103 Degrees

It is the second morning that my oldest son woke looking a bit like an alien: puffy eyelids, eyes jutting about within the now yellows of his eyeballs. His tongue wants to jump out of his mouth, and he's too cold to stand up straight, despite his crawling temperature--a fierce fever that I managed to keep down last night but is back. Infection. There are few other options.

I waited on bringing him to the doctor yesterday (even though he stayed home from school), thinking sometimes flu can bring mild fevers. I gave him the big glass of water, stuck a twisty straw inside so the cat would stop cramming her head in his glass, took his temp regularly, and carried his cellie anywhere I went so that he could call me if need be. Just because he was feverish, my graduate student life stops for no one: there's a thesis to write, budding writers to teach. And so I did my daily duties, and we kept in constant contact via phone. Instead of rubbing his head all day, re-cooling his wet rag, and being sure he'd had his fair share of soup and flat sprite, I was off, carrying on in the world of the busy.

And this morning when he woke, looking like he did, so thin for an adolescent boy to begin with, my first thought was, shit, I have SO MUCH to do today. Tuesdays are my writing days, and I have a chapter to prepare. I took his temp, filled him a glass of water, gave him the Tylenol Meltaways, put him back in bed, and went on steaming my milk (for my requisite morning mocha). The time of steaming the milk has gotten greater with each passing day lately; I believe the poor nozzle of my cheap-o CoffeeMate espresso maker is crapping out, and I had ample time to think--berate myself and worry over every action, inaction I've taken and every action, inaction to come.

I woke up a bit and realized how disgusting it was: me, standing in front of my son, quibbling with myself about the order of events of my day, now that my original plan's been shot to hell.

When I was little, I was sick pretty regularly. My mother was a housewife, and while I don't remember her teaching me a great deal of anything, or even playing with me much for that matter (mostly she scrubbed and polished and cooked and smoked cigs), I do remember attentiveness during any illness--flu, strep, whatever...you name it, she was there.

Now, I have no wish to be like my own mother was, or to be a stay-at-home anything (it's just not my way), but I would like, for just one morning, to not worry over my day to come. I want to be able to look at my young son and say, let's get you back in bed and mean it without any feelings of anxiety over how his feeling like shit impacts me. I'd take him, my hand guiding him between the tiny wings of his sickboy-hunched back, to his room. I'd lay him down and rub his head for the time it took for him to fall back asleep.

But here I am, reflecting. I need more time. Or I need to make more. There is something in the way I have busied my life that I cannot abide by. Working mothers the world round know my plight, but it is a tearing down the center of a woman--especially (I feel) a woman like myself: a single mother, teaching and studying English. Reading and writing take time. Writing is the only real love I have within me. This not to say that I do not have an undying love for my children (I do), but my passion--the creation which completes me within me--is for stringing words together in little rows just like these. All day. And so I am perforated, a ready-made-tear-of-a-woman, right down the center. I'm learning that as more time goes by, I'm losing my balance, and as I wobble, I begin to tear simply as a result of gravity, reality.