Sick Days

For the strong

When I was a kid, unless I had chicken pox or was violently ill, a common cold was not a reason my parents would let me stay home, and as I got older and they suspected I wasn’t sick but just didn’t want to go to school, I was always told, “you’re not sick. you’re fine. you’re going to school.” Obviously in a post COVID world, parents of young children operate a little differently, but the vibe at the time was SUCK IT UP. People get sick and they go on with life and they get better.

My mom, a couple days ago, confessed to me that she had a realization that in over 30 years, she’s never worked less than a 6-day work week. That only one day per week has been available for normal life stuff, not to mention fun and relaxation. Work 6 days a week, to cram in sleeping in, but also doing all your chores and errands, and also taking the kids to the park, and also praising the Lord above in 1 day.

I’m looking in the mirror and besides the fact that now even a sneeze sends a kid home for a week whether I like it or not, I haven’t gotten much better and in some ways, the lines are even blurrier for me than they were for mom. I do not have a 9-5 (or 8-7 in my mother’s case) where I go to an office and can turn off the life part of life or an evening or weekend where I can turn off the work part. I took Leo out last night to a grand opening of a local market and as we sat and had a free burger and a mocktail, I was consumed with responding to clients’ texts. Body temperature rising with the anxieties of never being able to do anything right, not for our clients, not for my kid, not for me. “I’m so sorry buddy that I’m always working. I wanted to have a fun date with you and here I am on my phone.” “Mommy why do so many people want Tiny Topanga?” “Haha I guess we’re a little popular, huh?” “Yeah.”

I’ve been trying a new thing where I stop pretending that everything is okay and that I’m okay or super strong and I don’t need time off, and I’ll take a half day to just give into depression. There are always a trillion things on my to-do list so usually, I try to get up, have a few minutes of time alone to read and collect my thoughts so that after I drop Leo off at school, I can attack my day head on. But I just don’t feel like a warrior at the moment.

Which is why I’ve been thinking a lot about sick days. I’ve told myself, “look self, if you had the flu, you’d cancel stuff and stay in bed, so you should do the same thing when you need a mental health day.” But the true truth is that I wouldn’t. I would still carry on with life and work and caretaking, maybe a little slower and snottier than normal, but I wouldn’t take a day off. The idea that it’s weak to take time off is so deeply ingrained in me that even while I know in my head that sick days are meant for rest, there’s no way convincing the rest of me to actually live like I believe that.

So I did an experiment a couple weeks ago when I came back from dropping Leo off and as much as I tried, I just couldn’t get myself to sit at my computer and work. I asked myself what half assed way would I take a day off if I was physically sick? Maybe I’d stay in bed but still respond to emails and try to get some work done but cancel calls. I decided to take a half assed mental health day and just give into the depression. I didn’t have the energy to be a superhero anymore so I put on Netflix, got in my PJs and brought my computer to bed. I actually got more work done than I would have if I just putzed around all morning telling myself I’d eventually start working, and I was able to refresh a bit. And at the end of the day, I felt like I could better handle an afternoon of entertaining a 4-year-old.

Yesterday when the weight of the world seemed too much to bear, I did my experiment again. I’d been saying to myself, no you can’t do that. You can’t watch TV in the middle of the day, what kind of lazy asshole are you? Pull yourself together woman. But I fought the urge to keep fighting and just gave in. I got under the blankets, put my computer on my lap and got a task done that I promised a client 2 weeks ago. I was still juggling at my date night with Leo, but at least I had a moment to stop pretending, which maybe helped me have the presence of mind to slow down in the moment and apologize. The phone went away for the rest of the evening (…that’s a total lie, but I tried). And I went to bed with Leo at 7:30pm because I just couldn’t take any of it anymore.

I woke up with a totally different outlook on life today than I did yesterday. I’m still aware that things are challenging right now and there’s an infinite amount of things on my plate, but I feel less defeated. Yesterday I felt like I couldn’t handle the heat of the kitchen and was fantasizing about ways out of all of it. And today I feel like I can handle the fire better than most people, but I’d just prefer not to get to my eyelashes burnt off, so I better start putting in some safety mechanisms for my own physical and mental health. It truly is a whole lot of stress for a whole lot things that don’t matter. At the end of my life, will I really be worried that the client got the wrong color butcher block or that I was very very late on a website I promised?

My mom never took sick days and as she enters her retirement era, the chance to start taking those days has passed. She’s not slowing down at all, but she is trying to recover all those years of only 52 days a year for life. I hope we’ll both grow in these different eras of our lives and learn that rest, both physical and mental, is not weak but needed for strength. And pretending we can do it all doesn’t help anyone, but instead limits us from living a truly rich life. My mom is a magical unicorn superhero so by default, I am too a superhero in training, but even Wonder Woman sleeps sometimes.