Man Colds

Two posts in one day means I must be relatively new to this. My blog has zero hits, which actually makes it a diary. I’m okay with that. Are you? Yes. (I answer myself because no one else is listening).

 Okay, on to the reason I sat down to write. Man Colds.

What is a Man Cold?

A man cold is the male version of Acute viral nasopharyngitis, commonly known as the common cold.

My husband suffers with some regularity from man colds. In his defence, he works with children. As he walks down the school hallway on any given winter day, he might be chased by a number of virus coated twerps who use droplets of their green snot to chart their way through the universe. Here I was, here is my snot. 

So he catches a lot of colds. Then I catch them from him. But he catches the Man Cold version, far more debilitating than anything I’ve ever caught.

As colds go, worse only than my husband is my father. The only thing I remember about being sick as a kid was the efforts undertaken, at all costs, to avoid passing whatever ailed me on to my father. For I knew what would happen should he wake with a sniffle with any sort of timely proximity to my own.

You, he’s say through snot, you gave me this.

When my mother got sick, she picked up a pack of kleenex on her way home from work, stuffed it in her purse, moaned after an especially large sneeze and otherwise went about her life.

When my father was sick, our little familial world grinded to a halt. His moans, akin to some kind of death rattle, wafted out of my parents’ bedroom. My mother would emerge, her hands full of empty bowls and cups, and close the door behind her. We stood wide-eyed in the hallway, clutching our teddies and wondering whether we’d ever see my father again.

Don’t go in there, she’d say, rolling her eyes.

At night, I swear I could hear him through the walls, moaning, groaning, begging the virus for mercy.

Twenty odd years later, I live with a new, super-virus version of the Man Cold. When my hubby gets sick, he stops at the grocer and buys 6 boxes of tissue, a Club Pak. He searches the medicine cabinet for boxes that say the word Cold in bold. He lies in bed beside me, tossing and lamenting the throes of his disease, breathing through his mouth, his hairline rimmed with sweat.

I swear, I really do want to feel bad for him and nurse him like a good wife, but I look at him instead and think: Gross.

By the second or third day my patience wears off and I start with the Man Cold accusations. My husband takes this as well as my father used to take it when my mother hurled the same accusation at him, which is to say not very well.

It’s not the same cold you had! he’ll insist. This is WAY worse!

mmmmmhmmmmm. 

~ by thebookofmommy on February 13, 2008.