Last week, I used five of the hardest words in my own personal lexicon: "I'm taking a sick day."
These words did not issue forth from my mouth on the first day the cold from hell descended. Nor the second or third. Quite simply, I had too much to do. Besides, it was only a sniffly, gravelly, I can work through this thing kind of cold.
My faithful husband Dan tended to my heightened level of need as best as he could. He did late-hour runs for Airborne and NyQuil. He got me tissues laced with lotion. And he made sure that if I wasn't going to stop working, at least I need never step foot outside the house.
But on day four, he left on a business trip — and I decided I'd been sick long enough.
"Take it easy," he warned. "Of course," I responded, secretly plotting my full return to life as I once knew it...altered only by a pocket full of Kleenex. True to my word, the dog got walked three times a day. I went to my exercise class and had lunch with my friend afterwards. I took a meeting, shopped for groceries, put out the garbage.
A couple of days later, upon his return, Dan took one look at me and sent me straight to bed.
"You don't look any better," he pronounced. "You look worse. If you don't step away from that keyboard, I'm going to put crime tape around it.”
He wasn't kidding. I went to bed and slept for three days.
I'm feeling better now...and may well have gotten through this episode sooner had I kept my promise to Dan to take it easy a whole lot earlier. But I don't have that particular DNA in my genes.
Like many of our generation, we were the daughters of mothers of iron will. Forget about the take on positive thinking advocated by "The Secret," these women were forged out of the steel of the Depression and World War II. They didn't just pray for the outcomes they wanted, they commandeered them.
It wasn't that Mom didn't ever get sick. It was just that she always got the upper hand. She willed away everything from warts to back spasms to late-life depression. And in our family, letting illness slow you down always fell somewhere on the spectrum between "faking it" and "weakness."
When in the end she not only had high blood pressure and macular degeneration but kidney failure, I wondered how she was going to beat this one, too. If anybody were ever to show death who was the boss, it would have been mom. But of course, despite my doubts, even mom proved to be mortal in the end. To tell you the truth, while I love and miss my mom, it was a relief.
So anyway, Dan can take the crime tape down now. Mom's been gone close to ten years now. And having finally taken the sick day, I realize that while having an iron will is a wonderful legacy in regards to many, many things, sometimes what is called for — by even the best of us - is to let go.
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