HOME SICK, HOMESICK

Called in sick today, not something I do very often, and with new presumably more liberal leave policies -- PTO -- which combine sick and vacation time, I must consider if it's real sick or mental health leave I'm requiring.

The trouble with being home sick is that you never (except for those now obsolete mental health days) get to enjoy it. Because you're sick. Mostly I've been sleeping, my malaise punctuated with very odd dreams. On an ordinary well day, you sometimes think, "If only I could stay home today and ... read, paint, cook, clean, create clever ring tones for the cell phone, maybe even sleep." But home sick, and all you can do is sleep. And read maybe, a couple of pages at a time. And I have been reading, Stephen King's On Writing, not a bad memoir and inspiring as I embark on trying to write a whole book. That's probably why my dreams were so odd though, channeling Stephen, I dreamed I was keeping the ashes of two of my friend's children in shoeboxes --this all seemed very necessary. I was taking care of them for her. But they kept falling out and getting mingled with dust bunnies, cat litter, and other floorsweepings, and each other, the horror. King would probably go somewhere with this, and I guess I am, here, in a way.

Sickabed makes me think of childhood. My own memories of such times are illustrated like Jesse Wilcox Smith's image, above, and the one accompanying Robert Louis Stevenson's poem about the little boy and his toy soldiers, below. I would play with bucolic little cows and horses and ballerina dolls in among the bed linens.

When sick, I was well indulged by my parents. My mother would regularly check on me, bringing tea and thermometers and wet rags for the forehead. When he arrived home from work, in that hour that separated day and evening for the family, my father would treat me to a new coloring book, maybe a fat 25 cent comic book "Special." One particular flu was made more bearable when he discovered a forgotten Christmas present in his desk drawer: a crystal radio. (He always treated me a bit like a boy. Who gives a girl a crystal radio kit?) He strung the antenna wire all over my bedroom and I listened to the outside world on a little plastic box that didn't need to be plugged in, with an earphone not so different than the one I use with my cell phone today.

I don't remember my parents ever actually calling in sick, although I'm sure my father must have. Everyone gets the flu sometime, and he was prone to sick headaches. I inherited his tendency to migraine, which used to incapacitate me from working for a day or so every six months. And of course until she returned to the work world when I was 13, my mother could have been sick every day, but she was always home. It is a problem for a housewife and mother; how do you call in sick?

So now, I long to be pampered when I'm under the weather. But my partner's response to illness is "Just leave me alone." Since we tend to treat others in the ways we like to be treated, this causes some issues. I have to demand the cool wet washrags; he has to tell me to stop fussing over him. Not a difference of the sexes, I think it has to do with how we were raised. He was a boy with an older and younger sister; my mother called me her "one and lonely." (I think she was the lonely one.) My mother was not so busy; his was.

Fortunately as adults, we learn how to take care of ourselves. Still, today, I'm just a little homesick.