Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Breathless

Posted September 07, 2007
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I am thinking in the hallucinatory fragments of the mortally tired. Do they make caffeinated eye drops? is one thought I have. Will Googling "coughing literally to death" scare or reassure me? is another. I am trying to work on my laptop while Birdy, sick, sleeps next to me on the bed. Her cheeks are so surreally pink that she looks like a cheap doll version of herself. Her chest rattles. Hi-ho the rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh plays tunelessly in my head. Every now and then Birdy raises a hand to brush the hair out of her face, and the hand she raises is shaking. When I sneak a thermometer under her armpit, she yells, "Who is that?" without waking up, then mutters something that sounds like a muffled string of obscenities -- "Rassum brassum," like Muttley in that old cartoon. Her armpit temperature is 103, which I translate first, tiredly, as 102 and then, correctly, as 104.

"Should I wake her up and give her something?" I ask Michael and he says, "I don't know." We've been trading these exact lines back and forth all night, like we're rehearsing an existential play about actors rehearsing a play about a sick child. "We should probably just let her sleep," he offers, and I agree.

I would not be just a nothin', my head all full-a stuffin', my heart all full-a pain. Every time Birdy coughs, my stomach clenches. My whole body clenches. There's a rhythm to it: In, out, cough cough cough. In, out, cough cough cough. Now that it's the light of day, I can live with the clenching. In the night it made me feel like my skin was going to split open and I would be reborn as a lizard to slither away into the trees. I thought about getting some earplugs, which I wanted but knew I would never use. That's part of our job as parents, isn't it? Not to turn away from our children's pain, whatever its cause or expression. This struck me as incredibly profound in the night. And actually it still does. I smiled, though, to remember when our first babies were newborn, my friend Cat wandering out in the night to find her husband asleep on the living room couch. "Yeah, well, her crying rattles me," he'd explained, about the problem with the baby, and she said, "Oh -- okay then. I'll stay with her. Because I love the crying." Birdy's coughing rattles me. Hi-ho the rattlin' bog.

At one in the morning Michael and I argued about whether or not to page the on-call pediatrician. Birdy had already coughed up about a quart of barfy phlegm and she was coughing and coughing and not able to stop coughing and barfing. Would she stop breathing here at home? Would we just end up in the ER for six hours, Birdy finally asleep only to be jabbed awake by a nocturnal phlebotemist? We decided to give it another hour. I washed her hair in the bath, and she sucked a lollipop and floated happily around like a sick little fish, humming something or other, not coughing. It felt like the best half hour of my life. But then the coughing started again, like her body finally remembered what the whole point of life is, which is coughing. At two, Birdy sipped tea from a cup, coughing and cozily wrapped in a towel to watch The Snowman. Even under the best of circumstances, the melancholic soundtrack of that video makes me feel like my children's death is imminent.

At three, finally falling asleep, I said, "Wait -- wait. I smell barf again," and when Michael said, "I think it's just my hair," I actually said, "Oh okay -- good."

Michael's brother Mark is visiting and he'd just been observing that I seem more relaxed these days. "Wow," I said. "Did I seem so unrelaxed before? I always feel like I fake it so well." He pointed out that, what with my writing about it all the time, it was kind of hard to miss my perpetual state of apocalyptic panic (not his exact words), but that now I seem so low-key. And it's true. Or was. Because now I'm in it again -- the panic. Right now. It's ten in the morning, and in another hour Birdy will finally wake up, coughing but happy. "Ha-poo-ah!" she will say, over and over: the sound of fake sneezing that made me laugh last night. We will go to the doctor, be sent home with an ambiguous diagnosis and a nebulizer. Even now I know it's probably just a virus. But I keep putting my palm on her hot, mumbling body and doing the thing which, if you didn't know me better, you would probably think was prayer.

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Breathless

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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