Sick

The stories we carry

I had children in my twenties, and was a single parent of two kids by the time I was 27. Which meant I was learning how to be an adult and a parent at the same time. Which isn’t unusual, I suppose. But it did instill some habits in me that are hard to jettison.

My friend Juliette pointed out one of those years ago. I take very swift showers, because for years when I was in the shower one or two toddlers would be pounding on the door, running into the bathroom, or, worse yet, becoming very quiet. Juliette said that long showers can be lovely and since I now had no children in the house I could extend my ablutions as long as I’d like.

It had never occurred to me. To this day, a shower is a swift sluice, a briskly accomplished chore, a precursor to a full day.

I have COVID, again, as does my partner. He got sick first, then I did. Thursday, I was feeling crummy, and I did something else I learned as a single mom with no family support – I prepared. I got ready to be sick the way characters in pioneer novels prepared for winter. I went to the grocery store, got a week’s worth of food, came home and made chicken soup and did laundry. Only then did I rest. The next day I tested positive for COVID and then had an excuse to stay prone.

What is that? I live just outside of Seattle. I can get anything I need delivered to my house rapidly and effectively, from groceries to cold medicine to meals. My daughter and son in law live twenty minutes away and are happy to help. This bravado of staggering to the grocery store and wandering, stunned with illness, mask on, through the aisles looking for what I think I need is stupid and unnecessary. But I just did it.

Part of it is that I’m not thinking straight. I have a busy brain, I always have. I used to think it was intelligence, now I think it’s more likely anxiety, but I’m so sick that my brain is quiet. Which rarely happens. It’s a relief. I remember this from when I quit smoking, the downshift of my mental activity and this feeling of visiting another country. Like, wait, are there people who walk around like this all the time? Just quiet and calm in their minds, not spinning sixteen outrageous outcomes, daydreams, worries and plans simultaneously. I like this country! Of course I do, that was what alcohol gave me, that quiet, for the brief slice of time before it toppled into blackout. Which happened more and more, the blackouts. I didn't even realize they were blackouts until I got sober, I thought I had a bad memory. That, mysteriously, only beset me when I had applied quantities of alcohol.

I suppose many of us have patterns that we carry way beyond when we need them. Perhaps they are unconscious, muscle memory. A man who is tight with money even though he now has plenty. A parent who goads their happy and productive child to greater accomplishments because that’s what their parents did.

Some people repeat patterns because that’s how it’s always been done, and that continuity grounds them, gives them a sense of connectedness to history. “I came up sitting in an office learning from the people around me in the room, so that’s the only/best way to work and learn.”  “I did my residency getting only a few hours of sleep between calls and that’s how it should be done now.”

I always ask – what does it serve? We all do things for a reason, what does it serve? What emotional need is being met? Those who would hark back to the time when they started work and the important role being in a working environment together held for them, may not want to admit that time is gone, or grieve what that took from them. Or, if they’re in leadership, they may not want to let go of the imagined control they think they have if they can see their team right there, walk past and see if they are working.

I’d like to stop with the story of being a single mom, the habit carrying through the decades of preparing to get sick. But there’s more. There usually is.

There’s a thing on social media that a friend mentioned, that we didn’t grow up seeing women rest. We saw them work, and cook and care for others, but we didn’t see them rest.

I actually did. My mother was asleep every day when my sister and I came home from elementary school. She wasn’t working outside the home, and she said her doctor had told her to take a nap every day. I wondered, even then, why she couldn’t nap at noon or 1 or 2, why it had to be the hour after we walked home from school. We had to be very quiet and get our snack. She also had a bad back, and would often take to her bed for weeks at a time, although I don’t remember her going to many doctors or doing physical therapy.

My mother was troubled, and her body manifested that, and I believe her distress was genuine. But as a child, I didn’t see rest or self-care. I saw isolation and abdication. In my lifelong mission to not become my mother, I connected physical activity and the embrace of responsibility as the counterpoint to her antique technique of taking to her bed and stepping out of her life.

Sickness has a whole raft of narratives. Parenting and marriage and love and work of all kinds have deep cultural narratives as well. Today, feverish and phlegmy, I’m thinking about illness and rest and what stories keep me up and moving when I should be lying down. Do you have stories that are driving you? What are they? Where did they come from? What do they serve?