Life With Boys

And what does the magnet say? “You know you’re a mom when your kid throws up and your first instinct is to catch it.” That pretty much sums up the last two weeks. So when Matt found this article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch I just knew I had to share it with you.

I’m way too old for this much vomit

Bob Rybarczyk

“Daddy, I think I’m going to throw up.”

I gotta say, there’s never really a good time to hear those eight words. Even if they are uttered while the child in question is wearing a disposable wetsuit and is standing in the middle of a neighbor’s empty swimming pool, I still wouldn’t want to be the Daddy those words are spoken to.

So you can imagine how I felt when I heard those words at exactly 2:08 a.m. (it’s funny how exact times get burned into your memory at moments like that) the other night. My 10-year-old daughter, Gustavo, was uttering them. And if Gustavo (not her real name) says she thinks she’s going to throw up, well, that gets my attention.

Here’s why: in my house, we have two distinct gastro-intestinal tribes, the barfers and the non-barfers. Colette, her daughter Melon Ball (not her real name), and my younger daughter, Chi Chi (not her real name either), they’re the barfers. Oh, and Frisco, the cat, he’s a barfer, too. Frisco, in fact, is such a barfer that you’d think he got paid by the chunk.

Gustavo and I, on the other hand, are non-barfers. I have vomited exactly one time since 1982. (Savvis Center bratwurst, circa 2002. Not cool. Not cool at all. I cannot imagine a worse food to have eaten right before contracting the stomach flu. Beef stew, maybe. Maybe.) Gustavo’s stomach isn’t quite as iron-clad as mine is, but really, I probably can count the number of times she’s hurled in the last six or seven years on one hand. It’s just not her style.
Usually when we get the midnight wake-up calls, it’s Melon Ball doing the hurling. This has happened so often that when I hear the phrase “I’m about to throw up” in the middle of the night, I’m conditioned to respond by incoherently poking Colette until she hops out of bed.

So when I finally realized that it was Gustavo waking me up at 2:08 a.m., I bolted out of bed in a heartbeat. I was like a Marine who’d just heard distant gunfire. “Into the bathroom!” I commanded. Fortunately, she reached the toilet in time. I held her hair back and tried to calm her after the main event was over with.

One of the weird things about parenthood is that one of the more gratifying experiences you can have is taking care of a sick kid. Sick kids are just about the saddest, most pathetic creatures this side of three-legged dogs. Calming them and making them feel better makes any parent feel, for lack of a better term, worthwhile. So as weird as it sounds, I actually enjoyed being there for Gustavo for her disgusting midnight ramble.

After we were sure the fireworks were over, I tucked Gustavo back into bed and climbed back in bed myself. I slept the peaceful sleep of a Good Dad.

Did I just go back in time?

That peaceful sleep lasted about 45 minutes. Then Gustavo came back. “Daddy, I’m going to be sick again!” she shrieked. Again, I bolted out of bed, held her hair, and sat with her until she stopped sounding like a cat battling an extra-persnickety hairball. I tucked her back into bed, hopefully for the last time. Good Dad was thinking that he was going to be a little sleepy the next day, but hey, that’s all part of the job.

And you know, it was a job he was just about ready to quit when Gustavo woke him up an hour later. Especially after she noted that her tummy had caught her by surprise that time, and that she’d hurled on the carpet in her room. “Bathroom,” I croaked to her as I stumbled out of bed. Even Marines get tired of gunfire after a while. I checked on Gustavo to make sure she was OK, then went about the grim task of the 4 a.m. carpet de-barfing.

I don’t know how it is in your family, but in my house, there’s only one official carpet de-barfer, and it’s me. Colette is pretty much unable to clean up heavage without subsequently firing up a batch of her own. But it doesn’t really bother me. I spent two years as a busboy at a steak house. Life can’t throw anything at you that’s more disgusting than what you experience as a busboy at a steak house. If you can clean the ladies’ room at a steak house, you can clean anything.

Even if the sight of vomit normally bothered me, it wouldn’t have made me blink that night. I was so tired, I could have stuck my head in a bucket of centipedes without so much as a second thought. By the time I was done, Gustavo – who looked even more tired than me – was ready for bed once again. I tucked her in for the fourth time that night, not that I was capable of counting to four at that point.

I’ll trade you my liver for a half hour of sack time

It was all I could do to drag myself back to bed. I was so tired that I could have slept on the stairs. As it turned out, I probably should have, because after another hour, Gustavo was up again. I was astounded that her stomach still had something left to offer. But apparently, from the unsavory looks of things, it did. Bully for her.

I sat on the bathroom floor next to Gustavo and held her hair once again. It occurred to me that I now understood why people use sleep deprivation as a torture technique. I would have confessed to any imaginable crime at that point in exchange for the promise of three uninterrupted hours of sleep. Yes, officer, I molested that goat. Yes, I stole OJ’s Heisman. For God’s sake, yes, that was my cocaine in Lindsay’s pocket. Just please please please bring me a pillow.

I realized, as I sat on that bathroom floor, that I’d actually dozed off. “Did I miss anything?” I asked Gustavo. “No,” she said. “I think I’m done again.”

I prayed to every deity I could think of to have her please be completely done. I was going to have to work on, well, on so little sleep that I couldn’t even figure out how little. I stumbled back to bed…only to notice, to my horror, that it was time to wake up.

Seriously, there is no worse feeling than thinking you’re about to go to bed and realizing you can’t. You could throw my precious PlayStation 3 into a wood chipper and not hurt my psyche as badly as it was rocked when I saw my alarm clock reading 6 a.m. I had half a mind to collapse into a fetal position and start sucking my damn thumb.

As it turned out, the last round of mortar fire didn’t hit until 9:30 that morning, but by then it didn’t matter. I had gone beyond the point of exhaustion and was in full-on zombie mode. I probably could have sawed off my feet and not felt it. I decided to just work from home that day while tending to the convalescing Gustavo, who finally was able to get some sleep on the couch. Oddly enough, I ended up having a very productive work day, due in no small part to the half-dozen Red Bulls I sucked down.

I suppose sleepless nights are part of the job when you’re a parent. Call me crazy, but I had thought that those were supposed to go away once Junior was out of diapers. I just hope that there aren’t too many more of those nights in my future, because if there are, it won’t be long before Daddy’s the one wearing the diapers.