An early and late lesson in paradox

Paradoxes hold the high ground, containing such grand truths about gaining when you lose or only living when you die.  All this sounds very worthy and much to be striven after, but before becoming too high-minded, just check how good you are with the most basic of all paradoxes: to get better you must get sicker.

We know when we should do something but just don’t want to.  Proof of this happened the other day when I needed to get sick.  Yes, sometimes one has to get sick, throw up, hurl the contents of one’s apparently bottomless stomach through various of its orifices into, hopefully, an enamel receptacle (usually white, all the better for display).  This experience took me back to when I lay in my bed at the nasty age of five, having nastily sucked too many nasty sweets.  I remembered how groaning in those sweaty sheets had seemed a better prospect than the necessary dash to the bathroom across the inconven-iently carpeted floor; furthermore, I remembered that I had known that it was the right thing to do.  My problem was that, nearly fifty years on, I still knew that it was the right thing to do, but I still did not want to obey.

I felt blameless.  Nothing nasty, excessive or illicit had entered my sober gut – I had been sabotaged by something as yet unknown, for which I refused to take responsibility.  Lying in my bed was justifiable as, given enough time and a mature disposition, this dis-comfort jolly well should and would pass away after some judicious burps and discreet winds.  But, even after nearly converting the bed into a hovercraft, the desired relief would not come.  The more I lay and strained at being well, the more the pressures built.

At the back of my mind lay the memory of that child who had dreaded the coming of the sick. Usually it had needed Mommy – “you’ll feel much better afterwards” – to coax her little boy to go through the vile bile.  Even with her soothing hand, though, it was usually Dad’s stern “Just bring it all up, son” that made the stomach churn.  Now there was no Mom or Dad, just this Dad, prone upstairs while his twenty-year olds lingered below, chatting.  The awareness of their presence made the process of crabbing over the toilet bowl seem now all that more undignified.  But, sick happens – and it did.

Across the carpet I sped, my body already leaning at 45 degrees to better acquaint itself with the rim of the toilet bowl.  From here on in it was as if I had never left it, fifty years on.  The same heavings and hurlings, the same noise, the same taste… the same taste….  Some things don’t change – bile is vile.

And then, the moment of truth.  The feeling afterwards (“Darling, you will feel much better if you just bring it all up.”)  I did!  And good boy that I had been, I also had the bonus of knowing that I had done the right thing even though I had not wanted to.

I returned to my bed, mouthwash still lingering, a little wobbly, but less gaseous and much relieved – trailing a bucket, just in case.  My fears were gone: sick had not changed at all over the years – it was as ghastly as ever – but I had met the enemy and it was me.