Mixing up the Medicine

"Johnny's in the basement/ Mixing up the medicine/ I'm on the pavement/ Thinking about the government." - "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan

Just call me Johnny this week, because I've been surrounded by medicine for four days now. The five-year-old I take care of has pneumonia for the second time this year, and it's been a rough week. With a fever of over 105, horrendous coughing, and enough gross bodily stuff to even make a brown collar worker like me scrunch up her nose in disgust, the poor kid has been miserable and I have been spending every spare second I have sanitizing the heck out of her house in an attempt to keep everyone else healthy, especially her sister. So far, so good, although I am exhausted!

Being home with a sick child all week has given me flashbacks to when I used to stay home sick from elementary school. The catch was that I was rarely sick. I was Ferris Bueller before I even knew who he was! I was the queen of faking illnesses. My favorite lie was saying that my stomach hurt and I might throw up. That was a surefire ticket home from school, often just minutes after the bell rang. At six or seven years old, I never thought how difficult it would be for my mom to take off work or anything like that. I just smiled to myself, thinking about getting out of school and spending my day watching cartoons and game shows. And if I went to my aunt's house, a soap opera or two.

My favorite place to go when I was "sick" was my Aunt Shary's house. I'm sure she knew I was faking all along, but she never said anything. My cousin would be off at school and I would get to hang out with my aunt all day, which was so much fun! She always treated me like an adult, an equal, even though I was only six months older than her daughter. I loved that! We would talk and watch TV, she would tell me stories about growing up with my dad and my other aunts and uncle, I would have soup or a balogna sandwich for lunch, and then I would miraculously recover from the brink of death I had feigned at school a few hours before, just in time to go pick my cousin up from school and play with her all afternoon.

Looking back now, I have no regrets from playing hooky so much - and I did it quite a bit! I am still waiting for my Academy Award to come in the mail. My family lost my Aunt Shary five years ago, but I will always have those memories of hanging out with her instead of sitting in a desk at school, bored out of my mind and probably getting into trouble for talking too much. Maybe I didn't have any awesome adventures like Ferris, but I have a whole heartful of memories that are more important than anything I could have learned in school. Sometimes it's just better to break the rules.