The Daughter Arriveth

As I Am About To Goeth

I was asleep when The Daughter arrived home for winter break last week. I sent a car to pick her up from LAX because I had been deathly ill the day before, and semi-deathly ill until the evening she arrived, and I wanted to rest so I could be in decent shape for our last Christmas together in Los Angeles.

The Headache came on early last Friday morning. The Headache is unlike a tension headache, a sinus headache, or an I-need-caffeine headache. The Headache wraps its tentacles around the top of my skull, down the rest of my face, and the nape of my neck, its vise-like grip squeezingsqueezingsqueezing until my entire body throbs and my temperature careens from hot to cold and the nausea takes hold and with a sigh I realize I will soon be hijacked by an intestinal bug for the next 12-36 hours.

I immediately summoned the “sick management skills” that all mothers, especially single mothers, have honed with a craftsperson’s precision. Much of this process is automatic, so that my body knew it had to wait until Friday, when I end work at noon, before it unleashed the dogs of hell. That meant I only had to impersonate a high-functioning professional for three hours before I could completely surrender to sickness.

I rapid-fire tapped out an Instacart order for Gatorade, ginger ale, Saltines, and Advil, then opened my laptop to begin a session with a lovely, easy-to-work-with client. Immediately after, I raced to the bathroom where the bug released itself southward, and I calculated whether I could survive two more sessions.

If the first session was as an internist is to a cold, the second session would be as an ER doctor is to a cerebral hemorrhage. There was no way I could staunch this couples’ bleeding, subdue my churning intestines, and have anything left over for a third session, which luckily happened to be with a very reasonable client who appeared to take it in stride when I sent him an email canceling with an hour’s notice.

Then I sat down to perform emergency surgery on the hemorrhage. Working with challenging clients is like mainlining Ritalin: it’s impossible to be distracted or lazy in your thinking. All cylinders must fire at exactly the right moments to contain, redirect, and ninja-intervention patients into therapy ICU where they will or won’t recover, but at least you’ve done what you can do.

I closed my laptop at 10:50 a.m., and the rest of the day melted into a fever dream. As my intestines quieted, I guzzled liquids trying to quench the unquenchable thirst seizing my body which ached from my chapped lips down to my toenails. A bite of banana here, a Saltine there, and I slipped into a coma during the 4th season of The Crown, roused somewhere during the 5th season just to turn off the TV, and awoke for good ten hours later, blinking at my sun-streaked window, still exhausted, still thirsty, but mostly not nauseated.

The COVID test was negative, thank the Lord, so I spent the rest of the day in intervals of apartment-cleaning, present-wrapping, couch-potatoeing, and positive-thinking myself into good-enough-health just in time for The Daughter’s return. I kept in text contact with her as she wound her way from Portland to Boston to the back of a Carmel sedan, and finally to home, at midnight, when I was asleep.

Over the next several days she and I will weave in and out of each other’s lives, rendezvousing for meals, White Lotus episodes, and on Christmas morning, unwrapping in five minutes the gifts that took months to accumulate. We will team up to remove all of her belongings from the apartment she and I have lived in the past five years, the apartment that will be packed up on the 28th, divested of its boxes on the 29th, until all that remains is a 13-year-old calico, two suitcases, and me.

She will drive over the canyon to her dad’s house in Studio City, while the cat and I will soar atop desert, plains, and bare treetops, down into the snow-capped Blue Ridge Mountains. Her new year will begin with a semester abroad at The University of Bristol; mine will commence in my cousins’ guest room as I wait for construction to be completed on my new home.

She’ll visit me in the new home, despite her raised eyebrow at The South, coaxed by my assurance that Asheville is so blue it’s turning the red state purple, and that I’ll be residing minutes from the city’s version of Los Feliz/Austin/Brooklyn, where you can stroll past tattoo parlors and artisanal donut shops, stopping to get your photo taken next to a mural…

…or perhaps crash some nuptials while you shop at the local wedding chapel and bar…

…or encounter an actual cock o’ the walk…

…on your way to enjoy a warm biscuit because this is, after all, The South.

I’ll be seeing The Daughter less, since her friends and her home are in Los Angeles, at least for another year-and-a-half until she emerges from the cloistered halls of Colby College to whereabouts TBD in the real world.

Her current dream job is to be an editor at a publishing house in New York, but she’ll go wherever the work is, work that I hope will keep her on the east coast nearer to me. And you, dear readers and friends — if your vacation plans ever take you to Western North Carolina, please know that there’s a guest room in Asheville with your name on it and a tour guide waiting to greet you.