Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 32

If our children had a fever, we kept them warm and in bed for a few days. We didn’t go to the doctor and demand pills. A child gets ill, so you nurse it better.

‘It took time, but that doesn’t matter. We had the time to keep them at home and nurse them back to health, and if things got really bad then of course we’d take them to see the doctors at the practice. But it started by keeping them at home and resting for the first week, and usually most things got better in that time anyway.’

Stop right there! Having a child at home for a week?! What, is this lady nuts? Does she have the kindest employer in the world who doesn’t mind her taking five days off to mop her child’s brow and thus miss out on two board meetings and a client deadline? Does she not have grocery shopping to do, or ludicrous amounts of dashing about between toddler groups and ballet classes and trips to the bank and visits to Zara just in case something exciting has just arrived on the shelves?

It’s then that a penny about the size of a small island drops, taking with it half a ton of guilt to choke even the most adoring parent: one of the main reasons we dash off to the doctor so often for a miracle cure for our offspring’s ailments is that we don’t have the time for them to be ill any more.

That day when you bundled your daughter off to nursery even though she had a stinking cold and probably infected the entire class before biscuit and juice time. That day I sent mine to school with impetigo claiming it was a rash brought on by some new bath wash. That week the entire Year One class got nits when Johnny came in crawling with the little buggers, because his mum was at a conference in New York and his nanny promised to get the nit-comb out for him but didn’t. All those times.

Let’s be honest: how many working parents do you know who can take time off every time one of their children is ill? One? Two? Probably three at most, and they’re probably the idiots like me who work from home as freelancers because they were too lazy to get a proper job. (Oh, I’m kidding, fellow freelancers!) Many parents are forced to take unpaid leave to look after sick kids, and they worry about their chances of holding on to that job if they are doing this more than two or three times a year, which is almost guaranteed even if you have only one child.

And for those who have a nanny to hold the reins, what are parents supposed to do when she is ill? Can’t she have a miracle cure as well so we can all get back to normal?

I put all of this, in a slightly gentler, explanatory way, to Granny. There is some more shaking of the head. She stops rubbing her leg and looks at me with a mixture of disbelief and deep sadness, making me half wish I’d kept such an admission to myself. Too late.

‘If you can’t look after your child when he’s ill, what sort of a mother are you, Elizabeth?’