Flupocalypse

I've been sick this year. Really, just, a lot of sick. Starting in November and seemingly with very few breaks before the next thing slams into me. The kids have had colds and stomach bugs and ailments and I think I've caught EVERY SINGLE ONE from them. And whatever they don't get, I seem to bring home from all the other little germ infested goblins I teach. It has been, legitimately, disgusting.

A few weeks ago I was struck with what can truly only be described as Montezuma's Revenge. Except that, well, I wasn't traveling. It was someone's revenge though. I lost four pounds simply by being glued to the toilet seat.

In The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which I had the privilege of seeing on my first trip to NYC, there's a line that goes like this:

"Dengue--an infectious disease transmitted by mosquitoes and categorized by headache, joint-pain, skin rash, and severe diarrhea. When the Pediatrician asked Billy to describe the symptoms of his Dengue, he said, 'It was like there was a race out of my tushie, and everybody won.'"

That line has stayed with me. Because it is hilarious. Because who among us hasn't experienced the horrific nightmare of catastrophic diarrhea? 

I'm not going to focus on diarrhea though because I've been binge watching Downton Abbey and pretending I'm a lady. (When, really, I am about the farthest thing from English nobility.) I do know enough to know that ladies shouldn't share a lot of details about their bathroom escapades. But, you see, after I recovered from The Revenge, I had some good days and then I was struck with the other kind of flu. The Influenza A kind of flu. This ticked me off something fierce because we always get the flu shot. Yes, I know it was all but completely ineffective this year but that is not the point. I felt a bit under the weather when I left work on Thursday and by the evening I was running a fever. 

I stayed in bed almost all of Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I cannot tell you the last time I wallowed in bed for four straight days. This is why I have taken up Downton Abbey which I had saved for such a time as this. Oh I knew I would love it. I had so many friends who watched it AT THE TIME and loved it and wondered why, on God's wonderful earth, I was not among the obsessed. I always knew it would be a show for me. I somehow also knew I would pull it out at just the right and perfect moment.

The Great Flupocalypse of 2018 was just that time.

But the point of this post is not to discuss the Crawley's and their drama. It's not really to talk about that scene with Mary and Anna and Cora and a CERTAIN body. Even if I would honest to goodness hope to respond exactly like that mother did. To my children: I will not condone your bad decision making and I may make you pay but I will straight up help you move the body back to its own bedroom. JUST LIKE THE COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM. Anyway. The actual point is that my husband is an absolute blessing to me.

Sometimes we're married for fourteen years and the fire doesn't die or anything like that but the lingerie gets buried behind the flannel pajama pants and everything is just comfortable and nice. Let's face it, the lingerie, in and of itself, is not actually integral to the marriage. I happen to like the fact that he fits like a glove or, like a good pair of pajama pants. But sometimes, I'm shaking in bed with a fever and I can't stop. And then for some inexplicable reason I start bawling because I'm just so cold and I hear him beyond the closed door. He's taking care of three kids and doing laundry and making dinner and thinking about his sermon and changing a poopy diaper. I'm coughing. It's a deep, racking cough and he's there handing me medicine and putting a palm on my forehead. And when the flu goes up into my face and my sinuses are a brick wall, he's helping me use the terrible sinus pot because I really need it but I hate it so much it makes me choke and cry. 

I've been sick a great deal this year. I'm trying everything I can think of to build up my immunity and keep things away and yet, they have a way of clinging to my body and wiping me out. Through it all, my husband just keeps standing in the gap. And yes, it's what a husband SHOULD do. I couldn't agree more. But when I stop and really see that he is doing it, he is taking care of absolutely everything for FOUR ENTIRE DAYS, how can I be anything short of madly in love with this counterpart of mine?

This morning, I insisted on going to work. He texted me early in the day, "Hope your day is manageable. If it's too hard, don't be afraid to call it halfway through. Praying for you. Love you."

When you find someone who is praying for you and who loves you, don't let that one go. I just wanted to write something down so that my husband knew it didn't go unnoticed. All the praying. All the loving. All the doing everything. I see. Thank you.

My Travels with Charley

When I was in the second grade, I had a teacher that darn near ruined school for me. Often, she was incredibly unkind. If her hair was curled, we were going to be alright but if it was straight, everyone knew to steer clear. As an adult I realize that, maybe, on the days her hair was curled, she'd gotten up, had her morning coffee and then spent some quality time with the curling iron. The days when it was straight, well, maybe she'd rolled out of bed and we were seeing her in some kind of decaffeinated state. I don't know. She insisted that we call her Mizz Boyle. Not Miss Boyle. Mizz. She scared me. The rough terrain of second grade didn't stop with her incredible mood swings. The woman barely taught math. She focused so greatly on language arts and reading that one of my most vivid memories from all of grade school involves me sobbing at the kitchen table while I wrote a lengthy (way too long for a seven-year-old) research paper on Mary Cassatt. That class entered the third grade above average in all things to do with literature and well below average in our math skills.

It haunted me throughout school, always trying to play catch up in math and build on skills that weren't taught at the crucial age of seven. However, for all that I blame her for with my subpar mathematics skills, I do credit the woman for being the base for which my love for literature and language arts was launched and, in fairness, she's the sole reason I have any idea who Mary Cassatt was.

My foundational love for English took me into honors courses, on to Advanced Placement my senior year, and eventually landed me in a great many writing and literature classes in college where I graduated three courses short of a second degree in English Education. I say all of that to hopefully give some credit to what I'm about to say. (It was a long introduction. What can I say, I'm not short and to the point like Hemingway.)

In high school, as part of our honors program, I was forced to endure a few AWFUL books for summer reading. Terrible books. Books that made me question whether I should even bother with advanced classes. But here's the thing. I reread some of them in college and had a profound awakening to them. It was then I realized that some of what we'd been forced to read in high school was way over our heads. Listen, I was not in over my head in advanced classes. I never got a grade lower than A in English until college. So I can only assume that no one was understanding or connecting to much of our summer reading lists. When in college a few years later, my perspective had changed. I'd lived a little more life. The themes and concepts of some of the books we'd had to read in high school suddenly made sense. I firmly believe that we were introduced to some of that material well before we could even begin to chew it up and make sense of it.

I'm not blaming the teachers. Not a bit. I adored my high school English teachers. They were teaching what they needed to and in the end, we all survived. During school we were able to dissect books with our faithful leaders standing by, guiding and helping. It was those hot summers with long passages that made no sense that really got to me.

The summer before my freshman year, when I was a mere 13 years old, I powered, somehow, through Travels with Charley. I declared then and there that I detested John Steinbeck with the burning fire of 10,000 suns. It was so so very terrible. It was boring. It was dated. Still, for some strange reason, I held onto that paperback novel all these years. My mother, year after year would ask me why I saved it, as awful as it was. Then, later, my husband would ask the same question. I had no explanation. Perhaps I kept it in my bookshelf as some sort of badge of honor.

I have nearly tripled my age since I first experienced that novel. Suddenly, I had the overwhelming urge to read it. O, world, is it ever beautiful. Still, I look at its pages and I think, "There is no way a 13 year old could have possibly grasped this." Now though, I am helped by the fact that I have fallen in love with Steinbeck. Travels with Charley In Search of America was my maiden voyage nearly a quarter of a century ago. It is not the place to begin. One must first know Steinbeck. I believe, even, that The Pearl and Of Mice and Men (books which also came with my high school education) are not, on their own, up to the task. Perhaps, if one has held tight to the pages of East of Eden, it will have been enough. To embrace Charley, one must feel as though Steinbeck is an old friend and one must believe that America is meant to be discovered again and again. We must understand that she is always in a process of metamorphosis so intricate that one man's experience will never be the next man's. One must possess within her that restlessness, that wanderlust that so many of us, inherent in our Americanness, feel in the marrow of our bones. What 13 year old grasps these things? Nay, what 36 year old can do much more than open her mouth and hope to drink the entire ocean?

I was driving myself, pounding out the miles because I was no longer hearing or seeing. I had passed my limit of taking in or, like a man who goes on stuffing food after he is filled, I felt helpless to assimilate what was fed in through my eyes. Each hill looked like the one just passed. I have felt this way in the Prado in Madrid after looking at a hundred paintings--the stuffed and helpless inability to see more.

A few pages later...

Charley licked the syrup from his whiskers. "What makes you so moony?"

"It's because I've stopped seeing. When that happens you think you'll never see again."

What 13 year old is worried about absorbing that much, being saturated to the point of rejecting what is seen, heard, and experienced? Ahhh, but what 36 year old, in a moment of respite, enveloped by warm water and bubbles while her love plays with her three smaller loves, has not experienced the gripping reality that sometimes we lose sight of everything important?

There are moments when I wish I could visit myself. I would absorb wisdom from the soul of older versions. I would implore younger versions to listen, to give it all the time that it needs, to soak in as much as possible.

"Yes, younger me, the only part of Travels with Charley In Search of America that you will grasp and appreciate will be the parts about California. You have been there. You have experienced the land and everything he says about it is still true. One day, you will have seen more of it. You will have met more of its people. You will understand what John was looking for. One day, the book will move you. One day, you will wish that he invited you into Rocinante, poured you a glass of whatever he was serving, and asked who you were. Or not. Perhaps you would only discuss the weather. One day, you would consider paying top dollar to scratch Charley's head. That time has not yet come."

But it will.

Dear Matt,

You're halfway to 18 which is wackadoodle crazy, if you ask me. I cannot understand how you have suddenly turned into a 9 year old 3rd grader because I am sure that you were just born yesterday. And listen, kid, if you're reading this one day and you want to know what you were like, get a copy of the old television show This is Us. Watch Randall. All that wanting to be perfect. All that anxiety about not being perfect. All that thinking that anything less than perfect is failure. All the ways he loved his mama and his family. His struggles and his victories.

YOU.

Every week, we watch that show and it's like watching what we imagine you'll be like in 7 years or 28 years. And son, I hope you can shake all the needing to be perfect because that's all in your own head. But if you grow up and love your wife and your kids and your mother the way a fictional character loves those people in his life, well, I think you'll do okay.

Right now, you flip and flop and back handspring and walk on your hands ALL THE TIME. If you could practice gymnastics in our living room 24/7, you would. Of course, you also want to do karate, play baseball, play football, and wrestle. You are super strong and your chiseled body is basically ridiculous. Especially because you're NINE. You love to rock climb and can scurry up the wall like a buff little spider monkey.

You're a great speller and you love science. You would make potions and do experiments all day long (except for the times you were busy flipping and flopping about the house) if we'd let you. Reading is NOT your favorite thing to do but you are happy to read books about science and we have found a few others that'll hold your attention. You say that you want to be an actor and, when you come out of your shell for long enough, you are straight up hilarious.

You have the tenderest of souls, never wanting to choose something if your choice might hurt someone's feelings, never wanting to do anything to upset either of your brothers, always wanting to take care of people, often sacrificing your own opinion for what others might think. You've always been a hot and cold kind of kid. From the moment you were born, we've always said that your personality was like looking at a heart monitor. Up, down, up, down, up, down. You have big highs and big lows. The white folk you live with are a mostly German bunch and we're baseline steady--for the most part. You add emotion and flare to our relatively calm bunch. If you can harness all that passion for good, you'll move mountains.

I love you, man. I love your silly sense of humor and your tender side. I love how you love your family--both the one you live with and the one you came from--and want all of us to be happy. I love how you love Jesus. I love the way you self-sacrifice for your siblings. You are one of my most favorite people on the planet.

Grow and live and thrive and don't worry quite so much about being perfect. We love you just the way you are.

Love,
Mom

Interview with 9 Year Old Matthew

1. What is your favorite T.V. Show? Star Wars Rebels, Ninja Turtles, Ben 10.

2. What did you have for breakfast? Cereal.
3. What do you want to name your future son? (This is a new question. I got rid of "What's your middle name?" because, well, he's known that for years now.) Robert.
4. Favorite Food? Hamburgers.
5. What food do you dislike? Cooked up broccoli.
6. What is your favorite color? Green and red.
7. Favorite lunch? Peanut butter and jelly.
8. What is your favorite thing to do? Gymnastics.
9. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would it be? Ireland.
10. Favorite sport? Football.
11. What do you want to name your future daughter? (This is a new question. I also decided to get rid of, "When is your birthday?" because he's also known that for years.) Carmel.
12. Are you a morning person or a night person? Night.
13. Pets? Tessie. Hamilton. Ollie.
14. Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with us? I know how to do a handspring.
15. What do you want to be when you grow up? I still have time, I don't know. Maybe an actor.
16. What is your favorite candy? Lollipops, lollipops oh my little lollipops.
17. Where is the farthest place you've ever been from home? Israel.
18. What is your favorite book? My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish.
19. What are you most proud of? I'm very proud that I started a club last year on this day. It's Get Rid of Slimy Girls Club. (Ummmm. Okaaaayyy.)
20. What is your favorite movie? Ninja Turtles.
21. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg. The egg came first because the chicken would hatch out of its egg and have another chicken.

And, for fun, I asked him the same questions that James Lipton asks at the end of Inside the Actor's Studio.

1. What is your favorite word? The longest word in the English language.
2. What is your least favorite word? Good. I can think of way better words than good.
3. What turns you on? (I rephrased with, "What do you like?") Gymnastics.
4. What turns you off? (I rephrased with, "What don't you like?") School.
5. What sound or noise do you love? The tune to Play That Funky Music White Boy.
6. What sound or noise do you hate? Balloons squeaking.

7. What is your favorite curse word? Stupid. Even though it's not. I can't say it.
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Be in the military.
9. What profession would you not like to do? Be a nurse.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? (I omitted the "If Heaven exists" part)? Welcome.