PRESCRIPT:  There are some new readers to this blog, and I’d like to say two things to them.  1) Welcome! and 2) No, I don’t usually write this much about illness and disease. However, last night the universe decided to continue its recitation of the Aristocrats on my behalf by infecting me with my daughter’s stomach flu.  I haven’t thrown up since I was ten years old after eating a chicken dish at a greasy spoon in Chicago’s Chinatown, but I did so with both the skill and dedication of an Olympian last night.  Eww.  Since I’m now quarantined in the bedroom with a plastic tupperware and a laptop, it’s given me a chance to go through the random bits of detritus that are floating, unfinished, through my blog.

The following is a post that I started a couple of months back when my wife was saddled with the flu for over a week.  During that time I did double-duty, working from home and taking care of the kids, one of which ended up on antibiotics with an ear infection at the same time.  It was a week that stretched both my parental acumen and my relationship with my wife, and this seems as good a time as any to finish the damn thing.

No one who reads a newspaper or watches CNN can avoid hearing about the swine flu/H1N1, the OMG-WTF-PAND3M1C that’s been percolating across the globe for the past couple of years.  During that time it moved from its innocuous origins Out There ™ – you know, that place that nobody cares about because it’s Not Here ™ – to my daughter’s preschool classroom, a circumstance that has caused us no small matter of angst.  But that’s not the point of this post.

The kids didn’t get the flu.  I didn’t get the flu.  My wife did.  And in a lot of ways, that’s infinitely worse.

But you know what?  It’s HARD.  It’s incredibly difficult suddenly being thrown into the shark-infested waters of single-parenthood without any time for preparation.  The childcare support network that we’ve been blessed with suddenly evaporated that week, which left me with a sick spouse, two young children to care for, work responsibilities from home, and very little help.  None of which is even remotely the fault of my wife, who ended up suffering more or less alone, quarantined in her room with books and a laptop while her children were prevented from seeing her for fear of exposure to the fucking swine flu.

So in a lot of ways this post is also in part an apology to my wife.  The whole purpose of  being an enlightened dad is to avoid that old chestnut that men aren’t capable of being nurturing caregivers while at the same time being, well, men.  Over at DadCentric, some recent posts have been calling out not only the pop culture cliché that “good dads are hard to find,” or the pointing out of celebrity fathers doing what they should be doing as some sort of freakish Hollywood sideshow, but also the self-deprecating daddy-blogger (a trope that I myself have all-too frequently fallen into here) who inadvertently perpetuate those same stereotypes in the thinly veiled guise of being clever.  Guilty.  So what does it say about me that I had so much trouble taking care of my kids for a full week?  What does it mean that, in fulfilling what is expected of me as one half of a caregiving team, I nearly put my fist through the wall on several occasions? That parenting was so damn hard that I actually cried during the kids’ nap times on more than on occasion that week?

But see, here’s the thing.  If this situation were some sort of a cosmic test, some karmic final exam of my parental abilities in the face of enormous stress, then… I passed.  Not by much.  I’d give myself a C-minus – a “gentleman’s C” if grading on a curve.

Could I make it as a single dad?  Yeah.  Would I want to?  Absolutely not.

The experience left my wife and I at loggerheads.  She was angry at me for not taking more and better care of her when she was infected, and I was angry at her for (to my eyes) not once saying thank you for the sacrifices I made this week.  I didn’t want to spoon-feed her tea because I didn’t want the damn flu… but I put the welfare of my two healthy children on a higher pedestal than I did my sick wife, the woman who bore those two children. She didn’t express her gratitude to me in an overt way… but it’s incredibly difficult to do so when you feel so sick and it’s like the feeling will never go away. By the end of the week, we were so irritated with each other for these stupid perceived slights that we were reduced to sending nasty e-mails to each other — I from the downstairs futon (the Realm of the Banished Husband) and she from our bedroom. Ahh, marriage.

She apologized first, which she maybe shouldn’t have done, but it was appreciated.  And this, then, is my apology to her for my failure to understand that even the infected need comfort from the stressed-out single dad.  I get that now.  As hard as it was, I could have done more.  And I’m sorry.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta and the pundits on CNN love to talk about the “sexy” aspects of a pandemic like this one.  I get that.  It’s a fascinating study into how viruses originate and spread in our global economy.  But rarely do these reports get down to the ground level and see the impacts — both direct and secondary — that these viruses cause to the people who are infected.  With time and reflection, the pundits have concluded that H1N1, while most certainly a pandemic and cause for concern, was “not that serious” of a virus in the grand scheme of things.

On behalf of my family, I beg to differ.

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