When Misery Hates Company, It Can Sure Test a Marriage

Welcome to the misery sweepstakes. Who feels worse? Who will be crowned King of Ill, Empress of Flu, Duke of Germ?

He will, if I don’t step up. My God! He’s so very . . . verbal with his suffering. Is he always this verbal? No, I did not say “whiny.” That was not my word. But, my God!

“Oh, honey, I am so sick!” he is saying. “Oh, I just can’t believe how sick I am. I don’t ever remember being so sick in my whole entire life! Do you think this thing is going to my brain? I mean, if this fever doesn’t break, my brain could actually start boiling, couldn’t it?”

No, I did not say “melodramatic.” That was not my word. In fact, I am not saying any words. How can I possibly get a word in? I am just as sick as he is--no, I am definitely sicker than he is--and frankly I believe myself to be the superior human being because I don’t just lie around bragging about it.

Of course not. Because I am female. Females are stronger than males when it comes to sickness. Females rally. Males fold. This is just a fact of nature. A fact of nature I am learning about in an up-close-and-personal way at this particular time. Because I’ve seen him sick plenty of times. I’ve just never seen him sick through the eyes of someone suffering through the very same sickness at the very same time. This puts a rather bright spotlight on the difference between our sickness styles.

“Ouch!” he cries. “That light! Oh, that light is killing my eyes! Please turn that light off! Oh, please, please, oh, my God please turn off the light.”

“Honey,” I say, “it’s a light bulb. A light bulb.”

He coughs. It comes out like something you’d expect to hear a dragon do after it got its tail stuck in an elevator door. It’s a big cough, deep, full of moisture and sorrow.

“Do you want a cough drop?” I ask.

“I think I need my inhaler,” he says.

His inhaler. He’s gotten so many sickness points out of that inhaler his doctor gave him. I don’t have an inhaler. I don’t have a whole suitcase full of flu drugs from my doctor. Of course, I didn’t go to my doctor. Of course not. It’s the flu. I am female. Flu plus female equals aspirin plus Hall’s Mentholyptus. It means you suffer quietly, bravely, without ever once pointing out that your fever spiked to 102 this morning, while his was only 101.3. You are a hero.

Being sick at the exact same time as my spouse is a whole new adventure for me. It’s one of those things about parenting you don’t factor into the big picture. It’s a question of germ distribution. In the old days, when it was just the two of us, one of us would come home with the sickness and experience the sickness before passing it on to the other. This gave each of us the time and space needed to be the most important human being in the world, which, as anyone knows, is the whole key to healing.

Enter child, also known as germ ball. The child gets sick, it breaks your heart, you fawn all over her, your husband fawns all over her, fawn, fawn, inhale, exhale, the germs incubate in mother and father, incubate just long enough for the child to bounce back into her former bundle of joy while the mother and father go down. Hard. Simultaneously.

He mumbles something.

“What?” I say. “You are mumbling again.”

He mumbles something about my being snippy or snappy or something.

“Look, my sympathy motor is not, shall we say, firing on all cylinders,” I say.

“What?” he says. “What did you say? I can’t hear you! Oh my God, I think I’m losing my hearing!”

See, this right here is the difference in a nutshell. I can’t hear him, and so naturally I assume the problem is: him. He is mumbling. He assumes the problem is: him. He assumes that his eardrums have been perforated by some foreign matter trapped in his eustachian tubes.

This does not bode well for our future. If we survive this flu, we are likely to grow old together, lose our hearing for real together, and we’ll be shouting “What?”at each other over a TV that’s on too loud and there will be our daughter, wondering what planet she is on, wondering how to make a graceful exit, forgetting all about the germs we braved on her behalf and the indisputable fact that on this day in the year 2000 my fever spiked to 102 while his was a mere 101.3.

Jeanne Marie Laskas’ new book, “Fifty Acres and a Poodle,” is published by Bantam.