I am writing this from bed, my dresser next to me filled with the mugs and tissues and other detritus of some virus or another that has taken hold of my body. My 13-year-old is asleep down the hall, afflicted with the same condition.
It has been years since we’ve had a sick day in our house. I boast often of the mind-over-matter strategies I employ to keep us Thompsons healthy. But my system has broken down, literally and figuratively. The steam-shower eucalyptus, tea-with-honey combo that usually works has not. We are down for the count.
I look in my Louise Hay book to find out what this means. I turn to the guru of love-yourself healthy to determine what mental afflictions have caused our bodies to falter: sore throats and coughs, our lungs strained and phlegmy. Sore throats, she says, show an inability to express oneself, a holding in of angry words. Lung issues show an inability to take in the joys of life, she says, and coughs say, “Listen to me, now!”
Geez, how did we get to this place? Oscar doesn’t buy it. He gets in to bed weakly but smiley next to me and shakes his head.
“No,” he says when I suggest these are the reasons we are laid out. “I don’t believe in that.”
We always have theses conversations about how our mental stresses make our bodies weak or how I think that and how he doesn’t believe me. But then I told him to look it up, the statistic I heard that more than 70 percent of physical ailments presented at the doctor can be attributed to stress. It was there, a surefire “fact.”
“I don’t think I’m that stressed out, mom,” Oscar whispers hoarsely.
We have barely talked about the high-school search process he’s embarking on. He has a tutor for the specialized high-shcool admissions test. People routinely ask him “Where do you want to go?” But I am trying not to make him crazy and stressed. There are lots of options, I say. We will not visit every school in the city. We did not go to the high-school fair. I will try to pretend we live somewhere normal, where pressures to show yourself worthy don’t come up every few years. I try to see it as an opportunity to help my kids think a little (but not too much) about who they are and who they want to be. I love the story the guidance counselor told of how one kid said, “It’s not where I go, it’s what I do when I’m there…”
What about me and my valiant effort not to stress and strain this fall? As I continue to try to finish renovations, cursing that damn woman who wrote that book about “touching everything you own to make sure you love it,” I am pulled in a million directions. I try to support family and friends, continue work with my small non-profit, and figure my writing career. The Jewish New Year looms. Even though we don’t go to temple anymore, I am stuck forever on the Jewish calendar I grew up on, imagining that fall is the time for renewal and rebirth, for looking back and making amends so you can move forward.
Ugh. Cough, cough.
My legs are heavy and sore, maybe from the long run I took getting ready for the half-marathon I signed up for, maybe from this darn virus.
Regardless of whether Louise Hay is “right” or “wrong,” there is something to be said for those little reminders that every once in a while you need to take a day of rest, for your mind and body.
And so we are.
