I am in my warpaint, I have girded my loins. My nails are painted ‘black and blue’ (you go to hell, MAC, for reformulating all of your nail polishes and thus discontinuing that color, you go to hell and you die!), the dark pearl choker the Lad got me some Christmases ago round my neck, dark stretch bootcut jeans and Doc Martens. Too bad the visage of urban, confident snark Wo-man is undermined by the unrelenting assault on my sinuses by Muculor, Dark Prince of Phlegm. I have Sean’s cold (goddamnit!) and the pressure change, as we climb to our cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, is causing approximately 32 gallons of snot to migrate en masse out of my brain and into my sinuses and nose. The people around me on the plane must be thrilled- thank God it’s not a very full flight, and I have my entire row to myself (no joke. I’m in ‘D’, and I’m the only person in row 18. Apparently, the ticket agent took my informing her that I have a vicious headcold and she might want to move me away from anyone to heart. I am at once gleeful and misanthropic yet feel like a leper.)
I called Sraa from the airport. There was some question as to whether or not I’d make it onto the plane tonight. I was feeling like pure, gen-u-ine Ass with a capital A all last night, and barely got any quality sleep. Sean, for his part, has proven our fears well founded; having gotten a whalloping case of the croup with his very first cold, he is, in fact, prone to it. I did the responsible thing at the first sign of a seal bark and got him into the pediatrician’s- too bad our lovely doc is off on vacation, and the ped covering for her that day is nowhere near as aggressive nor trusting of a parent when they say, “Listen, this is what’s going on, this is how his course has run in the past, and this is what we had to do’. God bless the Lad, he took the baby monitor and kept tabs on the poor wee man all last night from the futon in the guest room, and left me alone to sleep.
Sure enough, the croup spiraled into a festival of major league barking and labored breathing, so I got him back in this morning with a different doc covering for our usual ped, and she took one look at him and was Very Concerned Indeed (sidenote, if only they were there right now, hi jess! Hi robbif! I’m 33,000 feet above Springfield! Hi hi !) Years ago, I volunteered in the child life department at the children’s hospital attached to our university med center. Because I was older- a graduate student rather than undergrad- and a biologist, they handed me the tougher cases, figuring I could handle gore and sadness better than an 18 year old Lit major. I would walk past the rooms of the kids with severe, deadly asthma, work with the kids with CF. I remember the exhausted, frightened looks of the moms as they grimly restrained howling children whose every breath was a struggle, trying valiantly as the child squirmed to hold a nebulizer up to their face. Little did I expect that someday I would be that woman; sure enough, they did a breathing treatment for Sean this morning, and as with all things new, loud, and good for him, he fought tooth and claw against it. I think I ended up breathing more of it in than he did. About 2 minutes before it was over, he suddenly passed out into his morning nap, drooling insensate against me, and freakily, with his eyes open. You know, having your child twitch and gasp and essentially go limp, eyes open? Terrifying and looks to be right out of a crap-ass Lifetime, Television For Women movie. Eventually, his pulse ox recovered, and we were sent home with incredibly strict and stern instructions about how if his condition worsened one tiny iota, we were to call immediately, get him to the ER, and he would likely be admitted for intensive breathing treatments and a little camping expedition in an oxygen tent.
To no one’s surprise, this unhinged me. The pediatrician was pretty clear: take care of myself, try to unwind in NY, but if Sean woke up in bad shape from his afternoon nap, get his ass back in to be admitted. The Lad informed me, in no uncertain terms, I was fucking well going to New York. LPG did the same. My mother called and told me to ‘get on the fucking plane’. I am on the fucking plane. I called Sraa from the airport, and she crowed. And she was wise and right and told me it would all be fine and see you tomorrow and ‘squeee!’.
I will drink in the city. I will drink in the people and the noise and the crowds and the rush and the smells and the stench and the attitude and the arguments and the passion of emotions unbottled and I will heal. That part of me which is not necessarily broken but perhaps wounded will remember; remember that there is life beyond the strip malls and the Taco Bells and the mega churches. I will throw my arms wide and gobble it all down, greedily, like a child with ice cream, like a starved man sucking the marrow from the bones of a meal lucked into.
Squee, indeed.