What is it about my son’s illnesses that plunge my life into despair, knock me into a pit for the duration? Four days at home with a sick four-year-old, four nights of not-enough sleep, his body sandwiched between my husband and me in the middle of the night, exuding heat, the constant bark of his cough punctuating my waking dreams.

“Just spit it out, cough it up and spit it out,” we told him Wednesday night as he hovered over the sink. His coughs have been from the center of his body, deep and hoarse. He let loose a fishing line of spit, coughed again, and threw up into the basin. It was very matter-of-fact, but he was concerned. "Will I need to go to the doctor now?" he asked. "That's not the bad kind of throw-up, is it?"

“I used to cough until I threw up when I was a kid, too,” I told him as I rubbed his back. “It happened to me all the time.” It did. I had a bum pair of lungs and was prone to bronchitis and middle-of-the-night asthma attacks. It didn’t help that my mother and I lived in a series of mildew pits, that I slept hemmed in by cats drawn by my little girl warmth. I was allergic to both mildew and cats and probably the cigarette smoke that twisted through my grandparent’s place. Used tissues would pile around me like snow drifts. I had a lot of “melodramatic” coughing fits.

The doctor said the asthma was nervousness or hysteria or some such nonsense. I remember turning it over in my mind, that these terrifying attacks, the desperate quivering of my lungs for breath as I sat up in the dark, were emotional. They were my fault, or maybe my mother's, for being a single Mom, for being a bit of a hysteric herself.

The unfortunate thing about running on fumes, about being stuck to the side of a sick boy for four days – I have no perspective. I wish I could tell you of the helpful doctor who helped me manage my asthma, who held out her hand for mine. There was no helpful doctor, though I did at least get an inhaler.

The truth is, I've never wanted to be helped, except maybe in my secret inner heart, and if you don’t want to be helped people generally don’t help you. Maybe it’s safer this way, but it’s also a drag, and when you’re in a funk it only drags you down further.

But give me two days of sunshine and maybe a week of health for the boy and the rest of us and I will leave the funk behind. I promise you that everything will be different, that I will smile back at strangers, will embrace friends and acquaintances. After the long gray winter, spring will come again and I will be filled with warmth and perhaps something resembling happiness. Or contentment. I'd settle for contentment, the absence of grayness.



Image: Kid in between colds, disguised as a mummy.
Prompt: Write about a time someone helped you

Tags: sick kid, writing prompt, Round Robin, asthma, complain, complain, complain, never-ending winter, spring, endless days of rain bring me down, winter of many illnesses