In Sickness and In Health

I am recovering from the flu.  I've been recovering since Wednesday.  And I'd already had this particular plague for seven days at that point.  I know I'm on the back side of it, because I no longer have the fever that created dark black circles under my eyes and a headache behind them, for days.  I woke up on that first Thursday at about 2 a.m., literally soaked through with sweat and freezing from the chills, and remember thinking, "I wonder if this is what sleeping in the rainforest is like.  At least here there are no snakes." 

I feel sure I have written about being sick before, but I know it has not been for a few years.  The winters when Noah was three and four years old I was sick more days than I was healthy.  He would get a cold for three days and I would get it for eight.  I think that the sleeplessness that comes with having a new baby is not nearly as crazy and surreal as the long-term exhaustion that sets in after a couple of years of parenting your heart out.  "Run down" doesn't quite cut it.  I refer to it now as having the marrow sucked out of my bones.  And for me, that exhaustion was eventually commonly accompanied by sickness.  Not a death virus like this one every time, but repeated colds, sinus infections, and occasionally a wandering knock-me-down flu. 

I've been exercising diligently at the Y for the past three years now, with occasional two week gaps due to aforementioned illnesses.  At least some of this diligence stemmed from someone saying to me, "Our bodies heal seven times faster when we are exercising regularly."  So for at least two years I both exercised and got sick a lot, surely losing more bone marrow all the while.  I never quite felt the healing thing she talked about.  

And now I know, without a doubt, why.  It was the other thing I've already talked about.  My parenting and work "balance" for those couple of years involved being with Noah all day until he went to bed at 7:30 p.m., and then often sitting down to a graveyard shift at the computer, sometimes working until 3:00 a.m. to get everything done.  Aside from being tiring, I can personally now attest to how demoralizing it is to be up working late when every other living creature in the house is sleeping peacefully.  I couldn't even get a cat to stay downstairs with me to keep me company.  My big cat Sid would just glare at me with a black look in his eyes and disappear upstairs, his tread heavy with disapproval.  

It is not exercise that makes the difference for me, but sleep.  Deep, uninterrupted, innocent sleep.  I've always been a good sleeper, and love to sleep.  It used to be a joke with my young friends that at sleepovers I could fall asleep anywhere, and within ten minutes.  I like to sleep long and often.  Many mornings my waking thought is, "I can't wait to go to sleep tonight."  And this was true long before I had a child. 

And so this winter, after coming out of an extremely busy couple of years of consulting and parenting, I began to sleep again.  Noah began Kindergarten in September, I finished two large and overlapping consulting projects, and despite my initial thoughts of immediately taking on some personal creative projects, I neglected all that and instead, slept.  I've now had six months in a row when on many nights I am asleep at or before 8:00 p.m.  I complete work during the daytime instead of retreating to my nocturnal work cave with a shawl and cup of tea to make believe it's really fine that I'm working until all hours.  I no longer dwell in darkness.  

And as I finally come out of the only real sickness I've had since October, and feel my energy returning enough to write this, I look at the clock and am so happy to see that it's way past my usual bedtime.