PART I
As I sit at my computer the last evening of the holiday
season, I reflect on the highs and lows of the past two weeks. My 3 children
have one extra day before school starts again. Which means, they aren’t as
depressed as I am yet. Tomorrow the sulking will begin for them. And I will be annoyed because I’m
always annoyed with behavior my kids learn from me. (Geesh, I must be terribly
annoying then.) Anyway, tomorrow is coming (along with below freezing
temperatures and commuters who have forgotten the rules of driving in inclement
weather.) I tell myself I will embrace it. I get through the post holiday blues
every single year, right? What could be different about this year? I won’t
answer that or my blog will delve into territory better suited for a
psychiatrist than an innocent reader. Okay – so the future starts tomorrow
morning and I will talk about all of that after it happens. Right now, I’d
rather take a few steps back and look into the very recent past. The holidays.
It all began on a Friday. My children had parties at school.
Except for my 7th grader. I have no idea what he did on that
throwaway school day. Truthfully, I already don’t remember anything else that
happened that day, or the rest of the weekend so I’m going to skip to Monday. I
remember Monday. I begrudgingly worked from home while my children entertained
themselves with TVs, iPads, Xboxes and sugar. Work ended up being a nightmare –
and lasted into the evening. In the meantime, my child who tends to cough from October
to April of every year was coughing more, and I suspected it was turning into
illness. Why wouldn’t it? Everybody on my Facebook friends list was sharing
their viral misery with everyone on their Facebook friends list. That kind of
sharing puts me in a panic and makes me assured I will catch something through
the computer screen. I was getting nervous with my daughter’s cough because she
started sounding like a werewolf smoker lounge singer. Not something that
sounds as though it should come out of the larynx of a 5 year old girl. More
worrisome though was the fact that we had tickets to our city’s annual Yuletide
celebration the next afternoon. Not a cheap excursion. And I wanted my children
to get into the spirit of the holidays by giving them a fun experience. So I
put little werewolf Tom Waits to bed at a reasonable hour hoping she’d wake up
in good health and spirits.
This is the part where I fib and tell you she did not wake
up with a slight fever. Nope. Bad thermometer. We were going to Yuletide
dammit. No one was going to babysit a sick child the day before Christmas Eve,
and by the looks of my sprightly one, she was not ill at all. (Thank you
Tylenol). Just a wee little cough. (cough cough) Let’s face it, I was a nervous
wreck. Taking a hacking 5 year old to an orchestral event the day before
Christmas Eve was sure to get me a few hateful glares. But it would be loud right? Who would
hear her? The answer is I. I would hear her. Every forty seconds I would hear
her. Muffled with her coat and a hand towel I stuffed into my purse just for
the muffling, I would hear her. When the 4 of us sat down in our seats – at the
very top of the auditorium and on the end of an aisle thank goodness, I made a
preemptive apology to the women in front of me about my coughing child. Told
them she’d been coughing for months (which is true) but that I was an expert
about stifling the sound. They were very gracious but the older woman in the
duo kept insisting I take one of her mints for my daughter. Even though I
clearly had my own stash of mints, (clearly because I had them in the palm of my
hand), she wanted me to take one of her childnapper lollies. (Think Chitty
Chitty Bang Bang…because I was.) This was not going to happen. I don’t know
whose hands had been in that tin. I mean I know at least one person who had her
hand in that tin. (This is how my defective brain works. I had the sickie with
me yet I was worried about the germs of a stranger with a tin of mints.) But, I
was always told to never take candy from strangers. That parental advice stuck
with me. (If we leave college and my early twenties out of the equation.)
The show started. It was loud as fuck. YES! I figured out my
daughter’s cough tempo and was there with the hand towel in time to smother the
sound. I noticed too that about one-eighth of the theater was hacking anyway. Suddenly
I felt as though we belonged. My boys were enjoying the show, I was successfully
blocking locomotive sounding sputters and coughs, and my little girl was dancing
in between hacks. Happy times! Then, then it all went to shit. Why you ask?
Because whoever created this show decided to have a group of men sing Elsa’s
signature song from the movie Frozen. The second we heard the first lyrics of
Let It Go come out of a male singer’s mouth, my daughter went into thumbs down
mode. Coughing was no longer the issue. Let It Go was. She was pissed. PISSED.
How dare these professionals ruin her show? I personally thought it was
terrific, but I no longer have the mind of a 5 year old girl (for the most part). Unfortunately this was the beginning of
the second half so I had to try to hang on until the end. I made up my mind I
was not leaving early unless public shaming of my family for bringing a sick
little person happened. Now she was restless and whispering to me every sixty
seconds, “I’m ready to go home mommy.” No easy way to muffle that, so I put in
my internal mommy earplugs, (they seem to work much better on whining than
coughing) and made her stick it out to the end. When it was over, we Usain
Bolted our way out of the theater to beat the crowd. A talent I learned from my
father at an early age I’m proud to say. This entailed me having to carry my
forty pound child, but I fortunately had it in me.
Once we made it to our vehicle in the parking garage, I let
out a colossal sigh of relief. I did it. It wasn’t a great success, but not a
complete failure either. My middle child was meh about the show. My oldest and
most favorite child during this blog, liked the show, and my dear sweet
exasperating youngest child said, “That was the most terrible-est thing I have
ever seen in my whole life. I wish I just stayed home!!” It did not take long for her
to realize her blunder with that declaration. Something dreadful washed over my
face and I turned into well, is it cliché to bring up Faye Dunaway’s
impersonation of Joan Crawford? Because although I don’t remember what came out
of my mouth since I buried it deep inside the 5 percent of my heart that is
cold and unforgiving, it may be tell-all worthy to my babies one future day.
Needless to say, baby child buckled her seat belt faster than she had ever shown she had skills to do, and she didn’t complain or say a word the rest of the ride
home. She did cough though. A lot.
To be continued…
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