November 14, 2003, 8:41 a.m.
I Hope It’s Not Contagious

“Shh, Mummy. Close your eyes." Phoebe looms over me, frowning. I turn my head, and see the side of Violet's face some distance away, half-obscured by a closet door. She is sitting cross-legged on the carpet, looking at a book about insects.

"What do caterpillars turn into?" Violet asks idly.

"Butterflies," I whisper.

"Whabbout lobsters?"

"Uh. Supper."

I look back at the ceiling, and resume my study of the chandelier in the girls' room. In a spasm of '70's bad taste, a previous owner moved all the original light fixtures up to the top floor and in their places installed bulbous mustard-yellow monstrosities. We took out most of the bulbosity when we moved in, but ran out of energy before we found replacements. As a result, bare wires poke from the ceiling in our bedroom, while in the nursery, the children read by glittering crystal.

Violet bursts into song: "Alistair Campbell has — five humps! Alistair
Campbell has — five humps! Alistair Campbell has — "

I lie there, aching and fuzzy-minded. I thought Tony Blair's ruthless adviser had already resigned. Was there a story today? Does Violet have some source for U.K. news I don't know about about?

"Darling," I murmer carefully, "Why are you singing about Alistair Campbell?"

"Silly Mummy. Alice the Camel."

A tear trickles theatrically down the corner of Mummy's eye. When Daddy is stricken, he skips work and stays in bed. When a child is sick, the child skips school and stays in bed. When Mummy is death warmed over and it's a weekday — well, pull yourself together woman, you have a household to run. You will pack lunches and you will drive the children to school and fetch them again and you will tidy up the dishes, and you will have a hardback Curious George anthology dropped on your stomach — ow!

"Please read George, Mummy."

A lovely smell floats into the room. I climb slowly to my feet. "OK, darling. First, let me — "

Phoebe's voice slides up the register from reasonable to shrieking: " Read George, MUMMY!"

"Where are you going?" Violet cries.

"...Got to take the birthday cake out...," I call, clomping downstairs as fast as is possible on fever-wracked legs, which is not very. Cooking with gas is still a novelty for me, and in a tall house like ours it is easy to lose track of how long something has been baking until you get a whiff, when it is too late, and you have to throw everything out and buy another pan. By amazing chance — perhaps illness has sharpened the maternal nose — the cake is light brown and perfect.

A wail of "George!" drifts faintly down the stairs. My head is heavy and my whole skin hurts and the house seems suddenly enormous. Perhaps I'll just sit down, just for a moment, just right here by the stove...

....and oddly enough, it is suddenly the next day, and I'm still sitting by the stove feeling as though the KGB has been working me over with truncheons, but now I am in my nightgown, and a noisy crowd is eating breakfast around me.

"Coffee, darling?" asks my husband.

"Poor Mummy," says Phoebe pityingly, climbing down from her chair.

"And there's a moat," Paris continues, explaining the elaborate martial diorama he has arranged amongst the breakfast dishes.

"No thanks," I croak, in defiance of all precedent.

"I'm a girl!" Violet cries, whipping her head behind her lamb fleecy and peeking out again.

"It's Paris's birthday party tomorrow night," Molly notes.

Phoebe approaches menacingly with a baby blanket, "Here Mummy."

"Oh, yes! My birthday party! And the water is 50-feet deep so the baddies can't wade through it — "

"I have a mustache!" Violet twinkles, her hair swooping across her face. It is a family joke that, like a starlet, Violet has always just walked out of a beauty salon. The rest of us emerge from sleep all rumpled and deep-fried. Violet is always as glossy as the Breck girl.

"And it's a hundred-feet wide — "

Phoebe covers me up to my neck with the blanket, in the process crushing my shins beneath her knees. "Feeling blah, Mummy?"

"Ow — thank you, Phoebs."

My husband smiles sympathetically, and looks back at his newspaper.

Violet is holding a necklace of shiny black beads to her chin. She says, "I'm a rich girl with a beard!"

"Are we going to play Freeze Dance at Paris's birthday? And Pass-the-Parcel?"

Molly asks. I cannot for the moment find an answer, as I am trying to work out how I will stay alive long enough to host this long-awaited sleepover party for three seven-year-olds, plus my own children. Also what is this new fixation of Violet's on facial hair?

"And the water is all boiling when the baddies come — "Paris leaps up and does a frenetic dance.

"Watch out for my coffee," says my husband mildly.

" — But they don't know, that when they're not there, the water is perfectly flat." Paris stands perfectly still, to demonstrate flatness.

"I'm cross with the world," Violet remarks.

"You'll be better by then," asks Molly hopefully, "Won't you, Mummy?"

We are, as parents, called to make heroic sacrifice. Now and again I will remind my children that I would jump in front of a train to save them, I would take a bullet for them, I would scrub doorways to keep them in applesauce, etc. No doubt they will eventually take these tales to analysts, who will relieve them of their money and say, soothingly, yes, yes, it was all Mummy's fault — she should never have laid upon you the dread responsibility of holding her life in your young hands, and oh dear, that's all we have time for now, and same time next week?

Later that day, I resolutely tighten my grip on the bedclothes and resolve that, yes, absolutely, I will get up. I will frost that cake. I will wrap some sugary item in multiple sheets of paper for a zesty round of Pass-the-Parcel. I will do it all. I will do it just as soon as I can get up, which isn't quite yet.

I doze. Occasionally I catch stray noises from a great distance, shouts, and slams, and definitely someone crying. The noise dies, then, some time later, resumes. My husband pops his head around our bedroom door.

"Meg, we've all just come back from Paris' soccer game."

"Oh. Eh?" I say wisely.

Paris pops his head around the door lower down. His face is pale.

"Paris says he's not feeling well. I think he may have a fever."

I struggle up on to one elbow. "Poor darling, let me feel."

There is no doubting it. A relieved smile creeps across my face like a
stream trickling back into its own familiar bed after a drought.

"Go back to sleep," my husband says, "I'll make the calls."

— Meghan Cox Gurdon is an NRO columnist. Gurdon lives in Washington, D.C. and writes as much as her young family will permit.