Having a small child in full-time daycare has reintroduced sickness into my life.  Before my son went off to play in the petri dish with the other little germfarms, I wasn’t sick for years.  YEARS.  Oh, I’d take a sick day now and again, but they were really mental health days.  (Like one time, when my husband and I still lived in Brooklyn, we took a sick day together, because we’d had it with our jobs.  We built a tent in the living room and played video games in it.  Really.)  Before my son was born, I couldn’t tell you the last time I well and truly suffered an illness.

Since he started attending dayare, I’ve been sick every few months.  Knocked-down sick.  Aching, coughing-till-I-retch, moaning pitifully from under the covers, incapable of eating and breathing at the same time sick.  And just as I learned that it really sucks to be sick, I also realized that I don’t have the luxury of being sick anymore, because I have a small child.  Being a sick mom is NOT FUN.  (Mom, I’m so sorry.  I never knew.  I owe you one billion bowls of chicken broth and so much coddling.)

All this to say: I’m sick this week.  Ugh.  Horribly sick.  I even have a fever, which never happens.  I shouldn’t have gone to work the past couple of days, but I had to run rehearsals.  Nobody else can do that for me, so bringing in a sub doesn’t work.  And I couldn’t cancel rehearsals; the performance is next Friday, and I had professional fight choreographers in all week to stage the opening brawl (we’re doing Romeo & Juliet – the kiss-free version, if you can believe it.  But hey, it’s middle school.  The fact that I have them holding hands and touching each other’s faces is enough to send them spiraling into fits of hysteria.)

Feeling sick has muddled my mind.  Maybe that’s why, after crash-banging out almost a hundred pages over the Thanksgiving break, I have come to another screeching halt and haven’t written a word.

It could also be because I’m working on the climax of the book, which is, you know, pretty important, and can be intimidating to write.  Even knowing it’s a draft and that I can change it all, it’s intimidating.  It’s also complicated, because at the end of this book, I’m introducing something that needs to echo back in later books, including the final book, and I’m scared I’m going to screw it up.  Even though the books are outlined and the series is deeply planned, things change when I write.  They just do.  I’m scared to write myself into a corner that I can’t get out of later.

So instead, I’m writing this post, and drinking tea, and sniffling pathetically all over the place, as if that’s going to solve anything.  BOO HOO.