Parties, pills, puking and parenting

Feels like I’ve gone to the lab at the university where undergraduates get to create new hallucinogenic drugs to sell to their buddies, and, as part-time work, stick samples of rampant super-viruses in test tubes, and watch them turn different colours.

The hell that is a nuclear family in winter is this: Somebody on the ground floor of the building coughs, and microscopic spores are sucked into the vents. In what would be an amazingly short amount of time, if it wasn’t so lethal, they arrive on my upper lip, jostling for space amongst the random grey hairs which appear to grow hydroponically these days in my nostrils.

Having been inhaled, they go straight to my throat and chest, and hold little gossip-sessions in my joints. I feel bad. I go home, crash, and go back to work within a few hours.

The problem is this: One child will spontaneously, and colourfully, sneeze the contents of their head all over their breakfast. Their temperature will shoot up to something our crappy flawed thermometer fails to register. Their eyeballs will roll around in their heads like an exorcist extra, and they will slump to the floor.

At which point Neen and I will have to negotiate who has the least amount of hell to mine at work, or else drag the father-in-law out of bed, so that the sickly kid isn’t left to chew their fingers down to the knuckles, or develop a weird fetish such as ingesting their own hair.

By the end of the day, they’ll be fine, but then it will be child number two’s turn. You get the picture. Any of these kinds of illnesses work like this- a family of five can be out of commission for a month. And Neen and I end up taking leave from work to sit around watching daytime TV.

These colds and things are dreadful, but one step down from the entire family having a stomach bug, simultaneously. We have one toilet. You can boil your hands in oil, but if one of us gets sick, we all will.

By the time we are more or less healthy, we have so much washing to catch up with, that we don’t leave the house. We don’t visit other families for fear of passing on the viruses and plagues. We live alone, encrusted in our snot, our skin covered in sores, our house a place of quarantine marked with a biohazard symbol.

I guess now would be a bad time to suggest a wild Cape Town blogging-community party? It seems the Joburgers have a regular thing going on, but we in Cape Town have only our mountain to brag of, and that gets a bit anti-social after a while. “Suuuure, we have no life, no friends- but check out that mountain!”

Any takers?