Parenting is the ultimate humbling experience. Just when you start to feel like you’ve got it figured out, your kids bring you down a notch – or 10. You’ve got the multichild bedtime routine operating like a well-oiled machine, until your youngest sneaks out of bed and flushes her Peppa Pig down the toilet. Or you’re cruising to kindergarten after crushing a smooth morning, until your four-year-old asks how, precisely, babies get in the mom’s tummy.
But the ultimate record scratch, unquestionably, is a sickness that arrives out of nowhere and leaves you pleading for nothing but sleep and Gatorade.
Allow me to paint an ugly picture. My husband had just spent three nights in the basement, knocked out by a wicked stomach bug, and the kids and I were happily keeping our distance. He recovered and then promptly left on a work trip. Smooth sailing, I thought. I am such a pro, I thought.
Cue the record scratch and narrator voice: She was not, in fact, a pro.
Soon, I was oscillating between bathroom and sofa, groaning while the kids asked me for help with their artwork, for snacks, to find their specific Elsa doll, for water in their favourite cup – no, not that cup. The other cup.
I struggled to make dinner while I couldn’t keep anything down myself. But my kids, the audacity, still needed to be fed, taken to activities and entertained. I told myself I couldn’t be sick – I’m their mom, after all – but my body had other plans.
“There really isn’t an off switch – you can’t tap out,” says Allison Venditti, a Toronto mom of three boys and founder of Moms at Work, an organization that advocates for and connects working mothers across Canada. “As moms, when we’re sick, we’ll say, ‘sure just let me throw up and I’ll get back to helping you with your craft.’ We just soldier on.”
“It’s a societal expectation that we have placed uniquely on mothers,” she adds. “We just keep on, because what choice do we have? There is this deep belief that even if a mother is ill, a child needs their mom, no matter what.”
After I emerged from the bathroom one evening, my four-year-old asked a question that seemed to drive home Venditti‘s point: “Was daddy more sick than you? He didn’t play with us the whole time.”
I was tempted to answer that mommy is just wired differently. It turns out this is true – but not only because of societal expectations. Studies show that men experience illness more intensely than women.
Don’t tell my husband, but a study by a University of Toronto researcher found that severity of infection is higher in males than females for viral, bacterial, fungal and parasitic diseases. And an article in the British Medical Journal reviewed the evidence behind the so-called “man flu” and found several studies suggest men have weaker immune responses than women when it comes to common viral respiratory infections.
I wondered if there has also been research into moms who parent while sick. What does the data say about best practices when mom is parenting while ill, and how does sickness affect our ability to do so – particularly if we are the primary caregiver?
“There just isn’t any research on motherhood and acute sickness – which is surprising but also not at all surprising,” says Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta who focuses on the cross-section of family dynamics and health. “The blind spot itself is so revealing … It shows our own biases because no one is even asking those questions about mom.”
But I found my own answers while in the deep trenches, revealed – as so many parenting lessons are – in an episode of Bluey. In this instalment of the popular kids’ TV show, Bluey’s parents are hungover – a different kind of sick, sure, but I could relate. Mom and Dad are largely stationary, pretending to be a whale and a boat, while their daughters play the roles of captain and passenger – and the kids have the time of their lives.
I decided to join Bluey’s dad and immediately rolled onto the living room floor. My girls’ imaginations lit up: Mom was going to be the patient. No, Mom would be the baby. Yes, they definitely needed to go do the grocery shopping to feed me.
I had read about the trend of horizontal parenting all over Instagram and TikTok, with users sharing strategies to keep kids busy and engaged while mom or dad is literally lying down. The concept has even inspired an illustrated book, Horizontal Parenting: How to Entertain Your Kid While Lying Down.
For what seemed like 47 days but was actually only 72 hours, I barely moved – except for diaper changes and bedtime. I ordered food for most meals, grilled cheese and apple slices for days, and my older daughter did a surprisingly okay job of serving it to her sister. Sure, screen time helped – but mostly we played “mommy’s sleeping,” “who can rub mommy’s back the longest” and “Doctor Evie to the rescue,” where my younger daughter flew through the room with her pretend medical kit several hundred times.
Any time my expectations of doing it all started to creep in, I reminded myself of a new mantra: safe, fed and clean. And somehow, even given the gross circumstances, we were all having fun.
When I returned to the land of the living, I realized that lying down had afforded me a fresh perspective on parenting. Allowing our kids to be the entertainment, and following wherever their imaginations take us, is not just a life hack for when gastro disaster strikes. It’s actually a worthwhile parenting strategy, and the view from the carpet is beautiful.
