Floorboards

I am sitting here, trying to figure out what to name this post. My first thought? Frustration, Sickness, and Gloom.

My baby child is very sick. Fever and unable to keep anything down. He has slept more today than when he was first newly born, it seems. I pick him up and cradle his little overly warm self in my lap. I coax some electrolyte fluid into his tiny mouth and after a few minutes he seems to actually want it. I am all for this as he has had nothing to drink/eat all day and I fear the monster of dehydration that forces you into hospitals and will put needles in his small body if given the chance. But then, after taking all 3 ounces, he immediately gets sick everywhere. All over himself, myself, and the recliner. He starts half-heartedly crying and I lay him on the floor very gently. The smell is just too much for me and I guiltily run down the hall stripping off my orange vomit drenched clothes. It has soaked down to my underthings. I jump in the shower as quickly and guiltily as I can, still thinking of him lying on the floor. I hate myself for leaving him there. I hurriedly rinse without even shutting the shower curtain; soap is slapped on as an afterthought while my mother's voice tells me to wash my hands as much as I can to spare the boy child from the baby child's illness. I fly out of the shower, throw on a robe and scamper back to the living room. He hasn't moved, which tells me so much about how badly he is feeling, this overly-mobile child. I gently persuade him out of his clothes and replace his diaper. I am concerned with the lack of heft, which means a lack of urine. Cuddled up against my bare skin again, his eyelids start to droop. Finally, sleep quickly claims him again.

I call the doctor, who seemingly has no appointments left for the day, early though it is. The receptionist says, "They are double and triple booked, but let's leave a message and they will call you back." I grasp this life preserver that seems a bit misshapen and not exactly what I wanted. Then I call my husband to fill him in and ask him to stay home tomorrow with baby child. See, I just went back to work full time and have almost next to no leave accrued in this god forsaken country where paid family leave is a mythical beast living over the borders and across the oceans. This frustrates me to no end. It makes me want to scream and spit. I hate this. This having to leave my children when they need me most so that we could have the damn new car and pay the stupid credit card bills for things we didn't need.

Scream. Sigh. Cry.

And yesterday my mother told me how I would never get out. How the thought that I could rescue myself and all of us was a pipe dream because I would be paying my debt for the rest of my life. How I couldn't place this burden solely on my husband. In my head, I rage that I will show her all the while covering up the burgeoning fear that she is right. What she was really telling me is that I will always have to leave my children. When they need me, when they don't need me. That Brother will have the childhood I had, devoid of activities because of working parents. That both my children will have a worse childhood than I had in that they have both been in daycare for so long already and my mother was able to stay at home with me until I was 5.

I feel like a lonely moody teenager who is convinced the world does not, can not, and will not understand how I feel. How I am furious and in despair. How in my head, I am lying on the floorboards in my mind, weeping and weeping.