Parenting With Chronic Illness: Skip the Birthday Parties

Single parenting week has been kicked off with a bang followed by copious whimpering on my part.

First up, the toddler's first swimming lesson. Which she managed well.

The weather, though, was another story. It's whatever you call colder than frigid. The wind kicked up tornadoes of ice crystals that invaded my lungs and drummed in my ear.

Just the other day I was telling someone, asthma is like drag on a car. Sure, you can probably get a Porsche up to 90 even with a parachute snagging wind behind it, but not without making the engine work a whole lot harder. I may outwardly appear to be 100% a-okay, but it takes more out of me to do regular stuff compared to normally lunged people.

And I feel it.

Especially when the winter wind pythons through my lungs.

Or when I walk into a birthday party for a 4 year old and see they have cats.

Because I didn't think to ask.

At least they weren't smokers. Thank Gawd.

This was my first birthday party with the toddler. The very first one, I worked so hubby handled it. The second, the older neighbor girls took her and left us alone for a blissful 3 hours--see also heaven for parents.

This party was quite the rude awakening.

One, I need to remember to ASK about the environment I've been invited to. I am still not used to how vigilant I need to be now. I'm working on 'old asthma time', when it really didn't matter and any fallout was minor.

Two, children's birthday parties are horrible evil things that are best avoided. The toddler was run over by the older kids (all boys who seemed to all have ADHD or a serious Red Bull habit) and the younger kids were all refusing to share. There was crying. Squabbling. Boo-boos. Two hours in, they still hadn't served the cake* and the toddler was not coping well with the all around lack of sharing (day two of no nap did not help).

As a parent, I was stuck in the delicate position of not parenting other people's kids but also trying to ensure no one's kids killed mine.

I pulled the plug and left. Too Lord of the Flies for us.

By the time we walked out, I felt like I'd been worked over by Mike Tyson and a familiar ache started to throb in my mid back until my limbs turned to lead. Way too much stress.

From here on out, Daddy has to do this birthday crap. I can't hack it. Maybe someday if I ever kick my steroid habit, but now? It's just asking for trouble.


*For those of you without kids, this is excessively long for a birthday party. My goal is always to have the entire thing done in 2 hours; food, cake, games, gifts. If people want to stay past that, fine, but they aren't held hostage because the cake hasn't been served yet.