A room with the 'flu

One of the greatest things about working in a school is the fact that Management are incredibly understanding when you have to take time off for a sick cherub. In fact guidelines allow each member of staff three days per year precisely for this occurrence.
Which is nice.
But it does make me feel like a proper fraud when the child is fifteen going on thirty at the best of times when I phone to tell them she still has a roaring temperature and a hacking cough with a chill factor of winter-weight-duvet-by-the-radiator-still in bed proportions.
I can hear my inner-voice sniggering like a demon on my shoulder.
‘What, she can’t get out of bed and get herself a cup of tea?’
Um… no. And even if she were to attempt this feat (at the best of times unnatural) I would fret irrationally about boiling water and scalded body parts en route back to sick-bed because of the aforementioned duvet-constantly-wrapped-about thing.
‘She couldn’t get herself something to eat?’
Er… no. Actually. Because I do all the thinking around here. It wouldn’t cross her mind to equate a grumbling belly and a thumping headache with something so banal as hunger, unless I suggest it – then it’s the most obviously simple solution in the world. And so much nicer because Mummy made it (always ‘mummy’ to a sick child).
And even though I’d be home by 1.30 at the latest, I know I’d be arriving to a tangled, sweaty heap of phlegm that hasn’t even gone for a pee because her water bottle’s empty and she still doesn’t ‘get’ that infections have to be constantly flushed from one end to the other unless encouraged.
Oh and there’d be sick on the bed.
Which is always nice.
She might be 15 but she’s still my baby and when she’s ill I like her to cling to me like a hot little puppy as if her recovery depends on me. Because one day it won’t. And I’m not ready for that just yet.
Oh, and I DID work from home which kind of appeased my guilt-addled brain. So I don’t feel like a total fraud.
Just a bit.
And it’s not every lunchtime I get to sit in bed with my daughter, two bowls of hot tomato soup and watch the Aristocats.
Pass me the tissues - it’s going to be a another long old day.