I'm Terrified of Getting Sick

Moms don't have time to puke all day....

I started feeling nauseous late last night after the kids were in bed. I don’t myself it was anxiety or gas….bloating, maybe? And then around midnight I started puking like that kid at the pie-eating contest in Stand By Me.

As I was shivering with the chills in bed and trying to not to head to the bathroom again, all I could think was FUCKKKKKKKK, I don’t have the bandwidth for being sick. No mothers of small children do. And I know I have it better than most. I have a supportive husband who works from home and a caregiver each day for the baby until 3:30. And yet the logistics of a day where I was down for the count were fucking bananas.

I’m writing this all doped up on Advil and Pepto. I slept until noon (thanks Nick and T and the Philadelphia school system). But I woke up to 100 hundred emails and a dozen questions about how our household would run in the afternoon. Who would get the four year old from school and get her to her first ballet class and where are the slippers….WHERE ARE THE SLIPPERS? Who would take over for our caregiver and grab the baby? Is the big boy play date still on after the half day (why with the half days….why……)

Nevermind all the work stuff that kept beeping at my from my phone. I don’t work in a world with paid time off. I work for myself these days and if I don’t work then everything just piles up and kills me the next day.

So the solution is to avoid getting sick. It really is the only solution. Or if we are sick we have to suck it up.

And my heart goes out to every single mother and woman in the world that has less of a support system when all they want to do is put their cheek on the cold bathroom floor and fall asleep. Getting sick always suck, but getting sick as a mom is a perfect hellscape.

Coming up on tomorrow’s paid subscriber substack…my ask me anything (the questions are juicy) and a reading of The Sicilian Inheritance for you audio fans out there. Plus a preview of my new true-crime podcast.