There is no substitutes bench
When you're a single parent and you fall ill, you just have to get up and get on with it.
It started on Tuesday morning. A sniffle at the base of my nose. At first I thought, “Ahh goddammit. I need to dust the living room blind.” I’m allergic to house dust, and the feeling of wanting to sneeze and not being able to felt extemely familiar to me. But then I sneezed.
To be fair, I’ve had a good run. It’s been just over five years since I was last properly ill, and that’s a period of time that has taken in a global pandemic and just over two years of parenting on my own, five days a week. And when the sickness did land, it’s just been a heavy cold rather than anything more serious. TOUCH WOOD, TOUCH WOOD.
But I am also out of practice with being ill. Having a heavy cold this week has felt much worse than I remember having a heavy cold to be. My neck has felt like it is working double-time supporting a head weighed down with whatever revolting substances my body has created to fight this thing off. I’m both tired and wired, forgetting the obvious and remembering minute details.
And there is one other minor detail. The last time I was significantly ill, there was another person living here who could carry my load. My ex-wife and I were long emotionally separated by five years ago, but we’ve always co-parented well together. But that’s no longer there. I’m certain that were I properly properly ill I could deposit the kids with her, but I can’t do that over this.
So on we plough. There is no substitutes bench, not for an injury that, in the overall scheme of things, is relatively trivial. And here’s where things become weird. I’ve become ten times as efficient. I have extremely limited energy, so rather than faffing about, when I’m focused I’m completely focused. I’ve got a lot of work done and the kids have been dealt with efficiently. I’ve even been getting to bed at sensible times and getting excellent nights’ sleeps.
This wasn’t ever thus. There was a time when I caught every single last thing that my older kid brought home from the various mother’s groups and baby-meets that my ex-wife took him to while I was at work. At the time of his first birthday, he brought me home the gift of hand, foot and mouth, a disease which about which we frankly do not talk about enough.
It was faharkin’ horrendous. The NHS website page for it jauntily told me that “it usually gets better on its own after 7-10 days”. Reader, it did not. After a fortnight I looked like I had turbo-syphilis. After three weeks—a period during which I had to miss his first birthday party (yes, that still stings)—I made an appointment with my GP.
By this time I was actually growing a second set of fingernails underneath my soon-to-be old ones. Was this, I idly wondered to myself, how Pennywise started out? I consoled myself with the fact that while the symptoms were gross, they at least weren’t especially painful and that I’d escaped having any mouth ulcers, which might have proved to be a psychological tipping point for me.
The GP took one look at me and almost visibly recoiled. “Congratulations, Mister King. This is the most severe case of hand, foot and mouth I’ve ever seen in an adult. But there’s no cure for it. You’ll just have to ride it out. Come back to me at the end of next week if it still isn’t clearing up. We may have to take some tests.” It started to clear up a couple of days later. By the end of the following week, I had one set of fingernails again.
(This fingernails thing wasn’t quite as horrifying for me as it may have been for many others because I was already aware that nails can work in mysterious ways. In the 1990s, when I was young and fit, I had a pair of football boots that weren’t properly waterproof and over the course of the first couple of months of the season all of my toenails fell out. And the properly strange thing about that was that it didn’t hurt in the slightest. They just fell off and new ones grew in their place.)
So I kind of got used to it. Older kid got a cold, mine would follow a couple of days later. Eventually I ended up in this apparently permanent state of slightly under the weather listlessness, which I ascribed to my children being a pair of little germ factories. I wondered at points whether there was any way in which I could be immunised against them. But then the last five years happened, and one thing I have picked up on is that two very significant things—yes, among many others—have happened to me over that time; I’ve quit smoking and I’ve stopped working in an office.
My kids have both started school in that time period, and surely the presence of thirty other little germ factories around them should only have made it worse, shouldn’t it? But this hasn’t been the case. It certainly doesn’t seem inconceivable to me that my office could have been the germ factory rather than my kids. After all, in an office I was surrounded by dozens and dozens of others, and the presenteeist culture in which we live means that other staff are always likely to go in carrying something contagious. When I did work in one, barely a week went by without someone asking me whether I had a couple of Ibuprofen going spare. One woman I knew developed something approaching a recreational Solpadeine habit. None of this is healthy.
The health benefits of giving up smoking are honkingly obvious, but it’s only been this week that I’ve noticed that I’ve been coughing again, highlighting the extent to which I’ve not been coughing this last year and a half, since I finally, finally knocked that on the head once and for all. I’d never even given much consideration that I might not even notice the benefits of quitting smoking.
But we plough on. I haven’t been kissing and cuddling the kids like normal, but I’ve explained why, they understand, and have been good with it. I’ve been feverishly hungry, apparently needing extra calories to fuel the extra energy required to fight this sort of thing while still functioning. (Before taking dietary advice from me, please note that, whatever I may say on flights when a stewardess shouts out requesting one, I am not a doctor.)
Of course, the fact that you now can’t be ill for eighteen years is not something that’s included in the manual when they hand these things out, but I certainly don’t want praise for any of this. There’s been points at which I’ve been a bit short-tempered with the kids, when just for a few seconds a lightning bolt of frustration has shot from my brain and out my mouth before I could trap it.
But that’s okay. None of us are perfect, the kids are resilient, and I apologise if I speak out of turn, just as anybody should. And it’s important to forgive your own shortcomings in the way that you instinctively would in others. Like many people, I criticise myself in a way that I would never criticise other people. I’m trying to unlearn that. And this cold will be gone soon. Now, if you’ll excuse me, those blinds really do need dusting.