Dearest Daughters,
I can recall every single dingle time that I have vomited in my conscious existence.
This is a talent. The memory or the regurgitation?
You be the judge.
I fear these are talents that I may have passed on to Babybel. Namely: anxiety laced with a bit of hypochondria. And throw a red Icee in there for good measure, if you really want to see a show.
I hate throwing up. Or, as we call it, suka-ing. More than anything in the world. I'd rather crap my pants. Honestly.
Okay. So, here I am. Already feeling anxious about something, a little churn in my stomach. I'm probably someplace very inconvenient, like the airport security screening x-ray conveyor belt with half my clothes off, as they're being run through the machine, or trying on shoes at a store buried deep in the labyrinth of a mega mall without windows. Or air. Maybe working, the only employee in a tiny, unheated ticket booth, selling for-profit aquarium tickets to Pier 39 tourists in below freezing weather.
Not that I've ever been in any of these highly specific situations. We're just saying. For the sake of illustration.
I start to feel a little queasy. I take deep breaths. Tell myself I'm okay. But, there's that feeling that breakfast might just make a reappearance. And it is the uncertainty of its visit that makes me more anxious. Gagging. Dry heaving. Watering eyes. The fight against myself to not literally lose it in public. Because that would be the WORST. Vulnerability at its vulnerablist.
And when and if I do throw up, it's just added to the mental list of all the other times I threw up.
1) The time when I was two and got car sick, playing with one of those magic erase boards, the kind where you scribble with a plastic pen on a thin sheet of plastic, making dark marks as the sheet clings to the sticky black board beneath it. Then, you pull up the top layer and voila! your drawings disappear. Along with your lunch.
2) The time Auntie Diane, our care-taker, chauffeur, recycling and roadkill removal educator extraordinaire, picked me up from kindergarten. I drank an orange soda. So did the side of her car.
3) The time I had the flu in elementary school. And I don't know where my parents were, but Uncle Chuck came over from across the street and held my hair out of my face while I threw up in the downstairs bathroom.
4) The time I got sick on the bus ride to my middle school. As soon as I got to campus, they called for my parents to pick me up. This may have happened more than once and may have landed me in the school psychologists office. Not because they were concerned about my recent and shocking move to Marin County from Stockton, but because they thought I had an eating disorder. So very Marin County.
5) The time(s) that involved alcohol that I can't tell you about; other than that I was most certainly over the legal drinking age and that "resetting" is a term I learned from your Auntie Dee and Uncle Ron.
6) The time I was pregnant. And had to use the trash can in my classroom. In front of my students. Twice.
7) The other time I was pregnant. And got to use my own trash can in my office. Times infinity.
So, Babybel. I'm sorry. Not only because you've inherited your hysterical, anxiety, hypochondriac upchucking from me, but also because I don't have much to offer in the way of coping with said personality trait.
Maybe steal the barf bags from airplane seat back pockets and keep a lot of those around?
That's all I got.
Love,
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