April is the cruellest month
April is the cruellest month. So begins the famous T. S. Eliot poem “The Waste Land,” an apparent critique of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I’d further add to that critique that both Chaucer and Eliot forgot to mention that May is also a cruel mistress. At least as we’re experiencing it.
A few weeks ago, Camille wasn’t sleeping well, which means we weren’t either. Of course, that’s to be expected. A tiny little baby cherub can’t get her beauty sleep like a full-grown queen goddess.
However, what was unexpected was getting her eye infected with some red irritation that grew like that Cordyceps fungus from The Last of Us. The doctor called it dacryocystitis. We sprang into action like Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey to smite that demon from the face of her face. Our main weapon, supplied by an ophthalmologist we met through our pediatrician, was an unassuming liquid called Clindamycin that will forever be burned into our collective family memory.
You see, Clindamycin is a very powerful antibiotic that worked wonders on Camille’s infection in a matter of hours. Unfortunately, Clinda, as an urgent care nurse practitioner called it, tastes awful and is even worse on a child’s intestines. It also has the viscosity of syrup, and, when applied too liberally into the mouth of a squishy angel face, said squishy angel face is liable to choke. We flipped her over and performed the maneuvers in vain, then rushed to urgent care at almost 1:00 am. The whole time she was fine. But being new parents as we are, anything less than total perfection is terrifying.
The name Clinda sounds like the name of a sweet lunch lady from grade school, but her Sloppy Joes are no joke. One week of infection plus one week of you-can-probably-guess equals two tired parents. We have fewer diapers than we estimated in our original projections.
A week later, May 1, Camille started daycare. At the end of our neighborhood street, a mile from our house, sits a cute Montessori school with a playground and cracked sidewalks. The teachers? Fantastic. The staff? Superb. The viruses floating around the infant room? Below average. One star. Would not recommend.
Apparently, daycares are cesspools of germs that inevitably find their way to the parents. If you are a parent, you know that sending a child to school is a double-edged sword: You receive back in your day hours of time to work and clean the house, but you also receive back in your day invisible gargoyles come to ruin your life. If you are not a parent, God bless you and keep you and cause his face to shine upon you.
From that first week in daycare, Camille distributed more Sloppy Joes. Christine soon afterward fell ill. She spent the day and night in quarantine in the guest room. The state of our house was better imagined than described. My family members were dropping like flies. It was all I could do to hold the front line.
Finally, Camille recovered, her face shining like the seat of a bus driver’s trousers, to steal a line from the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse. Christine also recovered.
Then, against all odds, your humble correspondent caught a live one right in the kisser. I spent five hours on a bathroom floor, and another five hours in the hallway of the hospital emergency room, they not having room for me in the inn. It was terrible. I looked like Voldemort at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, feeble and shriveled, lying beneath a bench in King’s Cross Station. Evidently, I was asking Christine unusual questions about her business’s Gmail account in a state of delirium. Ask her about it sometime.
I spent the next twenty-four hours in bed watching YouTube videos on Austrian economics while eating Saltines. Crumbs were everywhere and I felt no shame. Another twenty-four hours later, I’m writing this missive to you now.
To be clear, parenting isn’t all a fateful mission across a war zone. Camille travels like the sweet baby back rib that she is.
In March, our little pre-virus pack of migrants flew across the country to the sunny city of Charleston, South Carolina, to attend my brother’s wedding. (Congrats, Zach and Maggie!) It was a rager. Camille slept nine hours that night, straight through. On the way back, however, she had a blowout in row 27. Win some, lose some.
We also traveled by car to Nacogdoches, Texas, the birthplace of my sweet wife, a city of which she was once named Duchess. She’s the angel who sat at my hospital bedside and directed the providers’ attention toward me. She’s the real hero.
All in all, we couldn’t have survived the last few weeks without Christine’s mom Janice and other friends and family members who have held and cared for the lil nug. It truly does take a village to raise a child. But we’ve discovered that sometimes it takes standing back-to-back with your partner, passing magazine clips of antibiotics and bottles and baskets of laundry, shouting commands over a horde of zombies clawing in around you as the world descends into chaos.
