{"id":104,"date":"2012-01-25T07:31:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T07:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/01\/why-i-dont-make-my-kids-wash-their-hands\/"},"modified":"2016-10-10T11:54:42","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T15:54:42","slug":"why-i-dont-make-my-kids-wash-their-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/01\/why-i-dont-make-my-kids-wash-their-hands.html","title":{"rendered":"Why I Don’t Make My Kids Wash Their Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0I was going to write about the mantilla yesterday, but spent alllllll morning in Ave Maria\u2019s blessed Urgent Care facility. I am eternally, eternally grateful to the urgent care on Annunciation Circle. (Yes, the street names drip with Catholicism. It causes me both glee and the wigs. And perversely makes me want to put up a faux street sign with Sola Scriptura Blvd<\/i>. on it, just to see what would happen.) If Ave Maria did not have said urgent care, I would have spent all day with a screaming Liam, a grumpy Charlotte, and a whiny Sienna in Naples, with an hour commute both ways. As it was, we still spent a good three hours there, but still. I got a diagnosis.<\/p>\n

It was not what I expected. I expected strep, because the throats were so sore that popsicles and jello were the only thing being eaten in Chez Alexander over the weekend. Then I expected chicken pox, because Liam erupted in, well, pox yesterday morning. (He is very far behind on his vaccines. I blame 1) the crazy granola train I hopped on briefly last year and 2) our recent lack of insurance).<\/p>\n

They have neither. They have hand, foot and mouth disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Obviously I need to frame this for our house<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The cleanliness of my children has always been somewhat of a sore spot between the Ogre and I and\u2026the rest of the world. The Ogre maintains that children need to be filthy and eat rocks and dirt and make and ingest mud pies in order to be healthy. I\u2019m pretty sure this hypothesis was formed after a certain episode of House, MD. I agree, in theory, and up to a certain point. For example, I insist that they wash their hands after using the bathroom. And if they\u2019ve actually been playing in mud and dirt, usually I have them wash their hands before eating. But not always.\u00a0 I also try not to isolate them too much from other sick kids. I always give other mothers fair warning if my kids are sick, but unless the child in question has had a stomach flu, I usually don\u2019t say, \u201clet\u2019s wait for a better day.\u201d Mostly, this is because if we wait for a better day our kids will never, ever see each other. Children are sick! All the time! They are constantly dripping some sort of goo from their noses, they\u2019re always sneezing in each others faces, they cough and then shake hands, or, like my kids, they spit into their hands and then shake. (It\u2019s an important bond of trust, as evidenced by Newsies<\/i>.) Children are foul. They are walking petri dishes of cold, flu, virus, and bacteria. There is no stopping the spread of illnesses by admonishing children to \u201ccough into their elbows\u201d. (Have you actually tried this? It is a very odd and unnatural thing to do.) Because they\u2019ll cough into their elbows, and then five minutes later they\u2019ll lick another child\u2019s face. As my favorite confessor once told me, children are savages. They neither know nor understand the rules of society. Trying to explain to a three-year-old why it\u2019s disgusting to sneeze into her food and then eat it is an exercise in futility. This is why it is so frustrating to spend all of one\u2019s time among children. They are, for lack of a more descriptive word, yucky. But I\u2019ve read enough articles over the last few years to convince me that sick children now will pay off in healthier adults later<\/a>. So I let them get dirty, and shake spit hands, and sneeze wherever they damn well please. (Within reason, okay.)\u00a0 I\u2019m no stranger to inexplicable rashes, bites, or dirt-filled scrapes. But this was new. Hand, foot and mouth disease was on the periphery of my radar.<\/p>\n

I asked the PA, \u201cIs that the one that kids get from playing with poop?\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t answer, he just looked at me. Then Sienna said, \u201cBecause Liam plays with his poop all <\/i>the time,\u201d after which the PA hastily excused himself to \u201cget some paperwork on it\u201d and ignored my cries of \u201cNo! No he doesn\u2019t! I swear he doesn\u2019t!\u201d which followed him down the hallway.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

My parents raised us to be much cleaner. We washed our hands after playing outside, before eating, and after going to the grocery store. We had baths every night. My sister played in the sandbox with socks on her hands. (That\u2019s because she\u2019s weird, not because my mom was obsessive about cleanliness.) As a result, my mother never had to deal with hand, foot and mouth disease. Which she told me yesterday, while also trying to reassure me that she\u2019s sure my children will be healthier in the end for all the poop they\u2019ve gotten into.<\/p>\n

I was not reassured. I felt horrible. I felt like the worst mother in the world. I felt that, at last, that my gross neglect of my children\u2019s cleanliness, regardless of what motivated it (because it\u2019s motivated at least equally<\/i> by laziness as it is by ideology) had come around to bite me in the ass. Or them, more properly speaking, seeing as how their bums are the ones that are actually suffering at the moment. I felt that my dues would finally have to be paid, and the worst part is that everyone would be able to witness my poor, dirty children and the suffering my non-cleanliness had inflicted upon them, because giant spots around their mouths and on their hands and feet are not exactly easy to conceal. I began to concoct elaborate scenarios in my mind in which the other neighborhood children also developed hand, foot and mouth disease, and the mothers in the neighborhood whispered behind their hands as we passed, \u201cthey\u2019re the ones that started it. Those poor, dirty kids at the end of the block. Their mother must let them just get filthy<\/i>!\u201d And I wouldn\u2019t be able to respond because actually I do just let them get filthy. And then we would be exiled, chased out of Ave Maria with sticks and rocks like carriers of the plague were chased out of villages during the Black Death.<\/p>\n

So I came home from the urgent care disgraced. And there, waiting for me, was a facebook message from my next-door neighbor. \u201cSo what\u2019s the verdict? Strep?\u201d<\/p>\n

I dithered for a little while, wondering if broad mental reservation could somehow be applied to this situation or if I would have to go to confession if I flat-out lied, and then just sucked it up and answered honestly, while virtually hanging my head in shame. (Virtual actions are connoted by asterisks, in case you didn\u2019t know. Like this: *hangs head in shame*)<\/p>\n

And instead of repulsion, or worse, silence, she said, \u201cOh, that\u2019s been going around since November. Now you\u2019re a real Ave Maria mom! Congrats!\u201d<\/p>\n

I feel that my very existence has somehow come to mean more since moving to Ave Maria. Even if we don\u2019t settle here, I will always know that somewhere out there, in a sun-baked swamp, other mothers let their children get dirty enough to contract some filthy-yet-mild childhood illness and pass it along to the whole neighborhood, and nobody judges them<\/i>. It\u2019s mothering the way it was meant to be, snot, spit and all. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0I was going to write about the mantilla yesterday, but spent alllllll morning in Ave Maria\u2019s blessed Urgent Care facility. I am eternally, eternally grateful to the urgent care on Annunciation Circle. (Yes, the street names drip with Catholicism. It causes me both glee and the wigs. And perversely makes me want to put up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy I Don't Make My Kids Wash Their Hands<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\" I was going to write about the mantilla yesterday, but spent alllllll morning in Ave Maria's blessed Urgent Care facility. 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