The Beauty of Flu Season

The Beauty of Flu Season

A few years ago, in Wisconsin, a woman with five daughters said she never experienced such closeness to her children as when she took care of them when they were ill.

I remember looking into the mother’s face and seeing nostalgia and maternal love. This confused me because I dreaded illness, which made my children need me even more than they usually did. But then, this week, my three daughters came down with the flu and I experienced what she meant.

For seven days, we were pent up in our warehouse apartment as snow fell, roads froze, and towns closed down as if two inches of snow were multiplied by ten. The girls’ fevers soared. They were flushed and thirsty; their brown, hazel, and blue eyes polished by an internal heat. Time was no longer neatly divided into days and nights, but possessed a strange fluidity like the first few weeks after I brought them home.

My husband works from the warehouse beside the apartment, so after he packed orders, he would come inside and help me as I buzzed around the house: making broth, running apple cider vinegar baths, pouring oil in the diffuser, rotating laundry, using berries to ply poor appetites.

We were pent up together, riding out the snow apocalypse together, as the hours poured by, and when the three-year-old’s fever spiked, we laid her on a towel and sponged her down—her blond hair a nest on the back of her head—and waited to see if her temperature would drop.

That same night, my husband and I lay on either side of her in the narrow twin bed he had built. The diffuser puffed clove-scented steam. I would glance across her small, hot form up at him, and I found I was not only filled with intense love for my children, but intense love for my husband as well. He did not have to be there, and yet . . . he chose to remain because he wanted to ensure our daughter was safe.

The next night, the baby began fussing in her sleep. The thermometer stopped beeping at 102. I laid her on our bed and peeled off her sleeper that was so snug, it was like peeling skin off a fruit. Her fever was high, but she was too distracted by this nocturnal adventure to be in pain, and I was struck by the sheer Gerber beauty of her: round eyes, round cheeks, round belly, round knees kicking the mattress in the dark.

Perhaps illness, even the flu, is a reminder of the fleeting nature of everything we hold dear, and that is what the mom meant in Wisconsin: we hold our children closer when they’re sick because everything stills, and we’re suddenly focused on our love for them.

Now, a little over a week since it all began, and here I sit with my laptop. My eldest daughter looks at a book beside me as my two other daughters take naps, and life is back to what it was before. The fevers are gone, though a few dry coughs remain; the snow has melted; the roads have thawed from white to black; the nearby town hums with life as everyone wants to get out in this fifty-degree weather.

I told my husband that one day we will look back on this week with fondness. He laughed. “Yeah, that time we were living in the warehouse, and everything outside was frozen?” But he knew what I meant. Sometimes, vacations are not where the sweetest memories are made, but those days when you are pent up together, pulling together, so that you can feel how closely your hearts beat, side by side.

Have you ever experienced closeness and beauty through hardship? Share your story with us.