The following is an excerpt from “Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink”
After our third child was born, my husband, Brian, and I, both full-time working parents entered a new level of busy. We created an elaborate schedule to try to get everything done, but things kept going wrong. The worst was when one of us got sick, because chances were, all of us would get sick, which meant being stuck in the house for a week or more, missing work, missing school, missing sleep, getting bored off our nut on Scooby-Doo cartoons.
We did everything humanly possible to avoid this. We took daily multivitamins. Brian began getting allergy shots once a week. At the slightest hint of a cold, I doled out herbal treatments to the kids like echinacea or homeopathic remedies that promised to boost their immune systems. Brian and I took the grown-up versions of these magical elixirs. One entire shelf in the kitchen was devoted to tinctures, packets of Emergen-C, plastic tubes of Airborne, and things I could barely pronounce like Oscillococcinum and thuja leaf.
We avoided sugar because I read that sugar compromises the immune system. We bought brown rice, never white, and ate wholegrain breads and Kamut pasta. I sprinkled brewer’s yeast on the kids’ yogurt and, for a special treat, let them lick white powdery acidophilus right off the spoon.
We canceled playdates if anyone’s forehead felt even slightly warm, and our friends did the same. Every working parent we knew was terrified of germs. We washed our hands as though we had obsessive-compulsive disorder, and when we went out, I carried lavender-scented antibacterial wipes in my purse. I eyed every doorknob and banister with suspicion. I flushed public toilets with my foot. I was worse than Howard Hughes.
And yet, after [our youngest], Jake, started day care and I returned to work, we got sick and sick and sick again. Chest colds. Unexplained fevers that lasted five days. Rashes that bloomed on the kids’ bellies and under their arms, then faded away. Head lice, which might infest only one of the kids but required us to treat everyone in the family and wash every towel, sheet, and blanket in the house.
Once, Martha got a stomach flu in the middle of the night. She tried to get to the bathroom, but didn’t get any farther than the top rung of the ladder on her bunk bed, where she vomited like a sprinkler head, somehow managing to hit all four walls of her bedroom. Really. All four of them. It couldn’t have been easy. The last thing she had eaten before bed was an entire pint of strawberries. It looked as if a dying animal had run around the room, bleeding on every surface.
Bronchitis. Sinus infections. Pinkeye. Walking pneumonia. Asthma attacks. Strep throat.
Whooping cough.
Whooping cough? The disease that was supposedly eradicated in the 1940s? Yes, that whooping cough. Both Jake and Brian got it. That one earned us a free house call from two very concerned nurses from the Centers for Disease Control. They shut down Jake’s day care for a week, so that even after he was well enough to go back, he couldn’t. In three months, Brian and I missed 10 days of work between us to stay home with sick kids. If the rest of the year turned out to be anything like those three months, we would miss more than 40 days of work. How could this be?
I had six paid sick days a year—generous, considering half of American workers don’t have any. But it wasn’t close to covering all the days one of our kids was sick. Of course, I could always use my vacation time, but I needed that to cover the random “professional development days” at school and holidays that only children and postal workers get (César Chávez Day, anyone?).
I asked our pediatrician for advice. She was in her 50s or early 60s and had seen it all. I trusted her implicitly.
“Why do we keep getting sick?” I asked during one of our many visits to check on a child’s lingering cough. “What are we doing wrong?”
“Oh, this is normal,” she said, as she tucked her stethoscope away in a pocket. “Children get on average eight to 10 colds and fevers a year.”
Eight to 10 illnesses a year? Per child? It was absurd and, yet, consistent with everything we had experienced. When we got home, I did the math.
Let’s say, on average, your kid has to be home from school one day per illness (some illnesses don’t require any missed days of school, while others can knock your kid out for a week, easy). That’s nine days per year, per kid.
Let’s say you have two kids, and their nine sick days a year overlap by half. That means you need to take an average of 13 to 14 days off a year to be home with a sick kid. Some years will be better, others will be worse. Of course, that number does not include the days when you, the parent, are sick. And no matter how many green smoothies you drink for breakfast, if you’re up all night with a sick kid, you’re bound to get whatever is keeping him awake.
My rule was to never, ever, take a sick day for myself unless I was throwing up. My frequent sniffles and coughs garnered sympathy from some of my coworkers and the stink eye from others.
Why are you exposing me to your germs? they wanted to say.
And I wanted to reply, I can’t afford to take a fucking sick day. I have three kids!
This was the silent conversation we carried out, time and time again, in my head.
Often, when one of the kids was sick and Brian was unavailable, I worked from home. It was generous of Stella to let me do this, but let’s face it. It sucks to field conference calls on mute while your feverish child is moaning on the couch. It just does. You feel as if you’re neglecting your kid when she needs you most, and you feel as if you’re letting your coworkers down, too.
Excerpted from “Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink” by Katrina Alcorn. Excerpted and available from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2013.
Katrina Alcorn is a writer and an experience design consultant. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and documentary filmmaking from UC Berkeley, and is a regular blogger at WorkingMomsBreak.com and for The Huffington Post. Since 1999, Alcorn’s day job has been leading design projects with corporations in a variety of industries to help them put technology in the service of people. This work has given her an insider’s glimpse into dozens of companies-from Fortune 500s to small startups-and she has spoken at more than a dozen design conferences internationally. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and three children.
Steve Cooper is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hitched. You can follow him on Twitter at @hitchedmedia.
