Besides money, what's the other great gift you love to receive?

I hope you had a pleasant holiday, however you celebrate.

We had high hopes around here. Both our adult children were going to spend Christmas with us, arriving on Christmas Eve. But we had another guest arrive first.

My wife was stricken with food poisoning.

We both had stayed up late on Christmas Eve-eve getting ready for the visit. I cleaned and prepared the rooms. My wife decorated. There’s always stuff to do as it is but when you have stay-over visitors (technically, they’re not “visitors,” but we felt compelled to make the house more presentable) you’re motivated to make things extra welcoming.

I slept on the sofa that night, having been hit with insomnia I read a book in the living room until I passed out. I awoke and continued various chores downstairs. Around ten in the morning, my wife called to me, “Can you help me?”

That didn’t seem right.

She’d been up since five o’clock in the morning vomitting and stricken with diarrhea. (I wouldn’t ordinarily mention diarrhea, but I figured out how to spell it a few years ago and now I use it in writing whenever possible.) And if you’ve ever been stricken with food poisoning, you know that the toilet’s your friend, but you don’t necessarily reach your friend before nature asserts itself.

Christmas Eve became even more work, trying to isolate and comfort the patient, cleaning, cleaning some more, and cleaning yet again.

I didn’t get much sleep that night, but our kids arrived and we had a pleasant gift exchange around one o’clock on Christmas day. All seemed right with the world.

Until around seven o’clock in the evening when I felt more tired than normal. I hoped it was the lack of sleep, but it was food poisoning. For the next twenty-four hours, I was a mess. At some point, our eldest kid was also stricken.

The illness was like having Mt. Vesuvius for a mouth spewing toxic lava, and Old Faithful on your butt putting on a show for the tourists every twenty minutes.

Our younger kid held down the fort, dealing with dogs, getting us hydrated, while also keeping a safe distance.

Illness is humbling and a great reminder how we all need help, and to care for friends and family is one of the greatest gifts we can offer each other.

It also reminded me that life is messy and being an adult is hard.

Twenty-five years ago, when those same two kids of ours were much younger, we made a road trip to visit my parents in Cleveland. We’d picked up food from Burger King during the drive from Michigan. That evening, my wife, our oldest kid, and I all got food poisoning. Each of us had ordered the same egg on a bagel thing. The younger kid ordered French toast sticks and didn’t get sick.

It’s tough enough travelling with little kids, but dealing with the mess of food poisoning, comforting a sick kid, all while in someone else’s house was extra miserable.

In the morning, I mentioned to my father how we’d been sick. He said, “Yeah, I heard you guys puking.”

It hit me that he was done parenting me. Whatever mess I had, it was mine to clean up.

I pondered this for a while, thinking maybe he could have helped us, or at least offered some sympathy. But that wasn’t really his style. He was more of a tough love parent.

It made sense soon after.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that my mother was slipping into dementia, and my father was quietly caring for her, doing his best to keep it all together.

I think he knew he was in for a tough stretch of road, and he was conserving every ounce of caregiving for what lay ahead.

Like I said, caring for friends and family is the greatest gift we can offer. I mean, cash is still great, but caregiving edges it out when you really need someone to help you get to the toilet.

Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…

I’m always hopeful that I’ll get a “bunch of writing” done during any kind of break from work (I took eight days of time off from my job). Alas, it never amounts to as much “done” as I hoped. Still, I advanced the current novel, figuring out some tricky plot problems.