Last week I was sick. I lay shivering in my coffin, er, on my deathbed, er, on my couch and thought about the last time I was sick. It was nearly three years ago and I was a single mommy with three kids at home. They each went to different schools that began and ended at different times and had varying bus stop drop-off and pick ups. It was a logistics nightmare that afforded me 2.5 hours alone time, four days a week (not five!), to work from home. La di da.

It all went swimmingly until I got the Death Flu. No one else in the house had it. Just me. I was doomed.

For five days I dragged myself out of bed at 6-ish and croaked greetings to my cherubs while stuffing bagels in the toaster and hoping they had lunch money left over so I didn’t have to walk an extra four feet to get a $20 bill from wherever I was keeping extra cash. By 9-ish they were all gone and I collapsed in a heap on the unvacuumed floor. Three hours to be Dead Mommy. If I was lucky I fell near the remote so I could turn Curious George off, otherwise I’d be doomed to three hours of PBS Kids until Eric got home and I had to muster the strength to walk outside and collect him from his bus.

Eric, the littlest, arrived back at 12:30. You’d think that some snuggle time with a three-year-old would be possible for a Sick and Dying Mommy, but not this one. He had the will and the strength of a rhinoceros, a small boy capable of staying awake for days on end. And I had to keep an eagle eye on him — at three, Eric-with-Down-syndrome had the self-discipline skills of a baby crocodile. He could not be counted on to be entertained (and stay in one place without wreaking havoc somewhere) with a nice DVD. The other two, in 2nd grade and 6th, dribbled in by 4 pm and had the gall to want things like DINNER. And BEDTIME RITUALS. And CALLIGRAPHY PRACTICE.

Okay, so I lied about the calligraphy. And they understood about the bedtime thing (sort of). But dinner … well, the point is, mommies really can’t get sick. I thought about this last weekend as I lay in bed shivering for two days, knowing I had the luxury to lay in bed shivering for as many days as I needed. Some of you know that my kids aren’t living with me now, and I never realized until now that there’s an unexpected perk to this — I can actually be sick.

You can’t.

My mom was never sick. Not once. Oh, she had the sniffles from time to time. And once she tore a ligament in her ankle and couldn’t work for a few days. But she was never sick.

Was yours?

I know there are exceptions (there was a lovely mother to my kids’ classmates a few years ago whose long and graceful illness and eventual death was incredibly beautiful and touching for the entire school community), but culturally, there just isn’t the wiggle room for us to be sick. Work needs us, families need us, kids need us. Sure, daddies step in and do what needs to be done, but for Order to be Restored to the Universe, mommies have to be Well and Whole and Able to Read Bedtime Stories Without Coughing.

As kids get older, they can fend for themselves a little better, but what do you do when they’re too little to be on their own long enough for you to have a nice bout of Bubonic Plague? I’m sure you’ve faced this before. How do you cope? Or do you fight it off as best you can and pretend you’re not sick? (ha ha) And if we work outside the home and manage to drag ourselves to the office, how do we justify/balance/manage collapsing at home to recover, just when the second shift is starting and the cries of “Mommy’s home!” come from down the hall?

[Warning: rainbow unicorn bubble world alert.] I’m thinking of a time when we live in real community, where we step in for one another when needed like this. Wouldn’t it be great if there was always someone to care for our kids?  Without question?  I’d love it if as mothers (and fathers) we didn’t feel we had to suck it up and not get sick because there just isn’t anyone else. Extended families used to do this. So how do you make being sick work?

Show of hands if any of this sounds familiar:

• You walk on the sidewalk, not on people’s lawns, unless it’s someone you know well and you’re spending the afternoon there.
• You let people cut in front of you in the 10-or-less grocery line, but you try to burn holes in the back of their head the whole time they’re in front of you.
• Soup is lukewarm at the restaurant? Steak cooked a little more than the medium-rare you asked for? You eat it but you refuse to enjoy it.
• You won’t call anyone after 9 pm if you don’t know them well enough.
• You have an entire conversation with someone who stopped you on the street to ask directions, even though they creep you out a little, because you’re too nice to look the other way, keep walking, and ignore them.

Did your mother raise you to be nice? Mine did. In my mom’s world, nice trumped everything. if you couldn’t be smart, at least you could be nice. Good girls were seen and not heard, and if you were a teeny bit dramatic (aren’t all nine-year olds?) you got called “Sarah Bernhardt” and were shushed a lot.

That didn’t work for me, and I’m unlearning the niceness thing. And I’m teaching my daughter to speak out about what she wants and feels. I am so breaking this chain, the one that I can trace back to before my mom’s mom.
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I’ll bet you a cup of delicious Pacific Northwest coffee (tall no-fat vanilla latte, thanks) that at least half of you have said, at one time or another, “I’ll never hit my child!” And I’ll bet you the maraschino cherry on my hot fudge sundae (no nuts, thanks) that a sizable chunk of you, whether or not you vowed not to hit, have spanked your kids anyway.

Yeah, you. I’m talking to you. The Dreaded Spank. It happens. Toddler on the loose, darting for that busy street for the 3000th time? Permanent marker decorating the walls and carpet? Poop anywhere where poop just shouldn’t be? Swats happen. It happens. One quick reaction before rational thought sets in. Besides, some of us were raised with spanking. It seems … familiar. And don’t diapers provide padding?

But listen to this: a new study suggests that early spanking — and we’re talking the prime of toddlerhood here, kids who are between one and two — has some detrimental effects. Kids who were spanked at the age of one were more aggressive at the age of two and performed worse on cognitive tests at the age of three. Whoa.
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…and boy are my arms tired!

Oops, wrong punch line. Actually, I am wishing there was a punch line, or at least that I could punch somebody (not really, but sort of) because my kids didn’t watch President Obama’s speech yesterday. They attend public school in a blue-state county where five years ago I saw way more Kerry-Edwards signs than I saw Bush-Cheney signs, and where the vote last November was predominantly pro-Obama, so I assumed they watched. Nope, neither kid who speaks knew anything about it. Huh. A non-issue.

Frankly, it only became an issue for me because over the weekend I heard what an issue this speech was for many parents all over the country. I don’t think it was particularly appropriate that the President, any President, speak to my child at his school via a television screen, but hey, this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day. The message was innocuous: stay in school, study hard, life is kind of tough but you’ll be okay. What’s wrong with that?
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Oh my, the Duggars are at it again. Don’t get me wrong: I sort of like them. Who doesn’t admire the assembly-line precision they must have had to create just in order to, say, get everyone’s teeth brushed in the morning? Plus, they allow us to say to ourselves, “OMG, that could be me. But hello, no. No way. No way would I have EIGHTEEN KIDS.”

And then we can all breathe a sigh of relief and go about our day and maybe enjoy one of the other parenting train wrecks on TV, like Jon & Kate or Octomom.

That’s not me.

Since we’ve agreed that having 18 kids is probably unlikely for most of us — sheer logistics and, well, sanity tells us that — how many kids IS enough for one family? One? Two? Three? How do we decide the size of the perfect family? How big is your perfect family?
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