Young children are cute and lovable; they afford you a sense of purpose and meaning in addition to frequent bouts of heart-exploding joy. So I heartily recommend having one, or two, or hell, even three . . . but not if you want to avoid vomit and the runs and snot and fever and sores and other revolting things that I’m too demure to mention in print.
When I had my first baby, known in these parts as Primo, I was naïve enough to think that good hygiene could ensure good health. The mere recollection of how neurotic I was exhausts me now. No one held newborn Primo without scrubbing up like they were about to enter an OR, and if I heard a sniffle from a visitor, I mandated the use of a surgical mask. That is, by the way, not an exaggeration. Before the baby was born, my cardiologist father equipped me with a handsome supply of surgical masks and gloves, the same kind he and my mother required visitors to wear when I was an infant. That such measures will necessitate therapy later in life is obvious. That they are far from foolproof—that came as a surprise.
To be fair, my germophobic strategy worked as long as I kept it up; Primo sailed through his first nine months without even a hint of congestion. But such hyper-vigilance takes a terrific amount of energy and is nearly impossible to maintain once a baby becomes mobile. Once Primo started crawling, I realized immediately I was fighting a losing battle.
I’d turn around and see Primo’s formerly pristine hands plunged into a mound of “dirt” in the playground—not good, clean country dirt but city dirt, which doesn’t contain soil so much as ash peppered liberally with glass shards, cigarette butts, dog feces, and decomposing rat remains—and I’d watch, horrified, as he lifted the handful of hazardous waste to his mouth. Then, of course, there was his predilection for open-mouth kissing; the objects of his affection were invariably toddlers with pendulous globs of snot hanging out of their noses or hacking coughs that promised pertussis.
So, the bubble burst, and the germs flooded in. Thanks to my early neuroses, Primo’s immune system was totally unpracticed, having led a life of leisure, eating bonbons on chaise lounges instead of battling bacteria. Consequently, my son got roseola, rotavirus, asthma, allergies, strep throat, ear infections, ER-worthy bouts of croup, and an endless parade of colds and stomach bugs.
The kid even got scarlet fever.
I bet you didn’t know that was still around. I, for one, thought it had been eradicated shortly after Little Women was written, along with the consumption. Turns out, scarlet fever is still alive and kicking, though significantly less terrifying now that you can treat it with antibiotics. When scarlet fever hit, I realized all my efforts to protect my little one from contagion were laughable.
Which is why with baby number two, Seconda, I gave up my neuroses cold turkey. I wasn’t some renegade hygiene hypothesizer—didn’t host chicken pox parties or anything. I just did away with the surgical masks and abstained from antibacterial gel. It was a good thing, too. Seconda fared considerably better than her Bubble Boy brother had in his early years. She was a hardy little sucker; her immune system wore steel-toed Doc Martens and carried brass knuckles.
Of course, even healthy kids get sick from time to time, particularly during cold and flu season, no matter how diligent you are with your vaccinations and your Flintstone vitamins. My second time around, I accepted this with aplomb. The coughs and colds and mysterious twenty-four-hour fevers, I learned to tolerate. What I could not abide was the Family-Wide Stomach Flu.
With two kids under three years of age, the stomach bug became a frequent visitor in our home, especially between October and March. If we were lucky, the stomach virus that hit would have a long incubation period that prevented us from all getting sick simultaneously. We were not always lucky, though.
Taking care of a kid with the stomach flu is no fun, and taking care of two is even less fun, but the least fun thing is taking care of them while you yourself have the flu. The misery entailed in such an endeavor cannot possibly be described in English (possibly in German, but I don’t speak that language). Only those who’ve experienced it firsthand can understand how unpleasant it is to have one child barfing on the carpet at the exact moment the other one cries out, “Uh oh! I need to change my pants!” while your own stomach begins to have a not-so-great feeling. I have been there, and I can attest that it’s a roller coaster that only goes down.
You know how people like to say that having three kids isn’t that much harder than having two? This is, clearly, a subject open to debate, but I think it’s fairly safe to assert that as far as caring for puking, pants-crapping kids are concerned, three is harder than two. So, when I had my third child, I decided that while I could be laissez-faire and low-key about germs in general—“Sure, you can get in the sandbox!” “Oh, go ahead and eat it; the floor’s not that dirty.”—protocol would change as soon as someone hurled.
At the first gag, I put the place on lockdown; I dust off the squirt bottle of Purell and break out the medical-grade disinfectant wipes. These, like the surgical masks, were gifted to me by my father and they come in handy when there’s a highly contagious virus afoot. Breathing in the fumes emitted by these wipes may knock you unconscious, but they take no germs prisoner.
First, I scour all the surfaces the afflicted child has touched, all the while dousing whoever ambles by with Purell. Then, I turn my attention to making sure the sick-o stay away from the other children.
“Let’s get you tucked in bed, nice and cozy,” I purr to my greenish-hued progeny.
“But I want to watch TV on the couch,” the sick-o protests.
“Oh no, don’t wear yourself out on the couch,” I reply persuasively, “Here, let me give you the iPad. It’ll be all yours.”
If the child appears in the kitchen, expressing hunger or thirst, I’ll gently take them by the sleeve, averting my face, and guide them back to their warm, cozy, secure convalescence area where all their needs will be attended to. Then I use an industrial-strength wipe to disinfect the doorknob.
In this way, I quarantine my children, in the gentlest possible fashion.
“Mom,” my convalescing son observed a few weeks ago when I intercepted a cookie he was trying to hand to his baby sister, “Do you know what you are?”
I didn’t, of course, but I was dying to find out.
“You’re a sick-ist,” he said. Even woozy and nauseous, the kid is clever.
“You’ll thank me when you don’t have to fight your sister for the toilet later,” I told him. “And I don’t even use the surgical masks anymore. If you ask me, that’s progress.”
You can read more of Nicole’s misadventures in Mommyland, and beyond, in her forthcoming memoir Now I See You (June 2014, St. Martin’s Press) and on her blog amomamok.com.
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