Pox. What a nasty little word. It’s up there with wart, pus, slime and worms. To me the word “pox” evokes a time when rickety-boned children dressed in raggedy clothes lived in the back lanes of our cities and survived on mouldy bread. Like Scarlet Fever and the Black Death, I’d half-assumed pox of all sorts had died out, perhaps around the time indoor toilets became standard.
But not so. It’s very much alive and kicking, as many parents of young children will know. But why am I discussing it now? Because recently our house fell foul, or should that be fowl, of the chickenpox. Oh yes, the chickenpox came to us or, as we took to calling them, the chicken spots or the chicken Poc-poc-poc-poc-pox
They came via friends.
There I was some weeks back, sitting in a friend’s house, having coffee while her children played with mine, when her five-year-old started complaining of a sore bellybutton. Without further ado – as is the way with children – he lifted up his shirt for us all to see. And there it was – a single spot, a chickenpox blister. Not that I knew then what it was but she, my friend, did. She’d been expecting it, she’d known it could only be a matter of time, ever since the little boy had spent a weekend with his cousins just before they came down with the dreaded disease.
“It was bound to happen,” my friend announced casually. “Want another coffee?”
Want another coffee? Want another coffee? All I wanted was to get the hell out of there. What had she been doing asking us over? Wouldn’t it have been more in her line to draw a big red X on her front door to ward of the unsuspecting instead of inviting them in for coffee.
We left as soon as it was politely possible.
When we got home I rang another friend of mine, a nurse-cum-mother-of-four who’s a great source of information on all matters motherly. How could I tell whether either of the girls had caught the chickenpox, I asked her. I couldn’t, she told me, not for at least fourteen days. Should I keep the older girl away from playschool, I wanted to know. No point, she informed me. If I were to keep her at home for every little thing she may, or may not, have caught, she’d end up never going anywhere.
So the waiting began. When day fourteen came around I started carrying out checks, spot checks you could say, each morning until day twenty-one came and went and we were in the clear once again.
Who should we meet in town that very afternoon, but the chicken pox friend with her little boy (now recovered but still looking a little scabby) and her daughter.
“Want to go for a coffee?” she asked.
So off we went for coffee.
Some hours later, just as we were coming in the hall door, the phone rang. It was the same friend.
“Ah, Anne Marie, I hate to tell you this but we’ve got the chickenpox again. This time it's he litte one.”
And so began another wait.
Finally they came. The spots. On the two-year-old and, as usually happens with these things, during the most inconvenient week, the busiest week we’d lined up for ages. But the two-year-old was grounded. And if the two-year-old was grounded then so too I was. And if I was grounded then so was the five-month-old.
For a whole week all three of us were stuck inside. At the start I was full of good intentions to use the time well, to fill the hours with busy make-and-do projects but a tetchy, spotty two-year-old can be tiring and by the end of the week I’d succumbed to turning on the television as soon as she woke up.
Compared to the horror stories I’d heard about other children’s bouts, our two-year-old had got a pretty light dose and, a little over a week later, she was ready to go back to playschool.
The first thing I noticed when I went in the front door on that first morning back was the great big sign hanging on the classroom. It was addressed to the parents.
“One of the children has come down with CHICKENPOX (underlined in a thick red marker). Parents are advised to keep a lookout for symptoms.”
The second thing I noticed was what I fancied were the hostile stares from the heretofore other friendly parents at me and my still (slightly spotty) daughter.
“So she’s better now?” one asked. To my sensitive ears, her tone was more accusatory than sympathetic.
“Yes, yes. Fine.”
“And she’s not contagious anymore?”
“No, course not.” I’d hardly be bringing her into playschool if she was, I wanted to add, but thought better of it.
“You’re sure?”
“Course I am.”
The woman stared coldly at my darling daughter for a while, as if she were contemplating whether or not to suggest that the little girl should go about the place in sackcloth, ringing a bell and shouting, “Unclean! Unclean!”
“I see,” she said, finally, but there was a hefty dollop of disbelief in her voice.
As I went back down the steps, I felt her disapproving eyes boring into the back of me. What was she doing making out like it was our fault? My little girl had picked the chickenpox up from someone else. It wasn’t like I, personally, was responsible for concocting up the disease in my own private germ laboratory at home in order to unleash it onto an unsuspecting world, or more specifically, an unsuspecting playschool.
Yes, chickenpox is definitely one of those things it’s better to receive than to give. At least that way, you can blame rather than be blamed.
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