getting sick was inevitable

I am a very high energy person.

So much so that when I don't "sparkle", people worry.

A friend saw me yesterday on the sidewalk outside the elementary school, where we congregate in the afternoon to pick up our kids. I'm sick but I don't have the sniffles, so I thought nobody could tell. But last night this friend told me she was worried because I didn't seem myself. I think she was relieved when I told her that I just don't feel well.

I'm sick because I skipped a night's sleep a few days ago - ok, it was a week ago. Drat. Every single time I miss a night's sleep, I get a sore throat and this one is a doozy - swollen glands, achy, low energy, ugh, I'll spare you the details. This has been true for my entire life: whether it's the last night of sleep away camp or interntaional travel, if I don't fit in more than 4 hours of sleep, I am doomed. Back in 1990, a psychic told me that my lifelong physical weakness is my throat and she was absolutely correct. It's too bad I didn't listen to her and postpone my wedding and give myself time to examine all the issues she acurately raised that evening. But I digress.

People say it was heroic of me, even saintly, I've heard, to drive my sister and her kids to Chicago (4 1/2 hours in the middle of the night) to catch a 7am flight when theirs was cancelled. They say this to console me, I suppose, as I suffer through this illness. But I don't think it was heroic, merely inconvenient. It was the only way to get them home. Besides, I did less than I had offered to do in the recent past, which was to drive to NYC and bring them home with me for a visit and then, drive them back again.

Two round trips to NYC, one alone, and one with two kids, is about 50 hours of driving, but I would have been willing to do it to get them to spend some time with us in our home. Chillaxin. Which we do here by sledding, ice skating and driving into Indiana for snow tubing, then returning home, making a fire, cooking quesadillas, putting mud masks on our faces, making artwork and inventing new smoothie recipes. All of which we did together for a few days last month, but miraculously, they were flying to see us - I merely had to drive to Dayton and back and then, as it turned out, to Chicago and back, to make it possible. It had been two whole years since the last time my kids' cousins were here, and so yes, I was THAT desperate to make it happen again.

It was really just the timing of the trip that was hard for me, and the ancillary fact that I was terrified that I might not survive the return trip, not having slept for about 24 hours. I don't like to drive at night under any conditions. I get scared. Alone in the dark, staring at the road, looking for lights, squinting at signs, worrying about avoiding concrete and metal barriers and speeding trucks, I am afraid of absolutely everything that could go wrong. I can't seem to maintain my speed. It's not fun. But with my sister sitting by my side, while her kids slept sweetly in the back seat, I was somehow distracted from my usual fears, perhaps buoyed by listening to her make calls to various attorneys and family members bragging of my generosity in rescuing her from being late delivering the kids to their father in the middle of divorce litigation. Yes, I knew I was saving the day, and what big sister can feel scared in the midst of that?

But the next morning, when it was time to rouse the kids and get them onto the hotel shuttle to O'Hare, when I'd just spent 4 hours lying in the dark, listening to them breathe, my mind racing, going over so many unhelpful things while preparing to drive back...that was awful. I cannot sleep under pressure, much less in a room full of people, all sharing a bed. But I left the hotel part of the equation to my sister so I could say goodbye to my family and get organized for the trip and she had booked the four of us into a single room with a king sized bed for the five hours between arriving in Chicago and driving to the airport. The room was equipped with a loud heater that every couple of minutes would blast an excess of hot air into the room and no longer had a dial to allow one to adjust the thermostat. The room was also located directly under the flight path of about 25 airplanes scheduled to take off between 1 am and 5 am that morning. Nightmare. By 4 am I realized that my sore throat had arrived. And I would have to drive back home to my kids, without having slept, and without my sister to navigate, distract, inspire or otherwise support me.

When I finally collapsed into my own bed at 11 that morning, I realized the sore throat was here to stay a while. We rented movies, I begged out of taking my boys for another round of skating or snow tubing, and a few days later, we all stayed in for New Years' Eve and watched Groundhog's Day on video. The next afternoon, I forced myself to change out of pajamas and drag out with my family to a wonderful "hair of the dog" party in Kentucky, then went back home and collapsed again. My dog seems to think I don't love her anymore. She's actually the first one to notice when my sparkle is missing. Now, it's eleven in the morning and I'm stuck in pajamas, blogging to avoid getting in the shower and forcing myself to enter the world. I'll be back on the sidewalk by the elementary school at three. When I start sparkling again, I'll let you know.