The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Bitten

My throat is killing me, but I was due.

My sister and her family have been sick for about a year, give or take. There have been flus, sinus infections, pink eye, bronchitis, croup, urinary tract infections and the common cold. Whenever she calls, on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to lack of sleep or general frustration, I say all the sympathetic things one should when speaking to someone on a ledge. I tell her it'll be okay soon, that this is what having kids is all about, that when the children have successfully grown out of toddlerhood and infancy they will have ironclad constitutions and she will sleep again. As I say it, I know I'm not really convinced that it's true. I've never known children to get as sick as hers do, and I think if I were her I'd have lost my mind by now.

But now it's my turn, and Kitty Kat has been looking miserable and pathetic with various oozing fluids emanating from places where it isn't always likely. She can't hear at the moment, her ears congested or some such, and at first I mistook it as insolence, when really the child is unable to hear a pair of fingers snap next to her. M. isn't worried, though, and when I reached for the phonebook to look up the address to the local clinic, he patted me gently and said that it's 'just a cold'. Part of me knows this is true, but the other part is over-protective and henlike. He's been battling the same flu or whatever since hers started, and the two of them have been alternating their misery for me to tend to. Lo and behold comes the dinner hour this evening when the rawness in my throat gave way to the sensation of an open sore. I could barely swallow, and I was angry about it because I gone out earlier to buy candy canes and hot chocolate so we could decorate our tree in style. Instead, I waited for M. to hunt for white lights in the basement (I'm not really into the multi-coloured ones) and he got lost in nostalgia and cobwebs. I could hear him sorting through old photos in his mother's carry-on bag, the one he hastily put into the basement once she was safely positioned in a 'home'. Apparently, he had not looked through the bag until tonight, but this annoyed me. Why choose the moment when we're putting up our tree to get all sentimental over things he hasn't thought of in years? I tried to holler in my raspy voice to just bring up the multi-coloured lights and be done with it, but he insists on going out tomorrow to buy more white because he knows I prefer them. Honestly, the idea of shopping tomorrow is not a pleasant one. I'd be okay with the garish display of unnatural colours.

My body hurts and I am wanting a hot bath, but I know the sound of the running water will wake her. Instead, I'll go for the shower because it's swift and steamy and the noise is less invasive. It used to be that I enjoyed feeling like this because it was a way to escape the routine. While in school, it meant a few days in my room reading novels, watching daytime television and sleeping when everyone else was being productive. While working, occasionally I was able to call in sick, leaving me feeling a blend of luxury and guilt. Now, with a child, I am walking wounded. I am extremely lucky, though, that M. works at home. Should I really need a nap, he is usually agreeable about watching after her. There is still a fair amount of luxury in my life and I know it.

While M. sorted through a mountain of old photos in his mother's carry-on, he managed to 'accidentally on purpose' bring attention to the ones of his ex-wife. Little exclamations like 'oh oh, best get rid of that one' when his silence would have been better, I think. I know why girls do that kind of thing but is it the same with boys? Is there something in us which needs to feed the green-eyed-monster every now and then? I didn't care about the photographs, I mean, I've seen pictures of the woman before and it really didn't affect me but his pubescent behaviour has me wondering. Does he need reassurance that I care? Does he need to see me in a state of jealous anxiety? Would that stroke his ego hard enough?

I still have pictures of R., but they're carefully put away. I don't want to have to explain to my daughter about the man before, not until she's old enough to understand. Actually, there really isn't much call to mention him to her, ever. We weren't married, didn't have children, and even if he's significant to me, he never will be to her. My father never mentioned his ex-wife to me, and I only figured it out when I was eleven because of pieced together arguments my parents had in other rooms. He still doesn't talk about the woman much, and if I hadn't seen a picture or two of her, I might think she never existed. That I have two half-brothers I've never met does run through my mind from time to time, but mostly, it was a personal period of my father's life which happened before I was a reality. I'm curious, sure, but the history belongs to him, and I'm okay with that.

I'm okay with M.having his own history, too. I know about her, I knew him when he was still married to her, and though she and I apparently have no hard feelings toward one another (from what I've been told), I'm okay with letting her fade away in the recesses of his mind. I'll admit to having spent one or two afternoons in the basement sheepishly rifling through photos to gain a deeper understanding of the people in his past because I preferred to do so without the back story. I wanted faces to make mental connections but the personal anecdotes belong to him. I know about his serious girlfriend, the university professor who teaches linguistics somewhere in the U.S. I know her face is very long, more pained looking than a Modigliani, and that she never wore makeup. I know about the one in between the professor and the wife, the tiny, conceited one who loved to purse her lips for photos and was always surrounded by scads of people who looked as though they were in the middle of celebrating something. M. told me he never loved her, even though they lived together, and I wondered about why he thought co-habitation was a good idea. He said it made sense at the time. I don't really get that, even now.

The wife was, in my opinion, the most attractive of the lot, though M. disagrees. Lebanese and Italian, she was a dark blend of convential beauty. Smart, too, I'm told. An aeronautical engineer. Knowing this tends to make me feel inferior, even though M. doesn't seem to understand why. She was not interesting, he complained to me once, she didn't care about books or art and only pretended to like the things he did. Once, she forced herself to read one of M's favourite books in an effort to please him. I pitied her upon hearing that. If ever he gave me a book and told me to read it because it was his favourite I'd laugh at him and say 'yeah, go stack it on top of the others and I'll get back to you'. My pretending days are long over. Still, I'm given to periods of intense insecurity because I can't understand what he sees in me when he has the ability to attract such interesting, accomplished women. He is accomplished himself, and one of the reasons I took so long to make a decision about entering a relationship with him was because I could not believe he would really want it once the novelty wore away. These many years on, though, he's still here, and he still laughs and makes me tea and kisses me when he thinks I'm sleeping.

Go figure.

It hurts to swallow. My inner ear is complaining with every muscular movement. I'm really not finding this luxurious anymore.

Have I mentioned that despite my disdain for all things vampire I've been watching 'True Blood'? I can't help it. It has moments of intense hotness and it has enough silly dialogue to make me laugh in spite of my oath to reject the pale-skinned bloodsuckers. Look for Bill. He'd be hard to push away, even if his teeth were bared and his eyes were angry. I still think the vampire genre is overdone and trivial, but this show is not for horny teenagers. It's for lascivious grown-ups and hypocrites like me. It's a guilty pleasure, like Californication before it became...less smart?

I'm going to go gargle with salt water and think about imbibing some alcohol. It would be for medicinal purposes, really.