!!!

SUDAFED IS THE GREATEST CREATION EVER!

Seriously, you guys. Have you had a Sudafed lately? The real stuff, with the actual pseudoephedrine? The thing is like a miracle drug. My appetite, normally a raging monster that can sense refined sugar within two miles, has virtually disappeared. And while I still may be unable to smell anything, or even, you know, breathe that well, MAN DO I HAVE ENERGY.

I was down to only one dose when the cold set in, so a trip to the drugstore was in order. As I was showing my driver’s license to the pharmacist (you know, so they could record my name and track my Sudafed purchases and OH GEORGE ORWELL WERE YOU ON THE MONEY), I leaned toward her conspiratorially. “I don’t blame you for being careful,” I murmured, drumming my fingers on the counter while bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet. “This stuff is SO GOOD  it’s no wonder people buy it to make crystal meth.”

Luckily, she had just handed me the box when I delivered that last line, so I didn’t get to see the worried look on her face, or witness how she ran out to the parking lot to copy down my license plate number. I just drove on home, one hand on the wheel while the other popped those beautiful scarlet tablets from their cozy foil-wrap enclosure. “NO MORE FOIL FOR YOU, SUDAFED!” I howled at top volume. “IT’S ALL ME NOW!”

Sadly, the cold appears to be on its way out, so I’ve only had a couple of doses today. But I knew there was still a little bit of the magic coursing through my veins this afternoon, while attending Aura’s class pool party. Another mother casually asked if Adam and I were planning to have any more kids, a query that usually produces a frenzied mishmashed reply of GOD NO NEVER AGAIN WHY WOULD YOU EVEN ASK. But today, hyped on the good stuff and harboring enough energy to power a reactor and potentially take care of two children, I answered, “Maybe. It might be nice.”

On second thought, perhaps Sudafed should be illegal.

I could just keep singing and singing. You know why? Because singing is what you do when you are ECSTATIC and SUPER HAPPY and OVERJOYED. Such as when you kick your first soccer goal or fall in love or hold your newborn, or when you drive your mother’s devil-spawned, evil-incarnate cat back to Rhode Island, where he can torture the catsitter for a couple of weeks while Mom continues to rehabilitate up here with us. 

Of course, when Smokey Jo is at my mother’s house, he’s a different cat. I swear, I could wave the world’s most delectable leather couch in his direction, matador-style, and he wouldn’t even flex one claw. But here he tore and shredded and consistently pooped precisely two inches outside the litter box, usually while looking me straight in the eye. I would have almost admired his chutzpah if my faculties weren’t so clouded by pure, unadulterated hate and the fur he shed 23 hours a day. 

Presenting the household traitor. As well as He Who Shall Not be Named.

In other happy news, my mother received a glowing report from her hip surgeon during our short foray to the Ocean State, though she pulled a muscle last week, shortly before I twisted my knee on the garage stairs.  (Grace and coordination are not our strong suit. We are, however, geniuses at cribbage. It all evens out.)   

We were three generations of health in that doctor’s office, let me tell you. As my mother stumped into the office on her crutches, I hobbled feebly behind her, favoring my tender knee. An hour into waiting for my mother’s name to be called, Aura began her I-have-to-pee-but-refuse-to-do-it-anywhere-but-home routine, where she kind of drags her legs to prevent errant urine from escaping. By the time we left the waiting room, I caught the other patients sneaking sympathetic glances our way, the kind you’re prone to giving when you see a family made up entirely of cripples. I briefly considered capitalizing on the general atmosphere of pity and making a play for my own bottle of Tylenol #4 with codeine, but eh. My first preschool parent-teacher conference is tomorrow and I need to be SHARP. One cannot become too lackadaisical, or drugged, when it comes to discussing her child’s deftness with fingerpaints. 

Oh, yes–one more thing. I was glancing over the different search terms that have led people to this blog and was a bit taken aback. Think of how bitterly disappointed the person who searched for www.bangamommy.com must have been when he/she ended up here. (You’re curious now, aren’t you? I’ll give you a clue: It’s a .org, not a .com. Apparently mommy-banging qualifies as an organizational activity. Just so you know.)

As I sit here, ignoring my child in the name of recovery, do you know what I am thinking about? Sick days. I can’t believe I never appreciated them in my childless days, when I lolled in bed and moaned at regular intervals and demanded that Adam get me more orange juice and more Advil and then maybe more Hostess cupcakes because I think I read somewhere that the crème filling has restorative properties. (See how it’s crème, not cream? I was a French major, so trust me on this one. That accent over the e? It’s a direct translation of “healing.” )

I haven’t had a true sick day since Aura was born, as I am sure is the case for many other parents. It doesn’t matter if I’m overcome with the world’s worst nausea. Aura still wants to paint/use scissors/color/play Elmo Bingo. You know what I want to do? I want to do exactly what I used to do when I was sick: Watch Lifetime movies. Despite being a network I regularly ridicule in my spare healthy time, Lifetime has almost as much convalescent power as vitamin C. 

During pre-Aura sick days, I would lie on the couch watching it for hours, marveling at how different Tori Spelling looked in those days before she stole that Canadian woman’s husband and got her own reality show. Where else but Lifetime could I distract myself from nasal congestion by imagining what it would feel like to be an unwed teenage mother, or perhaps a career woman stalked by her lunatic ex-husband, or maybe a twentysomething plagued by an eating disorder that can be cured only by the selfless love of the next-door neighbor whom she never before noticed?

On these days, Adam would come home and greet me with something bordering on real alarm, so concerned was he about the tears streaming down my cheeks. Throwing down an armful of throat lozenges, he would rush to the couch and feel my forehead for a fever. ”No, I’m fiiiiiiine,” I’d blubber, wiping my nose with a ratty tissue and pointing at the television.  “It’s just this mooooovie. [sob] Those two are the parents and they just lost their seven-year-old daughter to an incurable blood disease.”

Adam would stare at the TV, his brow furrowed as he tried to catch up. “But why do they have all that baby stuff in their house then, if the daughter was seven?”

After pausing to bite into a fresh cupcake, I’d try to explain. ”Well, just as the daughter was about to die, the mother found out she is pregnant with another child. It’s like one life was lost, but another gained.” As my tears mixed with the chocolate crumbs stuck to my feverish lips, I’d scream, “IT’S ALL JUST SO BITTERSWEET.”

And then I’d feel better. Once you cry for eight straight hours, you really have no need whatsoever for Sudafed. All your nasal passages are clear. Plus you’re so emotionally drained that you sleep right through the night.

But I can’t do that these days. What am I going to do, turn on Lifetime with Aura in the room? I don’t even know how I’d begin to explain incest, never mind the fact that Lifetime Wife Hall of Famer Meredith Baxter-Birney is suddenly a lesbian. The very thought of it is exhausting.

You know, being sick sucks.

Now that I’m a mother, I have a brand-new appreciation for this time of year. Yes, watching Aura painstakingly unwrap every present in her stocking is camera-worthy. Of course listening to her make up her own never-ending lyrics to the tune of “Jingle Bells” is worth the price of admission. But what I’m really talking about are THE OPTIONS. Man. You can spend every single day of the Christmas season doing a new activity and never once hit up the Rainforest Café or the H1N1-ridden children’s room in the library or the toy section of the Dollar Tree. There are tree-lighting ceremonies, holiday-themed storytimes, crappy craft fair upon crappy craft fair–it’s like a never-ending parade of pine-scented events. And that, folks, is the true meaning of Christmas: ways to burn time.

Exhibit #1: Hanging garland on mailbox. If one is armed with the proper plastic tool, this activity can take at least 10 minutes. Maybe 12.

This may not seem like much to parents who work outside the home (although I know you all definitely have a deep appreciation of the subject on weekends), but to stay-at-home parents, discovering new reasons for getting out of the house and away from the morning’s ninth game of Chutes and Ladders is like crack. Really good crack, I imagine. Like if this was TV, you’d be buying it from the astonishingly good-looking drug dealer in the VIP section of the club, not the skeezy guy on the corner near the car wash. That’s how good.

Anyway. Moving on.

I discovered all this last year, when Aura and I began what I like to think back on as the Month of What It is Surely Like in Hell, or At Least the Really Undesirable Section of Purgatory. Shortly after Thanksgiving 2008, Aura and I came down with raging colds and prolonged cases of pink eye. Just for fun I also developed an inner-ear infection, whose single redeeming factor was that I could totally gross out strangers with its existence.  Before that, I had no idea how easy it is to freak out a grocery-store cashier. You mention “rupture” and “eardrum” in the same sentence and it’s like every single person in a Stop & Shop apron goes pasty. This is very satisfying when they’ve forgotten to scan your frequent-shopper card again. Makes you forget all about the knives stabbing you in the ear.

We interrupt for Exhibit #2: Shopping for and buying holiday socks. Easily takes up another 20 minutes, maybe 25 if you suggest putting on the good patent-leather shoes, too.

Between the two of us, Aura and I were pretty much blind and deaf for two-thirds of December. Yet we adjusted. Though it frustrated her, Aura got used to yelling into my good ear. I slowly became accustomed to wearing glasses instead of contacts, albeit glasses with a prescription four years out of date. Most days we weren’t fit for hobnobbing with others, so every fever-free evening I would plunk Aura in her car seat and we would drive around for an hour, trying to spot new Christmas light displays. It was a merry time, Aura announcing inflatable snowmen at top volume in the direction of my right ear, me weaving on the road, squinting wildly so as not to hit any carolers.

On days when we were feeling particularly frisky and non-contagious, Aura and I would truck on over to Target, where we would ooh and aah over the displays of moving wicker reindeer and point out the artificial Christmas trees we would have bought if Daddy hadn’t been so cheap and insisted on the shortish one with wonky boughs. Then we’d head to a nearby ice-cream shop and take out heaping cups of peppermint-stick ice cream.

It was during these quiet, nearly blind times that I began to fully appreciate the depth and breadth of the Christmas season.  So much to do! So much to experience together! If only we weren’t walking, breathing clouds of plague!

And so, in the throes of a rare spell of non-preschool-tainted good health, I enter Christmas Season 2009 with high hopes. Perhaps a little too high, since I believe Aura and I are scheduled to witness 12 tree lightings and pay visits to approximately 36 mall Santas. Such carousing will no doubt tax our immune systems to the brink. But, hey, we have all of January to lie in bed.

Exhibit #3: Riding the Holiday Express, aka decked-out commuter rail train. Meeting Elmo and then talking about it gets you 60 minutes minimum.