The "T" word

A plaintive little voice calling from the dark, "I think I'm going to throw up, Ma." For my mother it must've seemed like a fire bell in the night. Is there anything worse than a house full of sick kids? Two of the worst words in the English language have to be "throwing up."

"Well, don't throw up in here. Run to the bathroom, quick!" Mother nudged me in the right direction with both hands. Everyone in the whole house knew it when you were beating a quick path to the toilet. The hurried tread of your feet gave you away every time.

The alarm spread through the whole house instantly. "Barry's going to throw up. Get out of his way."

"Somebody's already in the bathroom, Ma," I pounded on the door with urgency.

"Hurry up! Get out of the bathroom. I have to throw up."

"I'm already throwing up. I got here first."

These arguments could go on at length with each of us making a special case for our particular illness. Even in our misery we still had enough energy to bicker.

"I'm older than you, so I get to throw up first."

"I'm smaller than you, so you should wait until I'm done."

"I'm a girl and Dad says girls go first. I'm telling!"

"I'm sicker than you are. Unlock the door or I'll break it down."

"Shut up! You're all making me sick." Our oldest brother Kevin, always the critic, was in general nauseated by his siblings and hardly needed another reason.

"He's not sick. He's faking it, Ma." The "faking it" charge was a real low blow and the last refuge of scoundrels.

And so it would go when a stomach virus hit the Wallace household in the 1950s. There were seven kids and we fell like dominoes to the gut-wrenching misery of the flu bug. My father had intended to finish the bathroom in the upstairs dormer, but money was always tight. So there was only one bathroom for nine people. This was a tight squeeze in ordinary times, but absolute murder in an emergency. When we all got sick at once, havoc and near mutiny ensued. The milk of human kindness quickly soured.

"Now, you're all going to get it," Mother said. "So be kind to one another and be patient." It was like watching a B movie with bad acting when the virus struck. One after another we would clutch our stomachs and beg for mercy. My brother Tim, an atheist from an early age, would usually carry on the worst. "God help me, I'm going to die."

"You're not going to die," Mother assured him. "It will pass and you will be fine soon."

"I can't take it, Ma. Call the doctor. Call the priest."

I knew that calling the doctor was an option my father would never permit. "Stay away from that phone or I'll break your arm! You're going to have to be a lot tougher than that to get by in life." Unfortunately, Dad always took the long view of things. If you cried when you skinned your knees at seven, what kind of a man would you turn out to be at 27? Sickness was only another challenge to be overcome.

My father believed we simply couldn't afford to get sick and that illness was a form of moral weakness on our parts. For years on end he rose early in the morning and went to the factory with headaches, stomach aches, chills and the gamut of large and small maladies that befall mankind. "Sickness is mainly in your head," Dad would insist, while I usually tended to experience it farther south of my noggin. But I had to admire my father's iron willpower. He simply refused to get sick. Factory jobs were hard to come by and he didn't want to give his bosses any excuse to fire him. He was swift on his feet, so he tried to outrun sickness.

Dad also wasn't Dr. Marcus Welby when his children were ill. He lacked any bedside manner or a nurse's gentle touch. He didn't expect pity from the universe, and his response to adversity was to tough it out with gritted teeth. I fully believe that he actually scared any germs away.

The bathroom was another matter. It was a nice, pink tiled room with a built-in linen closet and a deep square tub. Despite the heavy usage by seven children, Mom kept the bathroom meticulously clean. But the infrastructure collapsed during the flu. As the victims piled up we sat in the darkened hallway outside the bathroom door moaning and begging the guy ahead of us to finish. Such pitiful wailing and gnashing of teeth! Bad enough to be sick but even worse when you had nowhere to relieve your agony. Mom passed out buckets, basins and bags. It was like a London air raid with everyone scrambling yet trying to maintain composure at the same time.

Dad had another solution for his weeping offspring. "Go out in the backyard. There's plenty of room and no one will bother you." Now in the year 2010 this may sound cruel or barbaric, but in 1950s Bridgeport, people had a less genteel view of human nature and the privacy of the individual. I remember going behind the garage with my brothers, all of us hurling in unison under the maple trees. The winter air actually felt bracing and the novelty was distracting if not especially palliative. Some of the worst times you share as a family contribute most to family humor and years of reminiscing.

Mother's attitude toward illness was different. She tended to us with gentle patience. The smallest children were held to her breast and rocked in the chair. She cooed to them and comforted them. I was filled with love for my mother when I watched her nurturing a sick child. Their pain seemed to hurt her, too. "There, there, I know your tummy hurts, but we'll make it better." We older children had to fend for ourselves as best as possible, but Mom made sure to make a fresh bed and tuck us in to endure our feverish discomfort. If our father denied illness through his strength of will, our mother absorbed it and carried our pain with her.

The worst part for me was watching my mother get sick. After tending to all of us to the point of exhaustion, she finally gave into her own illness and quietly closed the bedroom door behind her. It didn't seem to fair to me that somebody so good would have to suffer like the rest of us. She did so without drama or complaint. As with so many other thing, my mother and father showed us the way in life.

We recently had a flu run its course in our house -- three bathrooms for two people. Fifty years too late to make a difference.