Call in sick? Not if there’s breath enough to sniffle
I was lying sick in bed one morning last week, slowly trying to build up either enough fortitude or resignation to slide my legs to the floor and start getting ready for work, when one of my sons stumbled in and collapsed beside me.
He’d clearly woken up just as miserable as me. Neither of us was feeling so hot the night before, so I figured he’d come in to commiserate, one sick guy to another.
"We’re sick," I croaked. "What are we going to to?"
Right away he let me know he was there neither to bring comfort nor find it. He was there to slap me awake with the notion that as smug as we adults are about running the world, it’s kids who get all the breaks on sick days.
"I’m going to stay home from school," he answered, his eyes still shut, "and you’re going to earn money."
Youth isn’t wasted on that young one, I thought. He knows not only how good he has it, but considerably more than I thought he did about the hidden rules of the world.
The hidden rule in play that morning meant that despite the huge blessing of having a job that gives me plenty of sick days, I can’t bring myself to use them as easily as a fifth-grader appears to.
The boy can simply hand Mom a phone and she’ll tell the school nurse he went back to bed. Once a kid gives up the possibility of getting anything important done on a sick day and slips back under the covers, it seems there’s nothing but a little coughing and sniffling to spoil his hours of naps and TV.
For us adults who take pride in what we do to earn our pay, though, the projects left stalled and deadlines slipping past when we call in sick rattle like Marley’s ghost. There’s no easy rest in our sick beds.
What we could really use is at least one full time-out a year we can swap in for a regular sick day -- something powerful enough to not only pause our to-do lists, but also stop the clocks with clients and make sure colleagues back at the office don’t feel obliged to add our load to theirs.
There’s no time out in real life, though, so I did as the boy predicted and dragged my sniffling self in to work.
My cold ended up being just a 24-hour bug, but my son’s hung on long enough to teach me that I don’t remember the burdens of childhood as well as I’d thought.
The morning after his day off sick from school, the boy woke with the same cold. I was ready to phone in another excused absence for him when he told me he wanted to trudge through the school day. Why? If he didn’t turn up for class, he said, he’d have to skip that evening’s big choir concert, and he’d been working hard on the songs for some time. The show had to go on.
A few days later, on Sunday morning, I could see he was still feeling pretty lousy. Staying home from church wouldn’t have been out of line, but he pulled on his good clothes like the rest of the family. He was signed up to be an usher, and he didn’t want me to have to rope in a replacement.
And then came Halloween. I suspect he worried that too sick for school might mean too sick to fill his pillowcase with free candy that night as far as his mom and I were concerned -- a prospect far more chilling than anything else lurking around the holiday -- so he sniffled through another day at his desk.
Turns out even fifth-graders have their clients, colleagues and big to-dos that they don’t want to let down by calling a sick day and crawling back to bed.
And looking at the busy lives my parents and in-laws live, I don’t see where I’ll be able to squeeze in many sick days in retirement, either.
As far as guilt-free days in bed go, looks like Warren Zevon’s right: We can sleep when we’re dead.
Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com.
This story was originally published November 3, 2016 at 4:52 PM with the headline "Call in sick? Not if there’s breath enough to sniffle."