Human Napkin
Today marked the official start of cold and flu season in our household. I am sitting with wide, glazed eyes at my computer, while my body reconciles the daily doses of essential caffeine with the nighttime decongestant I just took. It is similar to those cliché cartoons with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I wait with baited, wheezing breath to see which side will stomp out the other and achieve ultimate supremacy.

Each year, I reassure myself that being an isolated home school family (away from the petri dishes of school playgrounds, lunch rooms and public toilets) will somehow protect our little clan from the inevitable attack of Rhinovirus, knowing deep-down that we are doomed. Usually the onset of the sniffles sends me retreating like a mother bear to the comfort of the cave, where we find the warmest pajamas, best movies and wait for the storm to pass. But, tonight we gathered our lotion-filled tissues and ventured to my mother's annual holiday party.

As always, we had a lovely dinner and opened presents and decorated sugar cookies for Santa. We blissfully sit around the table like some sort of twisted-Rockwell magazine cover and try to help small children have messy fun without making a mess (which is another chapter altogether). My darling daughter, with frosting-covered knife in hand and a cookie perched gingerly on the tips of her fingers, lets out the most gentle of coughs—more of a barely audible whisp of escaping air. From the opposite side of the table comes the nameless adult mumbling, “Remind me not to eat THAT cookie.” The offensive Christmas tree is blacklisted and banished to the pizza pan at the far end of the kitchen. As the half-hour project continues, the population of blacklisted cookies becomes unruly, each with it's own little flaw: “he touched his hair,” “she itched her cheek,” or the most common, “he licked his finger.”

REALLY! My children span in age from 1 to 11 years old. They are lured to the kitchen table with promises of sweets and then armed with sugar-filled cookies, creamy frosting and brightly colored sprinkles-- I am in awe that their fingers pause to decorate a cookie and are not on direct route from the frosting to their face. It is then that my entry for tonight takes shape. With my sweet toddler squarely in my lap, he tops another snowman cutout, and I watch in suspended slow motion as he rethinks licking his chubby fingertip clean and reaches under the table to wipe it on my black dress slacks. The horrifying thought struck me, “I have been demoted to human napkin.”

I remember having picnics in the park and upon soiling my fingers reaching underneath me and wiping them discreetly in the grass. Many may read this with an air of superiority and say out loud, “Ew, I have never done that.” But, you cannot lie to yourself. Without the presence of napkins, or moist towelettes, even the outcast of the paper-product family—toilet paper, we have all been reduced to stoop and wipe on the common grass. With the addition of children to my life, I have become the equivalent of an ultra-absorbent roll of paper towels.

I am led to think of a time when my oldest child was less than three-months-old. I sat in a church meeting donned in a rosy silk sweater and innocently basking as I watched my adoring husband hold our young son. I point out that this was my oldest child because silk was still a fiber I owned. My dear hubby bounced our sweet boy on his lap and in another suspended moment the wretched man recognized the newborn grimace of a child about to regurgitate and launched the infant horizontally into my arms. Disheartening realization number two: in a pinch, I double as a human barf bag.

So as I sit and try to combat the oozing that accompanies the common cold, I reflect on all the times that I have stood comfortably conversing while a child lovingly stood shyly behind me and wiped a green nasal invader on the soft fabric of my skirt. I think about how many occasions I have been the victim of the infamous “Bury and Blow Maneuver.” This is maneuver is performed when the drowsy child is supported sturdily on one hip. While hopefully anticipating a welcome sleeping baby face buried in the shoulder of your shirt, allow the child one loud, squishy and viscous blow. The exercise is completed with the child firmly pushing his nose into your clothing and shaking his head from side to side in an attempt to cement his achievement permanently in the fibers of your garment. Alarming realization number three: I am a human hazardous waste bin.

A while back, my husband and I laughed at some faceless stand-up comic who realized one day that his mom was a woman with an underpinning of beauty, masked in an air of defeat. As I daily dress myself in the uniform of motherhood (usually a pair of sweats or medical scrubs), I amend this man's statement. I am not masked in an air of defeat, I am shrouded in a cloud of empowerment. I accept and realize my three-fold duty in this world and dress in anticipation that at any moment my attire may have to be sterilized or possibly incinerated.