This Morning

I was going to blog about Deep Throat, and maybe I will later, but the events of the morning have overtaken me.

I'm not good with the margins of illness, for me or my children. Give me a fever, vomiting, splitting headaches, nasty rashes and I'm good to go. I can put myself to bed, no problem. I can snuggle sick children for hours, plying them with Advil and popsicles and Playhouse Disney and cool washcloths on their foreheads. But you know those times when you feel kind of bad but not quite sick, and then you wonder if this is maybe just how you always feel, because you can't really remember what feeling good feels like, and maybe this is it, but not really, because really you don't feel so good, but then again you don't feel so bad either? I suck at those times. If it's me, I drag myself off to work and am miserable. If it's the children, I dilly and dally and dither, and unfortunately too often get frustrated, which doesn't help matters at all.

I have friends who, if a kid says they don't feel well, automatically let them stay home. Said kids are none the worse for wear, perfectly well-socialized and well-educated, but that just doesn't sit right with me. From experience, I know that a kid who feels a bit bad at breakfast often feels fine by the time school gets going. And I basically think you should be where you are supposed to be, unless you are really sick. However, there is always the possibility that feeling a bit bad at breakfast is a harbinger of feeling ghastly by noon. And then there's my working mother guilt. Do I want my kids to be well enough to go to school/sitter because it's a hassle for me to stay home? Or am I really looking out for their best interests? Ugh.

This morning was one of those mornings. I let M and E stay up too late last night, and the girls next door have been sick for a few days. So when M started acting pathetic, there was conflicting evidence. Overtired? Coming down with whatever the girls next door have? It was clear that she wasn't her usual perky self, but she wasn't SICK sick, that is, sick enough for me to decide unilaterally that she was staying home. And there's only a week left of school and her last Junior Great Books class was this morning and she's already missed a lot of school this year, so I was kind of pushing school, though I said that she needed to decide, since she was the only one who was inside her body and truly knew how she felt.

She couldn't decide, I started to get frustrated, I put her on the phone with her dad, he decided she was going to school, we hung up the phone, and she collapsed in tears. After lots of tears and snuggling on the couch, I finally got to the bottom of the situation: she felt a little bad, but really she was worried because she couldn't find her Junior Great Books book and she hadn't done her reading. At this point, I wanted to shake her. But I didn't because I am a nurturing and supportive mother. Instead I came up with a solution: I would write a note to the teacher explaining that she couldn't find the book and asking if she could borrow someone else's book to do the reading before Junior Great Books. I promised her that we would find the book, and if we didn't we would pay the school for the book. I promised her repeatedly that nobody would be mad. She started to perk up. I also told her that when she was worried about something she should tell me and we would come up with a solution, but not going to school is not a solution. By then she wasn't really interested in listening to me but was scurrying after her shoes.

On the way to school, I asked her what the lesson of the morning was. She said, "Tell Mama." And that was exactly the right answer for her. But I'm not quite sure what the lesson is for me.

[The piece that is left out of this story is that we are moving a few days after school ends, so our house is a half-packed disaster, hence the lost book, and M is stressed, hence, perhaps, the overreaction to the lost book.]