I have had to call our insurance company four times in the past two weeks about three separate issues. All ended up getting fixed, and I must say our insurance company has very nice customer service representatives, but this is new insurance for us as of six months ago and this is a nervous-making number of mistakes to have to catch and deal with.

Today Henry was supposed to have his allergy testing, and tomorrow an appointment with the doctor to decide what to do next. Instead the office called 90 minutes before the appointment to reschedule those two appointments for (1) a week from now and (2) MORE THAN TWO WEEKS FROM NOW, respectively. This is a significant and demoralizing setback. I am trying to see it big-picture-style as the blip it is, but I don’t mind telling you I had Cry Voice on the phone as she gave me the new dates.

A possible move update is that we decided to try to buy the house. We put in an offer contingent on something being fixed, so we thought we might very well lose the house to another buyer who would make an offer without the accompanying demand. But the seller accepted our offer. Our agent told us the seller can still start the process of fixing that thing, discover it is more expensive/involved than expected, and dissolve the contract without penalty. Also we are getting the house inspected, and we may find things during that process that we don’t like, in which case we too are allowed to dissolve the contract without penalty. This is why I say we decided to TRY to buy the house: I don’t want to feel as if it’s a done deal when there are still a lot of places where this could fall through.

I am almost entirely consumed now by house-related stress. Right now I am mostly coping by Not Thinking About It Too Much, which is also good in case it falls through (or in case it doesn’t fall through). I’m getting each thing done one at a time. Here I am, writing the escrow check, that’s all, nothing to do with any ENORMOUS HOUSE PURCHASE or anything. Here I am, writing the inspection appointment on the calendar, no big deal, nothing to do with anything that might happen next.

Here is what I would like to discuss in a distracting-from-home-purchase way: dog breeds. I have grown up with ONLY cats, and in fact none of my childhood FRIENDS even had dogs. (This was not on purpose.) I realize that dogs are individuals, but also I am given to understand that breed plays a big role, so that certain breeds are certain ways and you shouldn’t get a dog of that breed if those are traits you don’t like, even though each individual dog of that breed might have those characteristics to a lesser or greater extent. But, like, certain breeds Tend To Be more energetic and certain breeds Tend To Be less energetic, and so on. Am I getting this approximately right so far?

What I think might be fun/useful would be for me to say what basic variety of dog I am hoping to find, and have people yell out breeds that seem like a good match for some/all of the traits. Or say anything else about dogs. Let’s just talk about dogs in general for awhile. Like, don’t feel you have to have relevant advice in order to join the talking about dogs.

Paul says he doesn’t want a dog that, if he (Paul) were to strike a dignified pose near a forest, would make him look ridiculous. By this he means Corgis, Dachshunds, Basset Hounds, and anything small and fancy. His own preference is for a dog the size and basic dog-look (possibly not temperament—he doesn’t know anything about dogs either) of a Labrador Retriever or Golden Retriever or German Shepherd. (Do we capitalize dog breed names? I don’t even know that. It looks wrong either way I do it.)

But I don’t think we care very much what Paul wants. He technically has veto power but I’m planning to ignore even that, unless he gets very vigorous about it. This is MY dog. And I very much like the sort of dog that would make Paul look ridiculous if he tried to strike a dignified pose next to one. Dachshunds, Corgis, Basset Hounds. I will agree that I am disinclined toward the Small and Fancy category (Small But Not Fancy is fine), even though in many ways those seem like they’d be a good starter dog: it seems like they’re more cat-like, plus they’re small which seems more manageable. But they don’t appeal so far. Don’t let that stop you from recommending them: I am keeping all the possibilities open at this point.

The type of dog I have said over the years is my favorite, the type I would choose if I knew for a fact that it was something I could handle on all the levels a dog will need to be handled, is a Great Dane. But…I mean, they’re huge. HUGE. Does a person go from “no dogs at all” to “100-150 pounds of dog” like that? And how much would a person end up spending on dog food?? LOTS, I’m guessing. And what if I were walking the dog and it decided to take off suddenly? I very much doubt I could stop it from dragging me through the fields. It just seems like SO MUCH DOG. It might be better to start with something more medium-sized. I guess it turns out I’m PICTURING something more medium-sized, when I picture My Dog.

It is my impression that it is better to get a mixed-breed dog, is that right? Not only because of the cost (I have seen purebred puppies selling for multiple thousands of United States dollars EACH), but also I have heard that purebreds are more likely to have breed-specific health issues, whereas a mixed-breed dog is a sturdier creature—but I’m not sure how true that is. Also I’m not sure if there might be a difference between “purebred” (as in, a very expensive dog that is 100% a certain breed) and a dog that is, say, just Labrador Retriever but NOT a purebred (like, it might have some other dogs in its ancestry and you wouldn’t use it as a show dog, but if someone asked you what it was you’d just say Labrador Retriever).

Well. Okay, let me get to the part where I tell you what I would like. For my very first dog I would like an EASY dog. I want an adult dog, not a puppy. I would like a LAZY dog that is willing to go on walks or maybe play outside a little with the kids, but isn’t super-active otherwise. Do they ALL stop every few seconds to sniff things on walks, or is that something some dogs do a lot more than others? I would prefer LESS stopping, if there’s a choice. I would prefer a dog on the low end of drooling. I would like a QUIET dog, disinclined to bark; it’s okay if they bark when someone comes up the driveway, or if they bark a little while playing. I would like a dog on the LOW end of destructive. I would like a pleasant-companion dog who would like to hang out near me but doesn’t need a ton of attention. …I realize it sounds like I am describing a cat, but I feel as if there MUST be dogs like this.

Elizabeth had her scoliosis appointment with the big-city-hospital doctor. It took us over three-and-a-half hours to get there, with traffic and delays. We then waited TWO HOURS in the waiting room past her appointment time. We then waited forty minutes in the exam room. The doctor came in for FIVE MINUTES: he said yes, she needs a Boston brace, but she will only have to wear it twelve hours a day, so she can avoid wearing it to school if she prefers. He sent us over to the department that measures for braces, but they did not have time to see her. So we went home. The entire trip took eleven hours from leaving our house to coming back in the door.

If I were you, I would be suspecting all those numbers of being exaggerations. Like, probably Swistle is just venting frustration and it wasn’t literally a full two hours in the waiting room, and it was probably more like twenty minutes with the doctor. BUT NO. I assure you I am faithfully reporting. Then we had to wait almost ten minutes at the check-out desk, because the one task the doctor was supposed to have done in those five minutes we had with him (write a prescription for the brace) was something he had not done, so the receptionist had to go find him, wait for him to finish with a patient, and get him to write it.

Well. At least we got that one task done in the end.

I also brought Henry in for an appointment with an ENT doctor to see about his relentless sniffing. She said it looked like allergies to her, and now we have an appointment for him to get allergy testing. I’d thought it COULDN’T be allergies, because we’d tried Zyrtec, Claritin, Allegra, Flonase, and nothing helped. She said sometimes allergies manifest more in congestion than in itchiness/sneezing, and that Zyrtec/Claritin/Allegra don’t really help with that; there are decongestant versions of those medications, but she doesn’t generally recommend them (I don’t know if she meant for anyone, or just for kids).

Instead she recommends allergy testing, followed by allergy shots if the testing is as expected. So! Henry is about as pleased as you’d expect. He’s in the Bargaining stage: “If between now and the allergy testing I SUDDENLY stopped sniffing—would I STILL have to get the shots?” He is also nervous about the allergy testing itself. I had that done as a child, and what I remember about it is that the part where they put small amounts of substances under your skin was not so terrible, but the itching afterward was pretty maddening. Still, it’s temporary and endurable—and if the problem is NOT allergies, we’ve ruled out a whole big possibility.

I can tell the doctor is almost certain it IS allergies, though, and that furthermore she’s narrowed down what she thinks is the primary source. She said, “Do you have pets?” and I said we had three cats. She said, “…Do you like them?” It reminded me of one of my favorite family stories about my mom. My brother and I were both diagnosed as children with cat allergies, and my brother also with asthma. The allergy/asthma doctor said to my mother, “You will need to rehome the cats.” She did not argue with him, and she nodded, wide-eyed and compliant. Nevertheless catching something subtle in her manner, he repeated even more firmly, one finger held out warningly: “The cats MUST go.” Again she nodded. He said some third emphatic thing about the cats; she nodded again; he sighed. We did not get rid of the cats.

It seems odd to me that we’ve had cats for Henry’s entire life but he’s only started having trouble the last year or so. Apparently that can happen—but, for example, Elizabeth had allergy testing awhile back, and it showed she was quite allergic to cats, but she doesn’t have any trouble with them. The allergist said that by being around cats since birth, she got the equivalent of allergy shots: her immune system got trained to deal with them. But I guess that is not the way it happened with Henry, if indeed he turns out to be allergic to cats.

Well. The immune system is a neverending mystery.

My brain is almost fully occupied with frets and excitements about the the possible new house. It is such a consuming topic/situation. I find it helpful to use Coping Thoughts such as “People move ALL THE TIME” and “We would not be the first people to make a real estate mistake” and “This is a NORMAL LIFE EVENT.” Also right now we are in the delicate situation of wanting to be excited about the house (if we do buy it) but not wanting to get TOO excited (in case we don’t/can’t buy it), so I am adding “It happens A LOT that people want a particular house but it just doesn’t work out” and “There would in fact be some RELIEF involved if that happened.”

Paul meanwhile is NOT fretting. He has entered Full Love Phase about the potential new house. He is almost frantic at my reluctance to make fast giant decisions. I think at this point I could say “In addition to the housecleaner and the dog I want a ‘pool boy’ and maybe even also a pool,” and he would say “Yes yes yes yes fine can we call the agent now??”

It has made me think a bit about Couple Dynamics. In our marriage, it seems to me that I get my way about almost everything, because those are the things Paul doesn’t care about; but then when he DOES care about something, he always gets his way. I am trying to think of a time when he wanted his way about something and didn’t get it, and nothing is coming to mind, though I guess I would have to ask him about that.

Another issue at play here is that I am the Sensible Financial One in our relationship, even though you might not know it from all the stuff I don’t need from Target. But I’m the one who handles the bills; I’m the one who tries to shop carefully and find good prices to save us money over the long run; I’m the one who pushed hard for vigorous early payment of student loans; I’m the one who had us make financial decisions based on one income even when we had two incomes (because the plan was to go to one income once we had kids); I’m the one who said we should send tax refunds and other windfalls directly off to the mortgage company. It’s one of my major contributions to the shared work of our household. But Paul is the one who earns the bulk of the money.

You can probably see how these two dynamics together can make things a little tricky in situations where a decision is heavily financial but it’s something Paul cares about. I don’t want to give the impression that Paul is pressuring me or trying to force me into something I don’t want to do, and I am all set on discussions of shared finances with an at-home parent and so forth. It is more that it is something interesting to think about, along with how weird it is to make most of the major decisions of one’s life (whether to have children and how many to have, where to live and how) WITH another person.

We just watched Isle of Dogs and it was one of the most Wes Andersony things I’ve ever seen. Not appropriate for little kids, but good for older ones. There were some scenes we all went “URRRGGGG” about, like cutting up still-alive seafood, and pulling out something stuck in someone’s head (the person in question was okay) (both times) (and all animated, not real-life). Dear heaven. But really good, especially if you like Wes Anderson films, which I mostly do.

Also a good movie for warming hearts toward dogs, which brings me to my next topic. A lot has been happening here. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but Paul and I have been casually house-hunting for a couple of years. Nothing formal. Nothing decided. More like, let’s just scope out the sitch, just for fun. Just going to Open Houses or whatever, and then saying, “It’s nice, but not enough to motivate me to want to move” and/or “Sure, it’s good, but I don’t feel like I WANT it.” Subscribing to emails that let us know about new properties listed in our town. Etc.

We have lived in our current house for 17 years, and we bought it because in five months of searching, with me increasingly pregnant with our second child, it was the third of three houses in our area our agent could show us in our one-income range, and one of the others had water damage and only two bedrooms, and the other one had three bedrooms but an open concept (toddler access to EVERYTHING) and a terrible rickety add-on and the kind of stairs where a child could slip between steps and no real yard. So we bought this one, which had a terrible kitchen and an appalling bathroom and was so smoke-damaged by improper woodstove ventilation that you could see the outlines of what used to be on the walls—but it wasn’t about loving the house, it was about choosing the only sensible/possible thing that came along, and this one had three bedrooms and a good yard and potential for building stuff into the unfinished basement. And good thing we did, because I think we were the actual literal last people in our area to buy a house before the housing market went WHOOSHING up, and then soon after that there were condos selling for what we paid for our house, and then there were condos selling for half-again more than what we paid for our house.

Anyway, this house has served us well, thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of my Handy Supreme dad who, when we got Surprise Twins, added two small bedrooms and a multi-purpose room and a bathroom to the unfinished basement, and replaced a bunch of the squirrel-gnawed 1960’s windows that used to get a thick layer of ice on the INSIDE of them every winter, and knew how to replace the outlets that started SHOOTING SPARKS (!!!) shortly after we moved in, and quietly transferred over from his house to our house a bunch of shelves he’d built, and so forth.

And the thing is, now I DO love the house. But I didn’t mind Just Looking at other houses, because I felt like we didn’t get our fair share of Looking back when we WERE looking, and looking is fun. Here is the problem: Looking eventually led to Finding. But now that it has been Found, I have had multiple panicky weepy fits about Not Wanting To Move, Why Would We Want To Move, I Love This House, I Planned To Die in This House or Else in a Nursing Home Directly From This House, etc., combined with Wanting The Other House and daydreaming about the other house and so forth.

It is an OLD house. It has horsehair plaster walls, which I had never heard of. It has a barn; Paul says there will not be mice, because the barn does not store food, but Twitter confirmed what I thought, which is that old barns Have Mice. It has a loft so large I would never have to throw anything out; I could easily store a fully-decorated-and-assembled fake Christmas tree if I wanted to. I could store a Toyota if I wanted to. TWO Toyotas. THREE.

The house is big. The house is old. The house has a steep driveway, when we specifically did not want a steep driveway. The house has weird bedrooms, where two of them can only be accessed by walking through other bedrooms. The house has some of those weird old-house closets that aren’t even wide enough for a hanger; they would basically fit a broom and dustpan, nothing else. The house has two or three (I lost count) Weird Old Little Rooms of Uncertain Usage (to be converted to SWISTLE LAIR((S))??). It is the kind of house where you open a door and there is another room, and another room, and two more rooms, and a little staircase off that room, and a loft off that staircase, and a barn off that loft, and another room off the barn, and you lose track of what is what and what is where. (This is what I have claimed to love/want.) There are not really enough bathrooms for the number of bedrooms, but we are used to that and it’s a half-bath more than what we have now; and the electricity has been updated so there are lots of outlets. Also there is central a/c, and a kitchen island that could double as a guest bed. It is within walking distance of many things it would be nice to be in walking distance of, such as a park and a library and a charming shop I never go to because the parking is impossible.

Here are my biggest concerns, which are two sides of the same concern:

1. We will move, and we will hugely regret it. We will THINK we will know what we are getting into, but we are accustomed to 1960 House Problems, and this will be 1820 House Problems, and we will be so sorry. Any new house comes with a batch of Unpleasant Surprises, but this will be more like The Money Pit, with hysterical laughter and a bathtub falling through a floor and us basically being in way over our heads and now we can’t get out and we can’t sell it to anyone else because no one else is as foolish as us.

2. We will move, and we will hugely regret it. We will THINK we don’t want to live in this house anymore, but it will turn out it was the perfect house for us, and we will miss it SO MUCH. We will PINE for it! But it will be too late! Someone else will own our dear little house!! We cannot have it back!! They can do anything they want to it!! I had a literal nightmare about this.

We talked about it many times and I cried four times and then we got pre-approved for a mortgage in case we decided we wanted to buy it. Paul, who has been my boyfriend for 23 years, does not try to talk me out of Fret Fits. Instead he tells me Stories. In this case, here is the Story he told me: “We will not sell our old house right away. We will keep it for several months to get it ready to sell. And if we hate the new house and wish we hadn’t bought it, we can move back. It would be an expensive lesson—but we would NOT be stuck forever in a house we hated, and at least it would let us get all the floors refinished and walls/ceilings painted.” (The floors have needed refinishing for a decade. The walls/ceilings have needed repainting for about as long. But how do you get that done when you live in the house?)

There is virtually no chance we would actually move back; that would be a story like when people get divorced and then remarry a few months later. But this is just a Story. It is for comfort. The purpose is to Soothe, not to Solve. It is a Story I can tell myself when I am panicking. It works. A fear of Not Getting the House has creeped in, and is nudging aside the Fear of Getting the House.

But he wants to move more than I do. And he wants this house more than I do. And so I have made two Bargains. First bargain: if we move (to ANY house), we get a housecleaner every other week, so that the house stays clean and does not descend into the grubby clutter that makes me feel as if it’s too late to hire a housecleaner. Second bargain: if we move (to THIS house, which has an invisible fence and a dog run), I get a Dog Option. We don’t necessarily get a dog—but I get the OPTION to get a dog, with limited veto power on his part in regards to breed and/or particular dog. I have wanted a dog for years, and he has said no to a dog for years—but it’s possible that I only say I want a dog because I know he’ll say no. My new friend Morgan ran into this with begging for a cat: it was safe to do so, because she knew her husband would say no, so she begged and wheedled for years in comfort. But then one day he said yes, and she didn’t know WHAT to do. So I didn’t bargain for a dog; I bargained for a dog OPTION. I get a dog if I want a dog.

My terms have been accepted. We’re looking at the house again tomorrow.

I have returned from taking Rob back to college. More on that later. But right now: road-trip snacks. I’ve taken several road trips this summer, which has given me extensive opportunity to test road-trip snacks. Here are the ones I find I am most interested in eating, while other items I might THINK I would want sit unopened and unloved.

Cookie category:
Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies
Nilla wafers

Chip/cracker category:
Better Cheddars
Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips
regular Pringles

Snack-cake category:
Entenmann’s Little Brownie Bites
Entenmann’s Brownie Chocolate-Chip Minis
Little Debbie Strawberry Shortcake rolls

Candy category:
Caramel M&Ms
Almond M&Ms
Mike & Ikes (10-flavor box + 4-flavor box + Jolly Joes, mixed together)
Haribo Gummi Fruit Salad

This is of course in addition to food at stops: doughnuts, pizza-by-the-slice, frozen mocha coffees, ice cream in all its delightful forms.

I am very interested to know what your favorites are.

If you are in a bit of a tizz over a variety of things, may I highly recommend getting together with a group of girlfriends and having wine and a lot of snacks? I can’t even express how reviving it can be. This morning I am a new, freshened Swistle.

I would like to tell you about this little gentleman, which I debuted at last night’s get-together:

(image from Target.com)

One of the appetizers I like to do is a couple packs of Hillshire Farms little beef smokies cooked in a frying pan on low/medium for awhile so they get all nice and toasty-looking, plus a container of creamy/spicy mustard sauce to dip them in. I make the sauce by mixing mustard, mayonnaise, and creamy horseradish sauce; it’s a slapdash thing, but if I were making about 3/4ths cup of the sauce (which is gracious plenty, but if you make less it looks as if there isn’t enough and people are hesitant to take any), I’d guess I do like half mustard, half mayo, and a good tablespoon or more of the horseradish sauce. Creamy/spicy ketchup sauce sounds gross but is also really good: for the same 3/4ths-cup amount, I’d do mostly ketchup but maybe two tablespoons of mayo, and then a good solid squeeze of sriracha or some other spicy sauce, maybe TWO good solid squeezes. Bring a little box of toothpicks for anyone who feels weird just picking the hot doggers up with their fingers, and bring a spoon for each sauce so people can put some on a plate and dip each little hot dog as many times as they like.

ANYWAY. Benefits of this appetizer: surprisingly good, very easy, keto-friendly. Downsides: difficult to figure out how to keep them warm. Before last night, what I did was heat a baking dish in the oven, and then transfer them to it when they were done in the frying pan; then I put the hot baking dish on a towel in a cardboard box for transporting, and brought a hotpad to put the baking dish on at the host’s house. But…that didn’t keep them much warmer for much longer. So I bought the little crockpot to see if that would be better.

Here is what happened: the little crockpot DID keep them warm the whole evening. BUT: it made it harder to serve them (the crockpot had to be plugged in, of course, and then you had to go over to the little crockpot, remove the lid, get out some little smokies which were hard to see against the black interior of the crockpot, replace the lid), and ALSO it continued to cook them. I didn’t notice until I was on the way home and snitched a little smokie for the road and it was very, very cooked: dry and shriveled and dark. No good.

So. Possible solutions include: cooking them less ahead of time (but then they wouldn’t be Just Right at the beginning of the evening when most people are serving up); putting them in a sauce in the crockpot; unplugging the crockpot after the first hour; saying never mind about the crockpot for this particular appetizer and figuring out a different way to keep them warm longer; find a different appetizer that works better in the crockpot.

I am in one of my periodically-occurring tizzes. I think I can trace at least some of the root causes of this one:

1. Rob going back to college, and some accompanying turmoil: he made a last-minute change in his housing plans that meant he suddenly needed some furniture, and then he waited until the last minute to choose some.

1a. Also the last-minute change in housing plans ITSELF is tizz-contributing.
1b. And he doesn’t yet know what he’s going to do about a meal plan.
1c. And it’s been hard to know how much to offer/remind/help, as the parent.
1d. I don’t want any advice on 1c. right now. (“I KNOW RIGHT??” is okay, though.)

2. There are like five phone calls I need to make. There is the stress of needing to make the calls, and also the stress of putting them off, and the stress of why is this so hard when it shouldn’t be.

3. We got a form from our insurance company wanting to know if William’s knee injury could be blamed on someone else. It cannot, and we already said so at each doctor appointment, where they verified that it was not an employer situation or whatever. The form required a LENGTHY online response, including sections on how many times in the past William had had injuries that could be blamed on someone else (NEVER), and how many times we had gone to court for such injuries (N/A!!), and had questions I couldn’t answer (such as exact date of injury) but also the form wouldn’t let me proceed without answering them. It was very frustrating, and then afterward I thought of something I answered incompletely so there will probably need to be a follow-up. And the whole thing is stupid because THE INJURY CANNOT BE BLAMED ON SOMEONE ELSE.

4. Henry is doing this SNIFFING and THROAT-CLEARING routine and it is hard to explain just how insane those sounds can make a person over time. Like, I do okay all morning, but shortly after lunch, when I have been listening to three sniffs per minute for six hours and saying “Henry, blow your nose” or “Henry, pay attention to your sniffing” for six hours, I can get screamy. And I can’t tell if he WON’T stop or CAN’T stop. I can’t tell if this is a tic/habit/compulsion or a physical issue that requires treatment. And I so so so don’t want to launch him down an invasive treatment path if this could be solved by him breaking a tic/habit/compulsion—but he isn’t putting much if any effort into cooperating with the methods I’ve found for treating a tic/habit/compulsion, so I can’t TELL. And then I think, “That’s it, I can’t stand it another second, I’m taking him to an ENT doctor”—but that means a series of phone calls (appointment, referrals) so then I don’t do it (see #2).

5. Henry is starting middle school. I’m not actually stressed about this, but I’m friends/acquaintances with a bunch of people whose firstborns are going to middle school, and THEIR stress is getting me agitated. They’re asking me a million questions I don’t know the answer to because none of those things turned out to be issues. I’m getting a taste of what it must be like to be friends with ME.

My cholesterol has always been low—unjustly low, according to current nutrition recommendations. That is, I was not particularly eating the currently-recommended low-fat, high-fiber diet with lots of grains/fruits/vegetables and no caffeine/alcohol—and yet my cholesterol was always well below 200. I worried that switching to a diet that is basically meat, cheese, eggs, cream, and butter, with low levels of vegetables and no fruits/grains, might change that. Instead, after a year on keto (and no increase in exercise), my cholesterol has dropped still further and is lower than I ever remember it being, by about 50 points. In case you were wondering/worrying about this, as I was.

We have been cramming the rest of summer into the rest of summer, though for poor William that involved knee surgery followed by a wisdom-tooth extraction (which went very similarly to Rob’s experience, except we have different insurance now and it unexpectedly PAID FOR IT). I am looking forward to everyone being back in school—especially Rob, since I will be driving him, and I have a “no keto on road trips” policy that means I will soon be eating pizza and Taco Bell and Sausage McMuffins and a Wendy’s #6 combo and Entenmann’s mini-cakes and Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips and Haribo Fruit Salad and frozen mocha coffees and Mike & Ikes.

I am finally feeling better. It was one day of The Fairy, then one day of feeling very queasy and sick but no more throwing up, and then one day of feeling weak and tired and just a little queasy. This morning I still wanted to lie down after taking a shower, but only for a few minutes, and by lunchtime I felt basically myself again.

Every time I’m sick, I spend some time appreciating how good it feels to NOT be sick, and wishing I could sustain that appreciation. But instead, it’s like when my washing machine was broken and it took a couple weeks for the new one to arrive, and I was going to remember that feeling and be so grateful for the loveliness of having my OWN washing machine in my OWN basement—and I DID feel that gratitude, for about a week. And then The Joy of Laundry was over, and it was back to sullenness and resentment.

Paul is sick now. And I think I have probably complained about this too many times over the years, but he really is terrible when he’s sick. Like, terrible enough that I have thought with great fear about how it might very well happen that he will become chronically ill later in life, or get some lengthy disease, and then it will be too late to leave him because it would seem so heartless to leave a sick spouse. Also, I remember something about that in the vows, which now seem like those long contracts you sign without reading before using an app, but you don’t really think any of that stuff is going to pertain to your future with the app—but then one day the app gets sick and you have to spend the rest of your life with this app you liked a lot until it got sick and was teeth-clenchingly terrible all the time, definitely way worse than the contract-writers were thinking of when they wrote that part of the contract—or maybe EXACTLY as bad as the contract-writers were thinking, and that’s why they cleverly wrote it into the contract. There are LOTS of apps I would LOVE to still be married to even if they were chronically/lengthily ill, because chronic/lengthy illness is not the issue; the issue is how PAUL IN PARTICULAR behaves when he has even a stuffy nose, and how I cannot tolerate that behavior.

He moans and groans and gasps and pants and whimpers and makes whining/sighing sounds; no one has ever endured so patiently the unendurable torment he is enduring. He speaks in a weak, hoarse whisper, using as few words as possible to preserve his small reserves of strength; sometimes he has to pause mid-sentence to swallow painfully, or to briefly close his eyes. He asks pitifully to be brought a blanket. A thermometer (he always thinks he has a fever). A drink. A warm shirt. All sorts of other things he could have gotten for himself when he gets up to use the bathroom a few minutes later (shuffling, barely moving his feet, head hanging down, perhaps bracing himself against a wall). He gives me many detailed updates on how bad he feels, and he wants many consultations about what might make him feel better (do I think some soup would help? or would crackers be better? he’s not really sure he can eat anything; what do I think about an ice pack?). He is far more pitiful and childish than any of our five children have ever been, even as infants.

And I hate it. I HATE it. I can’t bear to look at him when he’s sick, with his tragic face and pitiful panting mouth-breathing. I can’t bear to hear all the ridiculous whimpers and groans, or listen to his hoarse/weak/pitiful voice, or deal with his infinite need for Mommy Attention—which, when he wants it from ME, feels revolting. I can’t stand the MELODRAMA of it. It makes me want to RUN AWAY. And I want to re-iterate here that the problem is not SICK PEOPLE; the problem is PAUL WHEN HE IS SICK. When I was doing my eldercare job and one of them became sick, I was sympathy and soup and medicines and cool washcloths and checking in to find out how they were, because NONE OF THEM were MELODRAMATIC about it. They were just sick! Sickness IN GENERAL activates my urge to help: I LIKE bringing ice packs and TV remotes and medicine doses and more pillows! I LIKE it! But not when the person is being A GIANT MELODRAMATIC BABY AND NO ONE ELSE HAS EVER BEEN SICK LIKE THIS BEFORE AND NO AMOUNT OF ATTENTION IS SUFFICIENT. He doesn’t need my assistance; he just wants an audience for his Illness Performance.

There is no need to have passed Psych 101 to guess that Paul’s mother felt differently about things. She told me she once held Paul’s hand while he slept, sitting there uncomfortably for hours, because he was sick and wanted his hand held. He was IN HIGH SCHOOL when this happened. He is incredibly lucky that after hearing this story I ever had sex with him again. He is further lucky that we were already married when his mother told me the story. I am sort of kidding, but I am not entirely kidding. In fact, if you ask me about it while Paul is actively whimpering in the other room, I’d say I’m not even sort of kidding: he is severely lucky on both counts.