Good Luck, Charlie

It’s 2:20 in the morning. The second day of school is bearing down like a freight train. Alarm clocks in our house will blare out their bugle call exactly three hours and forty minutes from now. You'd think we’d be nestled all snug in our beds, yet here we are, me at the laptop drinking chamomile tea, and the kids on the couch, cuddled up in blankets watching the Disney Channel at ultra-low volume.

The Disney Channel is what I put on when I want them to go back asleep. A.N.T. Farm, Suite Life and Good Luck, Charlie are just a notch too sophisticated for their cognitive taste buds, especially late at night, and will lull them into la-la land, versus the more ani-maniac offerings of, say, Scooby Doo or Wild Kratts, which would have them wide awake and bouncing off the walls in no time.

Both kids came down with a good case of the sniffles this past weekend. It’s their first week in a brand new school, and we were hoping for healthy, well-rested kids to tackle the transition, but fate, of course, had other plans. That would make an excellent descriptor of the past two and a half months, by the way – what we imagined versus what we got – “fate, of course, had other plans.” I sort of giggle, thinking when they finally have me committed for stress, migraine headaches and lack of sleep, that'll be the first thing they write on my chart.

I should note, since the kids moved in with us, the four of us have had the combined immune systems of one small albino rat. People keep telling me, “your immune systems aren’t used to each other yet…you’re not in sync,” and I sort of believe that on one hand, and sort of toss it off as silly pseudo-science on the other. The theory intrigues me. We’re not like regular parents and kids. We haven’t had a lifetime to build up a matching resistance to each other’s bugs, germs and creepy-crawlies. They came with their well-established line of crap, we had strains of our own, we hit the ground running and all hell broke loose, magnified by the stress level of the Category 5 hurricane our lives have been since we started this process back in April.

For tonight’s round of stuffed-up noses, the kids requested the following things in this order: 

·         Apple juice

·         Kleenex

·         Vicks under their noses

·         Grapes (don’t ask me how grapes got on the list at 2:20 in the morning)

·         One of those drinkable strawberry yogurts they like

·         Vicks wiped off from their noses because it burns

·         More Kleenex

·         Milk

·         The volume turned up

What they haven’t wanted, of course, is the cough and cold medicine that might conceivably send them back to bed with less-congested nasal passages. There is exactly one palatable flavor in the world to Justuce and Justin, and that is Children’s Dimetapp Cold & Cough grape elixir. And when I say palatable, I use the word in its loosest sense because honestly, they’ll engage in a five-minute stare-down with each offered capful like they’re about to do battle with rattlesnake poison.

“That’s ‘scusting,” declares Justin, every time closes his eyes and slams it back like a shot of tequila, the quicker the better. Justuce sips hers in milliliters. In drams. In atoms. Eyes winced shut and nose curled up the whole time.

But at least they drink it. Anything else, anything goopier, is projectile gagged across the living room floor, all over carpets, all over pajamas, all over the coffee table, all over me, all over everything. In our new world that comes complete with sensory and textural issues, it’s watery-thin Dimetapp grape or nothing. If pharmaceutical companies had half a brain, all children’s cough and cold medicine would come in the form of gummy vitamins or Chicken McNuggets. And there better not be an aftertaste.

It’s the first week of school here, and Howard Nemerov’s beautiful poem has been haunting me for days.

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,

And when I leave him at the first-grade door

He cries a little but is brave, he does

Let go. My selfish tears remind me how

I cried before that door a life ago.

I may have had a hard time letting go.

My child has disappeared

Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live

To see his coming forth, a life away,

I know my hope, but do not know its form.

May the fathers he finds

Among his teachers have a care of him

More than his father could. How that will look

I do not know. I do not need to know.

Even our tears belong to ritual.

But may great kindness come of it in the end.

I doubt myself all the time. I don’t know how to take care of sick kids in the middle of the night because I’ve never had to do it before. I’m trying my hardest, and I’m sure I'm not supposed to do it with grapes and the Disney Channel, yet here I am. Justin is stretched out on his tummy, arms on the coffee table, legs on the couch. Justuce is propped upright, legs outstretched in the other direction. They both look drowsy. Please, God, let them be drowsy.

Between the two of them, they’ve used half a box of Kleenex, and the evidence is all over the floor. But nobody is sniffling, and in ten more minutes, after Wizards of Waverly Place ends, I’m carrying everybody up to bed so they can get a few more hours sleep before they have to be up and rolling for day two of the new school year.

It’s late, I’m tired and I don’t have the first clue if anything I’m doing here is right. But I love them when they’re sick and I hope they get better. Physically, mentally, I hope they get better.

I’m so new at this. And I’m so tired.

May great kindness come of it in the end.

"September, First Day of School" by Howard Nemerov, from "Good Poems" by Garrison Keillor, Penguin Books, 2002.