who cleans when they're sick?

I was reading a Holidailies entry ("Boys" on Seeking Samadhi) and one line caught my eye: "He said he was sick, so he was cleaning the house. Who cleans when they're sick?"

Oh, boy, I could tell you stories.

When I was growing up, we weren't the sort of family where the parents call the kids in as "sick" so they can all take a weekend trip. We were rarely allowed to miss school unless it was for an unavoidable doctor's (or orthodontist's) appointment, or for a funeral. I can remember exactly two days when I talked my mom into letting me stay home, and both were during my senior year in high school: One day when the typewriter ribbon ran out at night while I was mid-term paper and I had to spend most of the day it was due in retyping it, which wasn't exactly a holiday. And one day when the seniors used to traditionally get the day off while the other students took PSATs and other standardized tests, but when we were seniors, the powers that be decided we should take a career test. I figured I knew my career plans and I wasn't about to take some stupid test when it was my right to have the day off. (I am still not sure how I talked my mom into that one.) Considering the mess of my current resume, I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't have taken that test after all.

I read a lot of books growing up about kids who managed to fake sickness and stay home from school, because they wanted to avoid tests they hadn't studied for, or bullies, or some horrible gym exercise. And of course there was Ferris Bueller's Day Off, although it wasn't released until after my junior year of high school. I never understood how those kids got away with it; in fact, I was a little jealous.

We never were able to fake being sick at my house. My now-married brother was a classic child con artist and he knew how to get out of chores and "forget" to return change to my parents from pizza delivery money and so forth, but even he couldn't do it. My mom was extremely strict, and had two responses when we said we didn't feel well enough for school:

1. "All right, I'll call the doctor's office and make an appointment."

2. "If you stay home, you'll have to help me clean up around the house. You're not too sick to vacuum."

These responses worked well. If we were genuinely not feeling good, we agreed to let her call the doctor. Of course, visible signs of illness were taken seriously, like chicken-pox bumps or throwing up. No one ever chose to stay home and clean the house.

But this upbringing has resulted in some strange grown-up activity on my part. First of all, I learned that vomiting is an impeccable sign of sickness, for the purposes of leaving work (and thanks to my sister, I learned that a bloody nose works too). When I worked my first full-time job with sick leave, I was a secretary and disliked the job a lot. If I wanted to go home sick, all I had to do was go into the bathroom and pretend to throw up. No one questioned that excuse at all. Fortunately, I eventually stopped doing that (because I would never fake illness to leave a job! besides, if you're a contract worker, you don't really have to, because you get no sick time anyway).

Second of all, when I do take sick time and I'm not feeling all that bad -- just bad enough not to work, or contagious enough to be kind to my coworkers -- I have been known to spend some time cleaning. I don't clean the whole day, because I feel rotten, but somehow the impulse to clean is too strong to resist. So you see, some of us really do clean when we're sick. Thanks a lot, Mom.

Posted at December 15, 2006 10:49 AM