How to Lose Your Week
What the Writer's Life, a Sick Child, and The Scarlet Letter have in common
This essay was originally slated to run in the gorgeous Taproot Magazine’s Spring 2024 issue before Taproot unexpectedly closed its doors. Here it is for you today. I offer it as proof that you can use literature to talk about anything.
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2 a.m. Monday morning. First you will have to deal with the sinking sensation, the cold realization: She will not be going to school today. It is best if you tell this to yourself baldly, while you hold your crying child, warm from sleep and creeping sickness, sweaty where her darkened hair meets her forehead when you kiss it. (You must hold her fearlessly; withholding affection to preserve your own health won’t help anyone at this point.) Next, fracture and reassemble your day right there on the bathroom floor while your husband sprays carpet cleaner in the bedroom, dabbing the mess with wadded paper towels.
In the morning, you will message the school office with a special CC for the nurse (whose last name includes the word “worms,” so that you always imagine her caring for horses or pet dogs rather than children). “She will not be coming tomorrow, either.” You declare the news bravely, face to the wind.
Inside, though, you should lie to yourself for now. You will be holding on to Wednesday—your bright shining star of survival, that day you always have to yourself at the grungy downtown cafe with the blue-skied patio and the back room perfect for writing. (Whenever you get the back cafe room to yourself, you turn down the sound on the business’s squat, square Bluetooth speaker and turn up the volume on your phone, Patty Griffin singing the aches of the world through your earbuds.)
you should lie to yourself for now
Your girl never stays sick for long. This a truth you cling to, and you will navigate the next two days of Kleenex and Clorox wipes on the tail of its robes.
Late Monday afternoon, you will scramble through the administrative folder in your new employer’s Google Drive to find a substitute teacher for your Tuesday English class. “Just in case,” you tell her in an email, “in case I’m sick tomorrow, too.” Instead of relaxing in front of the TV, you spend your evening writing a sub plan, something that won’t waste the tenth graders’ time entirely. Something like creating a Facebook profile for Nathaniel Hawthorne. (It’s a cliche assignment, but the kids will enjoy it.)
On Tuesday morning—hallelujah!—you won’t need the sub (yet), but you keep her on call for your Thursday classes.
Something like creating a Facebook profile for Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wednesday morning will arrive. “She was up every hour,” your husband will tell you, that good man who slept on the worn sofa in your daughter’s bedroom so you could get some rest. “She didn’t sleep more than an hour at a time.” You knew yesterday afternoon, yesterday morning—way back in the wee hours of Monday, even—you knew deep down in your gut, that today, this day in all the week to yourself, would disappear into the oblivion of sick childcare, but not in this way.
You will suddenly ache on behalf of your daughter, who lies listless on the sofa. (She will not eat a meal for three more days, untempted by toast or saltine crackers or even her favorite: strawberries.) She will be camped out on one end of the couch, on top of a brightly colored beach towel, and you will be on the other end reading The Scarlet Letter for tomorrow’s class lesson: that slow-moving, beetle-browed novel about misdirected spiritual formation. You will rub her sleepy feet.
You will pause for a moment and weigh these things: the density of motherly concern and the soft feel of your thumb pressed into the ball of her foot, beneath toes that have trod this soil for less than seven years. This daughter of yours is a wild woman, the loosest canon you have ever met. There’s a reason you need those solitary Wednesday mornings at the coffee shop. For the next three days, she will send uncharacteristically gentle smiles down to you across the sofa cushions between sleeps. Your own stomach has begun to churn, but not too badly.
There’s a reason you need those solitary Wednesday mornings at the coffee shop.
Thursday will pass in a haze of nature shows and My Little Pony movies; there is no other way. Don’t forget to call the sub. Ask the other English teacher to make copies of the blank Facebook profile pages and deliver them to your modular classroom so Nathaniel Hawthorne can make his grand entrance onto the social media stage.
On Friday morning, twenty-four hours after her last session of leaning over the red plastic mixing bowl, you will spoon yogurt into your daughter’s mouth, a bite or three each hour. After lunchtime, toast. She will tell you everything tastes bad. You hold a worry in your gut this day that you didn’t before: she is better, but she isn’t. She will reject Pedialyte as “medicine-flavored,” and you won’t blame her. She will reject a Tootsie Roll, and you will hold these emotions in tension, in awe: fear that she will never eat again, and the fact that you are more concerned about her than about your own precious time to yourself. Conversely, you’ll also know she will eat again, and at dinner time she will, sitting in your lap, reluctantly receiving nine paced spoonfuls of broth, one protein-packed chickpea crowning each bite.
After Friday dinner, the week will be gone, only a lingering stomachache of your own to mark the path it cut through your life. You will return the Clorox wipes and paper towels from their station at the foot of the sofa to their storage place above the bathroom medicine cabinet, while your husband hunts baking soda out of the pantry and takes a second go at the spot on the carpet that still smells sour after several days. Funny, you will think, your daughter asleep in bed, your husband taking her place on the couch, searching for the latest Ted Lasso episode. Funny, you will laugh: it feels like any other Friday night.
Anyway, what was lost?
When Saturday wakes up, the rascally grin on your daughter’s face and the life in her eyes will bear you lightly down the stairs. “She ate so much for breakfast this morning!” The relief on your husband’s face. Anyway, what was lost? You will have to catch up with your students’ assigned reading this afternoon to be prepared for next week. In today’s chapter, Hester Prynne will make a plan to escape with her secret lover to solve the problem of their lives, and he will agree, and it will all go sideways. Neither of them know what they really need.
You have such a gorgeous writing style! Look at you writing with interruption or about interruption! Also, love Patty Griffin! ❤️
I love this one extra-especially….because there’s just no reason for writing it except that there is an absurd beauty in the “sideways” moments and days of life. You showed me that beauty. Thank you.