I would like to file a formal complaint with the universe.
We went to Disney World. We came home full of joy and memories and possibly every germ that fourteen thousand people in a theme park had been sharing for a week. Within four days of returning to Denver, my daughter and I both had the flu. Full, committed, this-is-not-a-cold flu. Fever, body aches, the complete package.
I am a mother. Mothers do not get to be sick. There is a social contract. You hold everyone else together, you do not become the person who needs holding together. And yet there I was at 2 AM, wrapped in my weighted blanket, unable to remember my own name, texting my daughter from across the hall to ask if she needed anything.
She texted back: 'I was about to ask you the same thing.' And that is the moment I understood she is growing up.
We were both sick. We took care of each other. Not in a dramatic way — in a very unglamorous, soup-heating, Gatorade-fetching, 'can you get me another blanket' kind of way. She set up the Hulu queue. I made broth. We watched four seasons of something I cannot remember and ate things from the pantry and did not put on real clothes for three days.
This is the part of motherhood they leave out of every book. The days when everyone is down and there is no backup and you have to figure it out even though your body is filing paperwork. You figure it out. You do. Not gracefully. Not Pinterest-ready. You just get the soup and you sit down and you wait it out together.
The flu broke on day four. We both woke up slightly less like death. She brought me coffee. She didn't ask how I took it — she knows. She just made it and brought it and set it on the nightstand. That, right there, that small act of her knowing how I take my coffee — I cried about it later when I felt better. In a good way.
Rest was the only medicine. Rest and fluids and the weighted blanket that was already in heavy rotation from the Disney trip. I do not know how I would have survived those nights without it.
Buckle up, buttercup. The flu does not care about your schedule. Rest without guilt. You earned it.
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