It is 6:06am. I’ve just been yelled at for the sixth time since bedtime last night for suggesting that my child, who has a fever of 104F and is sitting angrily in front of a fan as if I personally assigned him this body-made-oven, might like to ingest some grape flavored medicine. [Like a horse to water the child to Motrin.]
Last Friday my kid spiked a 105 and has been riding it ever since with a double ear infection, taking breaks from sizzling only when I can manage to get him to sip down some meds by serving up the perfect cocktail of insistence, nonchalance, and fearmongering. I’m not sure how many more times I can tell him I’m going to take him to the hospital forthwith if he doesn’t drink it down, but my mother has suggested a fake phone call to the doctor in which the doctor wishes to speak to him: because her genius is unparalleled.
“Let him burn it off,” the anti-vaxxers and non-primary parents among us say. They, friends, have not spent sufficient time with my children, and/or they have had an excess of sleep and are tragically confident.
I’m hoping that one of the benefits of the week-long family fever-dream while Captain Dad’s in Dublin
is the reduction of the self and the brain to a sort of soup, from which, presumably, one can then regroup into something more interesting, like lasagna. We have not reached lasagna. But there are some prototypes for insight in the works.
Stoicism, though invented “to make it work,” does not necessarily make anything work very well. On day four of fever, when my son was pushing 106F and we still didn’t know what was wrong with him, I asked him in passing whether his ears hurt, and he said, quietly, “they’re even worse,” as he looked softly at the floor. He had not mentioned in four days of suffering that he had pain in his ears, or anywhere. We were now four days behind an infection. His father tossed me a knowing, if not mildly exasperated and reproachful, look— something like great, another stoic.
Unfortunately, the human parent can technically go without more than a few hours of broken sleep per night almost indefinitely without dying.