During this month,
Sunday and I have entered the new and disturbing world of ear infections. While neither of us thought that Jonah’s ear
infection was a cakewalk, his reaction to sickness didn’t match many of the
claims some of my parental colleagues have.
You’ve heard the
horror stories of sick kids: screaming
all night, bleeding eye sockets, shifting of the tectonic plates, dogs and cats
living together, mass hysteria.
Sunday and I didn’t
really experience any of those things.
Most of the time, I hadn’t realized he was sick until Sunday came back
from the doctor’s office. If you’ll
recall, I have Dad’s power of diagnosis, so he could have needed stitches and I
wouldn’t have known it. (Remember Luke’s
stitches? Eight! He needed eight!) But Sunday came in for the rescue.
This month,
however, Jonah was sick enough for me to know.
I took him to
church, and he looked a little tired.
For some kids, “a little tired” calls for non-stop whining and
fussiness. For Jonah, “a little tired”
means he’s mellow. By mellow I mean 45
minutes after a 3-hour Grateful Dead concert kind of mellow. Jonah was sporting slits for eyes.
When I came around
to pick him up from the nursery, he was sitting in the middle of the room,
looking up, counting the ceiling tiles.
When he saw that I was there, a slow smile spread on his face, and his
eyes drooped a little. He was not
feeling well. I took him to lunch,
though, because I was hungry. (I’m
sensitive like that).
When I handed him
to Sunday, she had an immediate diagnosis:
fever with a slight goopiness around the eyes caused by possible flu,
pink eye, or malaria. I just thought
that maybe he wasn’t feeling well.
Sunday knew he was sick. By the
time we got him home, he had a fever (102˚) and we both lost our good common
sense.
As we both looked
up from the thermometer, we looked at the numbers and then we looked at each
other.
“He’s got a fever,”
Sunday said. Tears pooled in her eyes.
“We got any tea?” I
asked, not noticing the tears.
SLAP!
“Hey, what was that
for?”
“HE’S GOT A
FEVER!”
I saw the numbers
on the thermometer. I knew he had a
fever. I just didn’t know that Sunday
wanted me to dwell on it with her. So,
as I recovered from the vicious slap upside the head, I began dwelling.
Dwelling, dwelling,
dwelling. I came to this conclusion: “He’s got a fever.” I didn’t say that, though.
I did say, however, “What do you want to
do?”
“What do you think
we should do?” she replied.
“Maybe we should
give him some water.”
“Put him in
water? What’s that going to do?”
“I said give him
some water.”
“Oh. That sounds good.”
Conversations like
these brought us to the high level of marital performance we currently
enjoy. Jonah’s fever has brought a
realization to our lives: neither one of
us wants to be the idiot to make the bad decision. If we’re both there, then we can live with
our own jackassedness. If one of us is
alone and makes a mistake in judgment, however, then our parent’s license could
be rescinded. We don’t want that just
yet. (We might want to quit that job
sometime in the future, but not now).
Plus, we realize that we have a virtual army of other parents who know
we are parents now, too, and we don’t want them badmouthing us.
So, as Jonah had a
fever, we stayed at home, as a family.
We hunkered down, hoping that the food would last until we could get him
to a doctor. It was like we were sharing
a wilderness cabin with the Unabomber or something, rationing food and making
sure the cable didn’t go out.
By the time Sunday
and Jonah left the apartment to go to the doctor, the light streaming through
the open door was greeted with a vampire hiss and shielding of the eyes. We hunkered down, buddy, and we did it
because of a fever. A FEVER!
Jonah ended up
having a virus and pink eye. (No malaria
yet).