I've developed a certain affection for sick days

I mean, I don't hate all of it

Our house has been bogged down with illness most weeks since February. Our coffee table, shelves and bedsides are littered with Tylenol bottles, tissue boxes in vague pastel tapestries, and yellow Ricola cough drop wrappers. Pho containers and empty tissue boxes crowd our recycling bin.

My husband, my kids and I have all been felled this round, each a maddening five days apart. Amazingly, I managed to time my last few illnesses around work, getting hit with the worst of it on my home days, though I did have to reschedule an interview I’d set up a month before.

My oldest was the last one hit. She spent two weeks hiding away from the rest of us, still traumatized by the last two times she had to miss high school — a week each in February and March — and the hours of dawn to dusk schoolwork she endured immediately afterward to get caught back up.

She made it to spring break well, but she’s spending her week off sick.

We’ve given up a lot over these waves of crud. So much missed school and choir and fun social stuff we were looking forward to.

We cancelled my in-laws’ visit last weekend over the unrelenting sick. We’ll try again in two weeks, with fingers crossed.

One of my most beloved people on earth is having an operation right this moment, as I type this (send good wishes!), and I wasn’t able to see her for two weeks and was so worried I wouldn’t be able to until after the surgery. But I was well enough last night to cuddle on her couch and watch Below Decks before she had to begin her pre-surgery ablutions.

Missing so much of our lives is not fun, especially now that Persephone has returned from Hades and gilded the streets of Seattle with pinks and purples and yellows and blues.

But, I have to acknowledge that something interesting happens, as the cancellations accumulate, as I drop and reschedule obligations, as I finally loosen my grip and release all expectations.

At first I was still clinging on so tight, like okay, I’m going to miss this one day but then I will work really hard on hydrating and resting and then tomorrow I will be recovered enough and everything will go right back to the way I expect it to be. The second day, reality started to dawn just a little bit.

By the fourth day I was like, fuck it, I’m a couch gremlin now.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

The thing is, once you realize you can’t fight it, you start to live more within it.

I don’t completely hate it, once I’ve given up hope of controlling it.

Something sweet happens when your life shrinks down to the bare necessities, to drinking and resting and sitting up to cough, on listening to audiobooks and observing the sun’s movement over the ceiling, on peeking in on your loved ones and petting your dog.

All of my business gets stripped away, and all of the obligations I stack around myself are knocked over and here I am still, just me. The same essence I carried with me every time I started over in a new state, in a new country, in a strange and scary situation I couldn't control.

I shaved down my life to mere existence, and it kind of felt like gratitude.

My life shuttered down to my cool hallway, my rumpled bed sheets, to pouring tea and carrying it to darkened rooms, to hovering the thermometer over foreheads until the screen turned red, then orange, then finally, finally green.

My life got small and simple.

And then I got to start over again.

I got to start over again with the trees bursting with life, with my neighbors out in their yards waving at me. I get to walk my dog with the sun on my back, wearing linen pants dead to me since September.

I’m alive, and the world is alive and there’s so much I have to get to do now that I’m better.