Germaphobe conundrum: can the inevitable illness be avoided?

My family and I spent the week after Christmas on vacation in the Outer Banks. It was a lovely week spent with friends. We rented a house on the Sound, the weather was great and we didn’t leave the house for days at a time. While there, I kept noticing on Facebook more and more comments about friends back home having sick kids – stomach bug sick kids. It seemed like each hour I logged on, I heard about someone new puking.

We drove home on Saturday. Halfway to Philly, my mother-in-law called to cancel her Eagles get-together the next day, she had been throwing up all night and had the stomach flu. And thus began my full blown panic. I just knew we’d get it. I had a bad feeling, the one that told me that each mile we headed north was putting us that much closer to the puke-a-thon.

Back home, we got up the next morning and ran a bunch of errands. I like a germaphobe on uppers, every five minutes I was applying Germ-X to my kids’ hands. Seriously, I applied like there was no tomorrow.

The next day, I took the kids to the gym. I was five minutes into my Step class when one of the girls from the kiddie care room came in to inform me, “your son just threw up everywhere.” “Which one?,” I asked. To which the answer didn’t really matter, because by the time we got home, my other son was also throwing up all over my family room floor.

We spent 24-hours in puke fest hell, a day or two more recovering. And in all that time, I kicked myself over and over again for even having left the house after we got home. “We got it at the grocery store, I just know it,” I told my husband. “That one kid in aisle 4 looked sick.”

 

Or, “I bet it was from school Monday morning. He got it there. Someone sent their child to school sooner than they should have.” I spent days racking my brain to figure out where my kids got the bug, where I went wrong, and asking myself how I could have avoided our family getting hit. It’s not like I was uninformed. As I washed more and more sheets and clothes, I over analyzed what we had done the last few days, and how I could have avoided our getting sick.

Rationally, I can reason that sometimes there are things beyond my control. And as responsible as I may be with the hand washing, my kids are going to get sick. But it’s times like this, I feel like I should just hole my family away for the winter and wait the storm of sickness out.

This is an original post to Philly Moms Blog.  You can also find Whitney on Mommies with Style, the online community for trendy moms, which she founded in 2004.