding around 8:30 or 9:00, but the flower girl turned into a party animal and stayed until nearly 10:30 tearing up the dance floor. She apparently worked up an appetite and required a snack after returning to the AirBnB, then laid in bed jabbering until 1:00 am. So I suppose it’s no surprise she, too, is in recovery mode.

We take turns blowing our noses as we snuggle up together, alternating watching The Little Mermaid and reading Today I Feel Silly. Nap time rolls around and she sleeps for three glorious hours while I half nap, half start season three of Bridgerton.

The next morning, she wakes up feeling completely better while I somehow feel worse. All the congestion has now gone to my head and even after sleeping for 9+ hours, every movement feels like I’m dragging my limbs through molasses. “God healed us!”. my two year old exclaims. “He’s working on it”, I chuckle as I press play on Cars and proceed to drift in and out of sleep while she watches, enraptured for awhile, and then flitters off to her playroom to whip up some imaginary concoction in her kitchen.

Nap time again rolls around and I ask Luke if there is anyway he can leave early and work from home the rest of the day, as the simple act of picking up a sandwich for lunch has worn me out. He agrees.

Only an hour into her nap, over the monitor “moooommmm” cuts through the fog of my sleep. I stumble into my daughter’s room where she announces she is not tired. “That’s fine”, I reply, “but you have to stay in your bed². Play with your animals or read some books.” And then I stumble right back to bed where I remain until the evening when Luke leaves for Bible study.

I manage to reheat whatever leftovers I find in the fridge the toddler declares her hunger and when she asks me to drag her Nugget couch into the living room to use as a stage, I don’t put up a fight. I lay on the couch as she performs interpretive dances to A Sky Full of Stars by Coldplay³ and instructs me on when to clap.

My husband returns home with chicken noodle soup and a peach milkshake and I tell my daughter I’m returning to bed and Daddy is putting her to bed.

“But why?”

“Because I’m sick.”

“But I want you to put me to sleep.”

“Remember how we both didn’t feel good yesterday? Mommy still doesn’t feel good today and I still need to keep resting so I can feel better.”

She lets out a few disgruntled sighs, but relents. Bedtime duties are performed with no tears.

The next morning I hear her little voice through the monitor, but as soon as I hear the deep voice of her dad join with her, I fall back asleep. When I finally awake, she is eating her peanut butter and jelly, cut into a star and little Micky Mouses, just how she likes it, watching Daniel Tiger. “Mama!”, she exclaims as she sees me emerge from my room, “are you better?”

“I’m getting there”, I smile.”

//

As a new mom, I never thought this day would come, the day (or in this case, days), where I could be sick in peace, yet here we are. Have I loved the amount of tv my toddler has been watching? No. But have I loved the extra snuggles, the slow pace of our days with nowhere to be, and her burgeoning understanding of what it means to be sick and need rest? Absolutely. Hearing a two-year-old proclaim that “God will heal us” and constantly ask, “are you better, mom?” is a balm to my soul. And being allowed long stretches of uninterrupted sleep? The best medicine.

In those early months, I truly believed my days of rest were over. Even in the “taby⁴” period where nothing held her attention, I wondered if I was destined to never relax again. But now here we are, at nearly three years old, and she has the attention span to watch (some of) a movie and the capacity to (somewhat) understand what it means for me to need rest. She is learning that Mommy can’t do everything, and Daddy can do bedtime and make her sandwiches just as well as I can.

//

We’re in the car to together, when completely unprompted from the backseat I hear, “when I’m a grown up, I will like sushi. And I will drive a black Jeep like you to go pick it up.”

This makes my heart swell and break at the same time, because while there are days when I miss the infant nursing sessions and the feeling of a baby curled up on my chest, I don’t miss said nursing sessions and said baby on my chest whilst battling a stomach bug. I love the independence my daughter is cultivating, little by little, and though the thought of her driving to pick up sushi one day actually terrifies me, it also thrills me. If she can grow up from the colicky newborn to the bright and sweet and funny two year old she is now, on the hard days of tantrums and defiance, I can cling to the dream that one day she will be a grown up who picks up sushi in her black Jeep and brings it over for sushi nights with her parents. And we will continue to get lots of sleep.

---

In Case You Missed It…

Last week, I had an article published on Verily about our annual Easter crawfish boil. Give it a read for a behind the scenes look at how we prepared to host nearly 100 at our home that is definitely not large enough to fit 100 people. Being a good hostess is more about your attitude than your home.

Dinner

A new Braum’s opened up down the street from us this week and we could not be more delighted!

If you don’t live in a state with a Braum’s 1) I’m sorry 2) it’s a fast food restaurant famous for its burgers and ice cream. They also have a market inside where they sell the best French onion dip.

We all three feasted on cheeseburgers, Luke got my signature half cookies ‘n cream half mint chocolate chip shake, I got a kid’s scoop of cappuccino chocolate crunch, and our daughter went with an old fashioned chocolate cone. She raved about the ice cream with every lick, exclaiming, “Mom! Ice cream is good!” She is not wrong.

---

Rave

As I mentioned, there has been a lot of screen time in our household this week. I am unashamed because there is a season for everything and this week was the season for television.

Part one of season 3 of Bridgerton came out in May, but I’m so glad I decided to wait until all the episodes were out so I could binge all at once this week.

Season 3 tells Penelope and Colin’s story and of course, there is more from Lady Whistledown. This show is completely frothy but was the perfect sick week binge. Highly recommend if you find yourself bedridden.

1. Having a colicky newborn born with lip/tongue/buccal ties along with acid reflux combined with a breast feeding mom who is a “just enougher” makes for dark days when you have people willing but unable to help when that mom is sick.

2. And this is why she will be in a crib for as long as possible.

3. A song from our wedding video she has recently become obsessed with. It has gone from “play your song” to “play my song.”

4. Similar to Britney Spears’ Not A Girl, Not Yet a Women, a taby is not a baby, not yet a toddler.