The doctor at our urgent care put him on a steroid treatment, Benadryl, and changed his antibiotic. The poor kid who had always had an Amoxicillin allergy but could tolerate other forms of penicillin now was allergic to all of it. Unfortunately, the next day he awoke again with a few hives. I kept him home and followed up with our pediatrician, and while in the waiting room the hives just started popping up all over his face. We were rushed back into a waiting room where they made him gag down more Benadryl and they seemed to go down. I had him home with me all that week. Have you ever spent a week with a kid on steroid treatment? They told me it could "alter" his personality. What they meant by the word alter was, "Your child will be inhabited by a demon, but do not consult an exorcist until after seven days and the symptoms persist."
Week two hit, he went to school slightly less demonic (but that was the teacher's problem now, not mine), and still on Benadryl. I got a call from the nurse every single day that week because the hives persisted despite the medicine. Our school nurse, God bless her anal-retentive soul, described each hive: its location, size, shape, time of arrival, time of departure, etc. I was in and out of the school several days that week and the next administering Benadryl and hydro-cortisone cream. Finally, after week three and another consult with the pediatrician who advised allergy testing if the hives persisted, we were in the clear.
If there was ever a sign from God that it was NOT my time to go back to work, ripping open an unpaid for tube of hydro-cortisone cream in the middle of Target and slathering it all over your five year old is it. I mean, I was it for the kid. If I was working, Eli would have suffered. My parents live two hours away, and I'm trying to be nice here, so let's say that my in-laws who are nearby aren't really capable of long-term care. I really don't know what I would have done because I really would have had no one to rely on for those three weeks. Sadly, I ignored the sign from God and jumped into Eat, Pray, Love to bolster my spirits and keep me on the optimistic path.
Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, for those of you haven't read it, is one woman's journey to happiness by living four months each in Italy, India, and Indonesia. I lived for five months in Nancy, France and if you ever need to do some serious soul-searching, go live in another country for a prolonged period of time. It's hell, let me tell you. So since I couldn't hop on a plane myself, I escaped vicariously and ate tons of pasta and did yoga and met a fantastically sexy older Brazilian man to get me through the rest of spring.
As June came and went and I received not one phone call for an interview, I decided to stay on my spiritual journey kick and jumped into Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk about a woman who spends three years in a monastery as an honorary monk/nun. I believe the official term is oblate. I first read this book while I was in France and as I was in the middle of a deep and troubled soul-searching of my own at the time, I did not remember how heavy and academic the book was. I trudged through it the second time, and though not as life-altering as the first read-through, I did have a bit of envy at this woman's ability to devote three years of her life to the study of this very simple and ritualistic life.
Mid-July hit with still no interview. I returned my interview clothes I purchased in the spring and added the extra hundred bucks to my bank account. How sad is that? Fuck spiritual journeys. I needed some fluff, so enter Emily Giffin and Something Blue. It was the first book I read by her and hated almost every minute of it the first time I read it until I came to the end. Then I realized I was suppose to hate it. The character was meant to be hated wearing her Jimmy Choo's and ignoring the prenatal care of her unborn child. Emily Giffin is a great author because her characters are very real, very imperfect, and it's a smart kind of chick-lit where you don't have to think all that much but you still aren't scraping the bottom of the barrel either.
I finished that and then needed a moment to think about where to go next, not just with my next book choice, but with my life. I clearly was not going back to work. It was all status quo for me. That's when I remembered Julie and Julia. I totally jumped on the band wagon when this came out. Saw the movie, loved it. Read My Life in France, thought it was OK. But, what really got to me was Julie Powell's memoir. She's a very accessible "character" in the memoir who drinks too much, hates her job, has cat hair on her pots and pans. I get it. She was living the status quo. And suddenly I was inspired, sort of.
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