IT’S NOT THAT I mind them being sick. Honestly. And I’m not saying she is doing it on purpose.
But I mean, there wasn’t as much as a sniffle over the entire Summer, despite some really questionable behaviour (I saw her eat a dropped M&M from the floor of a bus in Tenerife), and now here we are, back to school, and the poor thing is laid out on the couch wailing in despair.
She had a desperately sore throat on Friday morning, but I sent her to school anyway (not easily, mind you). Although she lasted the day, she was really under the weather by that evening, which was absolutely grand because a Friday evening cold is completely different to a Monday morning cold.
A Friday bug means ‘Oh no, we have to stay inside and warm all weekend’ but a Monday is going to be ‘Oh no, let me just reschedule the busy lives of four people and also explain to (or plead with) my boss that I need to work from home yet again’.
When they are first getting sick or feeling unwell it’s actually really nice, isn’t it? I mean, I obviously know we are utterly blessed that the odd cold is the height of our health worries but isn’t it kind of nice when their natural first line of affection resistance goes down, and they lose the utterly-bored-by-everything-I-say tone in their voice, and stop answering back for five minutes, and it almost feels like they are little again. All they want to do is snuggle, watch movies and sleep, and they genuinely want you there beside them, plus you know it’s only going to be a few days so you can fully lean into it.
In our experience, each illness follows a set pattern. First of all, you have to try to determine how genuine the illness is. You need to get really good at spotting a faker, because the stakes are high and the standard of acting is higher.
I hate them missing school, partly because one of us also has to miss work but also because I feel like they’ll never catch up on schoolwork or shifting friend dynamics, it’s so hard to stay on top of both as it is. And then, like every other Irish parent, I am absolutely haunted by Tusla’s 20-day rule of days missed and live in fear of being reported by the school. Those 20 absences in a year seems like such a small window when a standard cold can easily last five days.
I don’t mind them staying home when they are genuinely sick enough to miss school. But this means that every minor illness is immediately presented to me as a deathbed scenario, because the kids know it takes a lot to be allowed to stay home. This just makes me more suspicious, and honestly, no one wins. Unless, of course, I am raising two award-winning actresses, in which case, you are very welcome.
For this bug, she begins laying the foundation over the weekend, with gradually worsening symptoms and a delicate cough every time we mention school. On Sunday evening she asks if I am going to send her in, and I say we will see in the morning. I am praying for a miraculous recovery. Somewhere after midnight she appears at the foot of the bed, draped in a floor length blanket, croaking to show me that she can’t speak. It’s not great for the nervous system.
My partner calls it, he thinks she’s putting it on and should go to school. He has a simple test to check the legitimacy; Does she have school tomorrow? If yes, she is faking. I was utterly torn and tried a different tactic, telling her that she could stay home if she really needed to, but that she had to think about it carefully (as I was explaining this, she was already beaming and sinking back into her pillows) because, I continued, it would be her only day off this year so she needed to use it wisely. Even now I’m not really sure what that means, and in hindsight, it wasn’t the best way to call it. I’m blaming the lack of sleep. Anyway, she took the day off school. We lost the battle and then went on to lose the war because she didn’t go back to school for the entire week.
This leads us to the second stage, where you just have to rearrange the really important thing. You know, the thing. Because the first Law of Parenting is that every illness will coincide with the busiest week of your career, and/or a really special family occasion. Like that holiday you’ve been saving for, or your dad’s retirement party. You can’t fight it, you just have to go with it. Make your peace with missing key events for the foreseeable. You need to save your energy for other battles, like avoiding the unholy cocktail of germs that have been unleashed in your house (spoiler alert, there is no avoiding those).
If you do need a speedy recovery at any stage, just bring them to the doctor. I have never seen my children look or act as healthy as they do in the waiting room of the GP surgery, and I am always convinced that my doctor thinks I’m making it up for attention. The only downside to the Doctor’s miraculous recovery trick is that they will inevitably play with the waiting room toys and leave with a bug far worse than what they came in with, and then pass that bug to you.
Once you reschedule the important thing, you also then have to rearrange the entire week for your family. One of you has to stay home, other children will continue to require that their needs are still met on schedule, and you have to do the same amount of work for your job, but also while waiting on the sick child hand and foot. But look, the end is nearly in sight.
And this leads me to the final stage, the part where you curse yourself for not having the sick child lick everything in the cutlery drawer on day one so that you can all get it over with in one go, because, and I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, you are all going to catch it – if they weren’t faking the whole thing.
Before I had kids I thought I had a really good immune system, but it turns out I was just really good at not being around people who would sneeze directly into my eyeballs at point-blank range.
You know the movie poster for Alien 3 when the alien is centimetres away from Sigourney Weaver’s face, drooling, and the tension is building before the attack? This is parenting a sick child, except you have to bring it hundreds of ice pops, pick up its used tissues and hug it until it feels better.
We did the ‘Are you well enough for school today’ dance every morning, and by the end of the week I was telling her that if she didn’t go in on Friday she would not set foot outside the door for the entire weekend, to which she nodded solemnly and gave a gentle cough.
I had to commend her dedication to the part. Have the Oscar nominations already gone through for this year? I told her that we would be doing catch-up schoolwork all weekend, but then, inevitably, my throat started to really hurt. On the bright side, at least we know she wasn’t faking!
Margaret Lynch is a working mum of two in Kildare.
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