The Kid Sickness Cycle
writing toward mental verdancy
I have Capricorn Rising and Saturn exactly square Venus, which is another way of saying I want to be reliable, and I want to be seen as reliable, so very much. So when my kids get sick and I have to cancel things, especially astrology readings or work meetings, it feels very bad. Recently bb jr (my 1 yo) had roseola, which translated to me holding her for about a week. So everything else that week was canceled. A few readings which I had already had to reschedule once because of child care changes.
The problem isn’t so much the act of holding my child for a week, in some ways it feels special to have those moments with her because they are fewer these days, as she spends more time doing her own thing across the living room and in the neighborhood. The exhausting thing about it is my mental process. I get a hint of a sickness, which by now I am hyper-vigilant about looking for - one of my kids’ cheeks are especially red, or my older one is screaming a lot one afternoon, and a mental spiral starts for me. Is this going to be a flu? Is this going to be covid? Is this just because it’s hot in this house in the afternoons? Is their snot because we have forced air heat in the winter? Who else in the house is going to get sick? When do I need to tell everyone who might come in contact with them, how many social plans do we need to reschedule? Is the family we are planning to see this weekend the kind that is okay with runny noses or not? Will they stress if they see snot on our kid? How many days until they aren’t contagious and how come there never seems to be a sure answer to that question, ever? Can I reschedule this reading for next week, or will I get the sickness and need to cancel then, should I reschedule for two weeks out, three? The entire newsletter and instagram publishing schedule I am trying to create and stick to will be delayed, do I need to delay my next circle? How is everyone else doing this? Did kids get this sick when I was a kid? I don’t remember staying home very much. Did our parents send us to school sick or did we not get as sick or was it not yet covid so people didn’t care? Was everyone just completely blacked out in the eighties and nineties?
The mental process is the majority of the stress. It’s a lot of mental HIIT workouts with no end, no resolution, no ability to control any of the answers. No ability to control whether I am or appear to be reliable. And/or, I have to choose who and what I am reliable for, and usually I am more reliable to my children because I care for them and also because I am the primary caregiver who is on call to stand in when they are sick because my husband makes more money than I do so we arrange things for him to be more reliable to his paid work. I am more reliable to the other people at my kid’s school, and to our beloved babysitter, to preventing them from getting sick, than I am to people who I show up for in my work. Somehow the fear that I’m unreliable at work persists even when I am understanding of others’ “unreliability,” which is not in fact unreliability at all, but prioritizing one thing over the other, making a set of choices that are based on a system which does not face the realities of families and humans in this moment in time so that it does not have to actually support those realities.
My first impulse is to keep writing about this massive problem above, which spreads like a delta into so many facets of life and society. But I created a description of this newsletter to guide me, to keep me focused on what I want to bring here, precisely. Spiritual surprises from the early years of parenting. I will continue to define what that means as we go. This place that is being created by me and you (thank you!) is one where I look for and write toward the perspective that feels freer. That feels more open, that feels more verdant. It’s not the perspective I have all the time or even most of the time but it’s what I want more of. It’s also what I want to offer more.
So, when I realize that the most exhausting thing about the kid sickness cycle is actually my mental process, I can spend time breaking up soil to prepare for new seeds there. Some things I want to remember:
I’m (almost completely) not in control of when my kids get sick.
I’m not in control of what other people think of me, whether I seem reliable or not.
Even with a problem like “kids getting sick a lot” which seems perhaps too small to even address on the scale of problems, I want to fully accept the reality of how it feels to me so that I can apply my curiosity to finding a more joyful way of living with this reality.
I want to do what feels like an appropriate response to today’s sickness situation, and practice redirecting thoughts away from this anxious-question-spiral toward acceptance. From acceptance, look for how this situation is okay or even good. For example, it’s actually so special to hold my child while she is sick. When I’m future tripping, I miss this specialness.
So very much support abounds in my life that I am able to do this. When I remember this verdant support that comes from so many people, species, mysteries, how I view my situation dramatically changes and suddenly I become resourced in ways I wasn’t noticing, instead of only burnt out. Resource which can then flow to more places.
It’s not that I want to ignore any problems, especially systemic ones. I am here for the full confrontation and collective transformation of systemic problems, many of which are contained in this cycle I’m describing. For me there’s a step that cannot be skipped (that I have tried to skip a lot over the years) when I’m going for long term participation in what I care about, which I am. The step being doing the internal work of peace-making with my actual, current life. I’m making this particular MOTHER CREATURE world to write toward peace with the specific conditions of my life as it is right now, as unglamorous or boring as that might be. Because developing my practice with peace allows for more space for all kinds of things, including collective transmutation of systemic shit shows. So lately my mental process in response to my kids’ endless sickness is one of my sites of investigation. (As I write this, an emerging rule of Mother Creature is, no site is too small or too boring!)
I hope this is of some use to you in finding and remembering your own spiritual surprises. Thanks for being here.