Maybe if I Try Like This

Once when my kids were little, about four and six, we all got sick. It was some kind of miserable chest thing with a fever where you’re just miserable and everything is miserable. We all had stuffy noses and sore throats and a chest cough and no energy. When you’re a single mom and your kids get sick, something you might not know is even if you get sick too, you don’t really get to be sick. You have to be the one to make everything okay.

You have to get up at 11pm and 2am and 3:15am and 4am and 5:30am, when one or the other or both of your kids are crying, and rock them back to sleep or figure out what you can do to make them comfortable. Then you get up at 6am for the day because kids always get up earlier when they are sick and you are sick because it’s the law.

By the way, you are still lucky when it is a chest-and-snotty-nose-fever-thing because when it’s a tummy thing then you are getting vomited on or you are cleaning up vomit, and eventually you strip down and turn up the heat so at least you’re just dealing with vomit and not laundry, too.

You have to make the soup and get the popsicles and put your cool hand on those little foreheads, or your hot hand if you’re feverish, too. You have to read the books and sing the songs and run the tepid baths if the fever gets too high, or grab the hoodies and the fuzzy socks when everyone is getting too cold again. If you’re smart or desperate or both, you’ll ditch the schedule and put on movies and get on the couch with your kids, maybe you’ll do breakfast for dinner, you’ll make a blanket fort in the living room, you’ll accept help if anyone offers it - but they might not and you might be too stubborn to ask. Hi. Anyway, you have to keep it all going is the thing.

So we all got one of these horrid viral or bacterial plagues and on day three when their little faces were still flushed and their noses were still stuffed and their coughs sounded not good, I piled us into the car and drove to one of the best men I’ve ever met in my entire life, my kids’ pediatrician, Dr. Edward Malphus. The thing about your kids’ pediatrician when you’re a single mom, is this is the person you call when your kids are not okay and you are scared, which means this is one of the most important and trusted people in your universe.

This was the person I called from New York City when my son was nine months old and we were at my mom’s best friend’s house, and my son was sitting on an ottoman between my mom and her friend, and he was “playing the drums” with the palms of his chubby little hands on the flat metal radiator cover (the radiator was not on because it was spring) and laughing. They were also laughing, and I was watching them all laugh, and laughing, too, when all of a sudden I realized the ottoman had wheels.

I realized this when my mom uncrossed and recrossed her legs, and the foot that had been keeping the ottoman in place suddenly wasn’t, and it rolled back and I watched in slow motion as my son fell forward and hit the bridge of his nose on the hard edge of the metal radiator cover. I was there in .05 seconds, picking up my screaming baby off the floor and looking in horror at the welt as it rose across his nose, wondering if it was broken or how bad things were as I tried to calm him down.

Dr. Malphus was the person to get on the phone right away in Los Angeles, ask me if my son was following my finger with both eyes, if he was vomiting, if he would tolerate a soft ice pack. My son’s nose was not broken. If there are checkmarks for moments of high stress that get marked off in your soul when one of your kids gets hurt, I have a checkmark for that.

Dr.Malphus was the person I called a few years later when both kids were on this bouncing/rocking bumble bee thing at the playground, the kind two kids can ride that has a metal bar across the front of it. The kind where you put both your kids on together, and tell your older one “Not too fast!” and then watch as he goes too fast because your younger one actually loves that and throws her head back laughing, but this time, when she throws her head forward it hits that fucking metal bar so hard an egg comes out of the space between her eyebrows too fast to be okay. So fast you can’t believe what you’re seeing and you’re in a panic even though you’re trying to act calm because you don’t want to scare your kids.

Dr. Malphus is the one who says, “Bring her here, the wait time at the ER will be hours-long right now, take some deep breaths, drive safely,” and as soon as he sees her he tells you it’s going to be fine and you know it is.

So we went in with our stuffy noses and misery, and he picked up my kids one at a time and put them on the crunchy thin paper with their pudgy little legs swinging off the side of the table. He took their temperatures and asked them questions, told them to say ahhhhhh and looked at their red, raw throats, he listened through his stethoscope to their little chests heave up and down as they took a big breath in, and then out, in and then out. He looked up their noses and in their ears with his light, and some crazy way or another, he had them laughing through the whole thing.

I leaned back on the bench and closed my eyes and laughed, too. Dr. Malphus looked at me sitting on the bench and asked if I was also going to the doctor, and I said no, I wasn’t planning on it. “You don’t sound fantastic,” he said, and I laughed some more and said I knew, I felt pretty crappy but I was okay, I’d ride it out. He said if I got any worse, I should be seen. I nodded, promised him I would, and knew that I wouldn’t. He wrote prescriptions, I can’t remember for what anymore, only that we stopped at the pharmacy on the way home and my kids also scored these tiny stuffed animals off the circular rack there. The one at kids’ height, next to the register.

I really loved him. We’d hit it off at the first appointment when my son was a baby, and somehow it came out that Dr.Malphus had been meditating for years. He had a different practice than mine, he would go on monastic retreats, but we bonded over it. I can usually tell with people, because there’s a different quality of listening. There’s a focus you don’t often find, especially when you’re conversing with someone for the first time. I don’t say that to make you feel like shit if you don’t meditate, I’m just saying you could be a much better person.

Kidding. But it does change the way you listen and I think it’s a great quality to cultivate if you’re going to be helping people.

Personally, I think it would make a lot of sense to teach meditation in medical school, but if we’re cutting funding for women’s health studies - you know, things that only affect women like ovarian cancer or postpartum depression, for example, and if we’re cutting research about care for transgender people, if we’re not going to study why Black women are two to three times more likely to die due to pregnancy-related complications, if we’re cutting research for dementia and Alzheimer’s and long Covid and not worrying about measles anymore…if we’re cutting funding for pediatric cancer and also deporting four-year-olds who HAVE cancer, I think we can forget about meditation classes in medical school.

Dr. Malphus would go to Africa or Latin America every year to donate his time as president of Mission Doctors Association. He swam in the ocean every morning, regardless of the weather. He told my kids his best friends were dolphins, and I have no reason to believe they weren’t. He was just one of those extraordinary people you meet sometimes, if you’re really lucky.

The next day my phone rang and it was him. I picked up and started telling him the kids were already improved, they’d both slept better, the medication was definitely doing wonders - when he stopped me. “I didn’t call to check on the kids,” he said, “I called to check on you.” It caught me so off guard that I had tears on my face before I knew what was happening.

I think it’s unusual for people to really see you, and I say that with nothing but understanding. I think most people are so full of their own thoughts and worries, their own needs and stories, they see whatever you put out there. I remember running into this acquaintance not long after my divorce. I was really hurting, but doing what you do. My kids were so little - my son was four, my daughter was eighteen months old. I had a business, a community I’d built. I’d write until 2 or 3am after the kids were asleep, it was the only time I could. Falling apart was something I did on “my own time” in the shower for a few minutes, or in the car on my way to or from class. This woman looked at me and said, “I’ve seen you on social media, looks like you’re really killing it.” Yup, really killing it.

One day in 2015 I was driving down Lincoln Boulevard. My son was nine, my daughter was six. They were both at school. My phone rang and it was Dr. Malphus, which was a little funny because we hadn’t been in to see him. Neither of the kids was sick, and it had been months since they’d had physicals. The last time we’d been there I’d noticed Dr. Malphus looked thin, and he told me he was dealing with something, but felt sure it would be fine.

He asked how I was, how the kids were. I told him they were doing well, school would be out soon and they were excited for the summer. I asked how he was doing. He told me things were not so great. He asked if I remembered the last time we’d been in, how I’d wondered if he was okay. I told him I did, and I felt dread wash over me. I pulled my car over and parked. He told me he’d been battling a rare form of cancer, that he hadn’t wanted to say anything at the time, because he’d been hopeful about treatment. But the kind of cancer he had was aggressive, and the treatment hadn’t worked.

I was trying very hard not to cry, because I wanted to be there for him. I did not want him to have to comfort me, but I am sorry to say I failed profoundly. He said when the treatment had not worked he’d qualified for a trial of something very experimental, but that also had not worked, and now there was nothing to do but accept that he was dying. Friends, I wept. I cried like a little kid. I’m crying now.

I told him how much he meant to me, what an incredible gift it had been to me and my kids to have him in our lives, and I said we would never, ever forget him. I asked him if he was at peace with the idea of dying, or if he felt there were things left he needed to do, and he said he’d done the things he felt he needed to do, but there were so many more things he wanted to do. He loved his wife, his mother, his family, his patients. He loved swimming in the ocean, and traveling to places where he was needed. He loved being of service. He felt he’d had a good life.

I told him the story I told you, about the day he called me. I said I couldn’t tell him at the time what it meant to me for someone to see me like that and understand how hard it was, and to care enough to check on me.

And I said I would miss him so much, and I do. I think of him a lot.

Then he said, Sometimes you don’t get to control what happens to your body, and that’s strange for me, as a person who’s spent so much of my life studying the body and what to do when people get sick. We had a little laugh about how messed up it is that we don’t get to control things in life. We don’t get to write the story or decide how it ends. We hung up tearfully and gratefully, it was as good an ending as we were going to get.

---

I could leave you here. I could end things here. It would work as an ending, it’s heartbreaking and meaningful and true, but this isn’t where I want to leave you, not right now.

I want to parse out the piece where he said “Sometimes you don’t get to control what happens to your body.”

Last week I was talking to a man who said he’d found me on Substack and wanted to know how I grew my readership. Implicit in the question is, I want to do that, too. He’s also been sending me videos from one of his social media accounts. He’s here in Los Angeles, and he’s devastated about the fires and the impact they’ve had on our beaches and more specifically on our marine life.

He’s heartbroken about the toxic material that has yet to be removed from certain areas in the Palisades and along Malibu beach, the way it runs into the ocean water when it rains, and the potential impact this has on the algae which the fish feed on. Then sea lions and dolphins eat the fish who’ve fed on the algae and it makes them sick - sometimes (often) sick enough to die, and how things are so much worse this year than they have been in past years.

There’s something called domoic acid toxicosis - it’s caused by a neurotoxin that’s produced during certain algal blooms. These large blooms used to happen every four to seven years, but now they seem to happen every year in warmer waters off the West Coast. Scientists point to climate change. Of course, you’d have to believe in science. And climate change. Also, it’s true, things do seem to be a lot worse this year than in past years, and it’s very likely because of the fires.

We really do not want to get the message that our fates are tied. If we destroy the oceans and the forests and the air…well…you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or an astronaut like Katy Perry to know that isn’t going to go well. But do we turn off the AC? Unplug appliances we aren’t using? Turn off the lights when we leave a room? If you’re going to Google something, try: is AI bad for the environment?

I was telling him I really appreciate the work he’s been doing to spread the word, because I am also beside myself. You can’t write about all the gutting things in the world right now, there isn’t enough time, and no one can keep up. It’s the whole “none of us can do everything, but all of us can do something” idea. I said I was grateful he was writing and posting, because I have been so focused on what’s happening in our government with this administration and the attack on the Constitution, the erosion of our checks and balances, the lack of due process, and my concern for every marginalized group of people across the country.

To which he responded, “I’ve been really focused on our beaches and marine life, what do you mean by ‘marginalized groups’ like, which ones?” Which is why I didn’t want to end my essay three paragraphs ago.

Sometimes I sit and stare into the distance and wonder things. Some of these things might offend you, like some of the things you think might offend me - it’s why we don’t share all our innermost thoughts when we stare into the distance. There’s your warning to stop reading if it’s going to offend you that I think organized religion is responsible for a lot of suffering.

For example, sometimes I have thoughts like, maybe a long, long time ago, men saw women giving birth and they thought holy, holy, holy bejesus of all insanity, how in the fuck is she harnessing all that power? How is she panting and breathing and screaming and digging deep and squatting and bleeding and sweating and pushing and bringing forth - through nothing but her own will and strength - an actual human being? (Not that she has to want to do that, not that every woman can do that, but for these purposes - just the ones who wanted to, and did.)

And maybe some of these men (not all men, not all men) got so scared of her power to do that - to create life like that - they created religion to give the credit to a fucking man in the fucking sky no one can prove is there or not there. Did that ever occur to anyone? Let us give credit for creation to a man and thus and thusly it shall be so, and let only men write the Bible and the history books, and let them wipe not just the credit for creation from women, but also for all her contributions, for we are but wee and small men and lo, we are threatened.

Then the descendants of these men made laws to tell girls and women how they had to be and who they had to love and what they had to wear or not wear, and when they had to have babies and when they were allowed not to have babies, and whether their lives were worth as much as the possible potential for life that might exist inside them, and if and when and under what circumstances they were allowed to value their life, and not just them, lo, their doctors, too, and not just them, the police, too, because now, apparently, we arrest doctors for giving women lifesaving healthcare and we arrest women for having miscarriages.

And we aren’t going to recognize same-sex marriages, and we protect women and girls in fucking bathrooms but NOWHERE ELSE IN LIFE and not from the actual threat which is not all men, but is always men. Including this fucking guy talking to me about how to grow his readership, whilst caring about - apparently - two groups: straight white men and marine life. Because let me help with this if it isn’t clear: not seeing the danger we are in is a threat to us.

Gonna give myself a Stephen King moment here:

Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem. Guys like you are the fucking problem.

“Sometimes you don’t get to control what happens to your body” is a way of life for over half of us. It’s a state of being. It’s a living, breathing, awareness that is with you in stairwells and parking lots, on subway platforms and bars, and anywhere you exist at any time of day. It’s with you when you drive somewhere you’ve never been before and think about what you’d do if you needed help, it’s with you when you’re out cutting loose with friends, but not too loose. Fuck it if you can’t figure it out by now.

There are people who are going to understand, people like Dr. Malphus who naturally thought about what life was like for others and also loved dolphins (and also happened to be a devoted Catholic). People who call to see how you are because they’re actually seeing you.

Then there are people who are so full of their own concerns they have these giant, shocking blind spots. The guy I was talking to told me writing about women’s issues is divisive and I should write about universal things. He interrupted me to tell me that. The really sad part of all of this is everything is universal.

We can’t all do everything, but to not even realize there are so many human beings in jeopardy who are not straight white men, in addition to marine life, takes a level of myopia that is hard to fathom and impossible to excuse. And having said that, he’s still a lot better than the guys who don’t even care about marine life. The bar is low.

We’re all in this together and if you leave some of us out of your circle of compassion, your boat is going to sink. If you leave 51% of us out, you don’t deserve my help anymore, because that 51% includes my daughter and all my friends, see how that works? I want all of us and the dolphins.

Photo by Ádám Berkecz on Unsplash

If you don’t care about women, then you don’t care about LGBTQ women or Black or Brown women or ten-year-olds in Texas who have to have their stepdad’s babies because Gregg Abbott and Ken Paxton say so. You don’t care about your mom or your sister or your daughter or your aunt or your best friend, either, not really. We’re over half the population and we aren’t safe and we aren’t valued as equal, and we are now moving in the wrong direction. If that’s okay with you, you are not my friend because you don’t have my back. You either recognize that we are all here, sharing this planet together, that we are all guests here for a brief amount of time, or you think you own the place.

Maybe if I try telling you like this, it will make a difference. I keep trying. Maybe one of these day you’ll care.