Take some blame and call me in the morning
Parents take care of their children, because that’s just what we
do. When they cry, we comfort them; when they get messy, we clean
them up; when they are hungry, we feed them.
The roles eventually reverse, usually when the parents are
really old. For the past week, though, our teenage boys helped out
their relatively young Mom and Dad as we battled colds that knocked
us out for a couple of days.
Take some blame and call me in the morning
Parents take care of their children, because that’s just what we do. When they cry, we comfort them; when they get messy, we clean them up; when they are hungry, we feed them.
The roles eventually reverse, usually when the parents are really old. For the past week, though, our teenage boys helped out their relatively young Mom and Dad as we battled colds that knocked us out for a couple of days.
Men are big babies when we get sick, moaning and groaning and acting like we are on death’s door when we have a cold and cough. We call ourselves tough, rubbing dirt in a scraped knee and hobbling through sports injuries. Give us the common cold, however, and we become whimpering, weak and whiny.
Every step is a chore; every cough is a punch to the gut; every sneeze is a pain.
Women are the fairer sex and also the tougher sex, insisting on battling through whatever nature throws their way. This past week, though, my wife and I bore the brunt of our colds together, feeding off each other’s misery by competing for who had the worse symptoms.
“I can’t breathe out of my nose,” she’d say.
“My throat is killing me,” I countered.
“I have a massive headache,” she offered, daring me to beat that.
“I can’t stop coughing,” I said.
Soon enough, we agreed to call it a draw. Neither of us was sicker nor better than the other. We both had a bad cold, we both had to miss work because of it, and we both had to rely on our teenage boys to nurse us through the misery.
I didn’t feel a bit guilty about asking my sons to get me a bottle of water or fetch me the Robitussin, because they are the germ-carriers who caught the cold and brought the cold into our house. They had run through their symptoms, earning care and comfort from us a week before, while their illness – subtle as it was – waited patiently to move from the teens to the 40-year-olds.
Vitamin C, Sudafed, Ricola cough drops, orange juice, soup; we requested it all from the boys, and they responded admirably and relatively quickly. They even seemed to cut back on the brotherly bickering during the height of our illness, or perhaps I couldn’t hear them because my ears were plugged up (I should have pointed that out to my wife in our battle for the worst symptoms.)
My wife, being the reasonable woman that she is, made an appointment with her doctor to get checked out and get some medicine for her symptoms, while I, typical dude that I am, chose the “wait it out/let it run its course” method that usually means lingering symptoms.
I made it back into work this week to write my stories and draw disapproving stares from my co-workers as my cough sprang up from time to time. One of them said she was beginning to feel a little under the weather, and that she blames either her Dad or me.
I say she should blame her Dad, just like I blamed my sons, so he will therefore feel obliged to take care of her if the illness knocks her out like it did to me.
Blame may not be the best medicine, but the guilt it inspires at least helps the medicine get delivered.
Adam Breen writes a blog at http://thebreenblog.blogspot.com and teaches newspaper and yearbook classes at San Benito High School. He is a reporter for The Pinnacle and is former editor of the Free Lance.
