Unconditional Love takes on the stomach flu

Things are getting kind of gross around here.  Six days ago, C. started it all off with an all-night throw-up session.  I never knew the definition of unconditional love before, but now I think it might be:

Unconditional Love (n):  sleeping snuggled next to your sick toddler who has vomit caked in her hair.

What are the options?  Do you give your little one a bath and a hair-wash at 3 am when you’ve been cleaning up vomit all night and know she’s going to up-chuck again soon anyways?  No, you just sleep in it, and do laundry in the morning.  Despite my obsessive handwashing and hot-showering, I still feel our whole house is crawling with germs.

 Two days of Pedialyte and listlessness later, C’s stomach bug started coming out the other end, generating noxious fumes and even more mess.  You don’t understand gross until you’ve experienced diarrhea in the bath, which T. handled with aplomb.  

And then there was the incident with the jeans.  T. had taken A. for an emergency trip to Price Chopper for paper towels and baby-wipes.  I was enjoying a nice mama-baby bath with C. when she starting fussing and climbed out of the tub.  Before I knew what was happening, she was circling the bathroom and then squatted down and unloaded all over the boot-cut leg of my best   7 for All Mankind navy denims, which were hanging on a hook.  Nothing is sacred.  

I confess, I grabbed my sick child and plopped her back in the bath.  Cold-hearted mother that I am, I let her stand there crying with a sore tummy while I did damage control and cleaned copious creamy-yellow poo off my favorite jeans.  

Those Sevens were my first pair of fancy designer denims, dating back to August 2004 when I was newly-married and rocking out at a weeklong poetry workshop at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.  Deconstructing poems with incisive young poet Major Jackson was good, but people-watching gorgeous drag queens on Commercial Street during Carnivale was even better, as was dancing at The Vixen on the last night.  There were two lithe, acrobatic Russian girls pole-dancing on the Vixen stage while the crowd shook to the DJ’s club mix.  I shook my hips in my new jeans and thought, You’re not in Vermont anymore…

But here I am in the present in the Baby Cave (oh dark cave, nest of our family stomach bug).  The Sevens cleaned up well, though I will always remember what was on them.  Inevitably, I got the bug too–it started as a bout of intense nausea and exhaustion reminiscent of my second pregnancy, then progressed into writhing misery.  Now A. is feverish and queasy, sleeping next to a towel and a bucket.  We are anticipating the next onslaught.

“Look on the bright side,” said one friend.  ”At least they nap more when they’re sick.”  Truly, I am saying prayers of gratitude that we don’t have swine flu.

Tags:   7 for All Mankind · Provincetown Fine Arts Work CenterNo Comments