Bugs

A small story:

My Pilates teacher is a smiling bro of a man, never more delighted than when he has assigned us something truly terrible to do.

"This sucks," he says happily, as we Twister around the Reformer.

This morning, however, there was no smile.

He coughed politely into his sleeve with the resignation of someone who had done this numberless times already today. "I'm sick," he announced redundantly. "I can't believe I'm sick again. I never get sick."

I remembered his family visiting him one day while he was torturing us.

"Your son," I said. "He's in preschool, right?"

He nodded as he went to get another tissue and I flashed back fifteen years.

It's funny, raising humans. When you are in the weeds, you are IN THE WEEDS.

You can't remember a life before the weeds. There is no life after the weeds. You are fated to be IN THE WEEDS forever.

YOU ARE QUEEN AND ALSO SERF OF THE WEEDS.

Then, it's six months later and you can't remember those weeds at all what with now being in an entirely different set of weeds and you can't imagine a life before these weeds.

I assert there are only two reasons for preschool:

1. Teach your child to line up.

2. Develop their immune system.

Education begins earlier and earlier. Kindergarten - once mostly playing and the occasional holiday recital - is now where reading, writing and basic mathematics begin. That's a lot to expect of a brain only a half-decade away from the womb. Best to be there.

The first year children gather together, they will be sick all of the time. I can't prove this but I suspect preschool is mostly lining up, being taken to the bathroom and licking each other. It is the only possible explanation for the depth and breadth of crap they catch.

Kid started preschool on the Tuesday after Labor Day. By Thursday, she had her first thing. I say "thing" because preschool plagues follow no traditional trajectory, choosing to be the germ version of someone juggling an orange, a chainsaw and a family of ferrets.

Can you call it a "cold" if it involves vomiting, a brief fever, copious snot and a tendency to break out in song? How about a rash, an evil mood, a lower than average body temperature, a hacking cough and vomiting?

Many of these episodes seemed closer to demonic possession. The only thing they all shared was vomiting. Everything and I mean EVERYTHING would go to Kid's stomach. Cold, flu, strep throat, fatigue, growth spurt, sprained ankle, all were an opportunity to show me what she had for dinner again. We had, conservatively, 431 sets of sheets.

Because the universe delights in messing with my family, my daughter was morbidly afraid of vomiting. I mean, it's a rare child who enjoys it, but Kid could be perfectly healthy and suddenly burst into bitter tears imagining that at some point in the future, she might throw up.

I would pat her shoulder in what I hoped was a supportive way, because even if she was perfectly healthy at this exact moment, she was, at most, thirty-six hours away from catching the new bug.

The good news about being a serial vomiter is that illness tends to be nasty, brutish and short. The bad news: her primary nursemaid has no discernible immune system. I caught everything she brought home. Or not. A child in her class had Fifth Disease. Kid did not contract it. I did. That I survived long enough to reproduce spits in the eye of Natural Selection.

Kid — being young, healthy and capable of violently ejecting all intruders — would be sick for 26 hours. I — having no discernible immune system and having been up at least one night that week, changing and washing sheets — would be sick for three weeks.

My body, shaking off the last trailing remnants of the previous Thing, would effortlessly absorb the new Thing, adding weird new symptoms to whatever I was already presenting. I was the Borg. The only thing which remained constant was my cough.

I coughed for two years.

Kid took this picture of me last year, put it up for my birthday, people were impressed by my abs.

"Is that Pilates?" some asked.

I imagine, Pilates helped. I ALSO COUGHED STEADILY FOR TWO YEARS.

(Please note Kid makes fun of my immune system)

Even Consort, designed for much more durability than your correspondent, caught the occasional Thing from the pre-school Petri dish. but there was only one member of the family who coughed so hard she cracked a rib, either by coughing that hard or by the cough throwing her backwards so violently she fell down stairs. (Points thumb to chest modestly)

So, I say to you with small children, this shall pass. They will get sick and you will get sick, but you both will grow stronger for the ordeal.

Which will make you a perfect host for the head lice of elementary school.