Dispatches from the front lines of fatherhood: A virus breaches our defenses

Emetophobes beware

March 7, 2025 – 20:00 Hours

My two-year-old son, Tom, is ready for bed and about to start his cool-down play session before being tucked in. He usually does this alone, but I decide on a whim to join him tonight. He arranges his toy cars to follow the lines on the rug while I fondly look on.

Now it’s eight o’clock, time for lights out.

“Let’s say prayers,” I say, and I take him to his bed.

He gets in child’s pose on his little floor mattress. I’m snuggling him from above, and my cheek is on his cheek. It’s a picture-perfect moment, the kind of memory you cherish for a lifetime.

He says, “Heavenly Father, BLEGHHHHH,” and throws up all over his pillow.

I react like a cat confronted by a cucumber. Before my heart has had time to beat again, I’ve picked him up and sprinted him to the toilet. He pukes again. The sweet little guy has no idea what’s happening or what he’s supposed to do, so the aim is all on me. We get about 90% of the rest of it in the bowl.

My wife, Michelle, hears the retching and screams, “JORDAN, HELP!” from the other room. She doesn’t realize that I’m all over it—much less that I had a front-row seat for the first wave. Vomit tends to send her into a panic, and she’s going to be jittery for the rest of the night.

A few minutes later, my boy is in the bath, the washer is running, and we’ve lysoled the bathroom. Things are stable, at least for the moment. But in my mind’s ear, I hear a sound that makes my blood run cold—the unmistakable dull roar of tank engines in the distance.

March 9, 2025 – 09:37 Hours

Two days have passed. Tom has been all right—not eating much, but thankfully nothing is coming back up either. My wife has early morning church meetings and has been gone since about seven. The kids slept in—weird. When they wake up, I open their doors and tell them to come to breakfast, but nobody follows me—very weird. When they finally come, no one will eat anything. It’s clear they’re not feeling well. I text my wife and tell her we’re going to miss church today.

I go to my four-year-old daughter Charlotte’s room and offer to read her one of her beloved Dog Man books.

“I should read to her more often,” I think. “This is really peaceful.”

A few pages in, she scowls and says, “Stop!”

“Huh?” I say.

“BLEGGHHHH,” she responds.

I take a moment to collect myself. One step at a time. Strip the girl, put her in the bath. Strip the sheets, put them in the washer. Wash her hair. Paper towels, Lysol. One foot in front of the other. I don’t have backup this time, but I’ve handled worse.

Soon, the situation is stable. But the ground has begun rumbling beneath my feet. It won’t be long now before they’re on top of me.

March 9, 2025 – 15:13 Hours

A few hours have passed. Michelle got home from her meetings around lunchtime. I spend the afternoon pitching the utility of our big red bucket to Charlotte, but for whatever reason she seems to prefer her bedroom rug.

Snatching a free moment, I head to my room and lie down in bed, hoping for a quick recharge. Alas, I’m interrupted by a text from Michelle—an SOS. I head downstairs to our basement bathroom to check on her. I’m met with a sight both unfortunate and familiar: a Michelle Bathroom Encampment (MBE).

An MBE is a very bad sign. When Michelle gets sick, she creates a little shantytown on the bathroom floor. On really rough nights, she’ll sleep there. I first saw one on our honeymoon in Paris, when she got some kind of food poisoning. I was left to wander the streets of the City of Love in search of food she could hold down—a task made nearly impossible by the combination of the language barrier and her celiac disease.

Today must be bad, based on her current MBE. She’s sprawled on the tile in an array of pillows, blankets, and various screens. If she had a flashlight, a hot plate, and a few cans of beans in there she could probably weather an apocalypse. Her screens are going unused—a code red. If she’s not even up to watch Antiques Roadshow while she’s lying there on the floor, things must be bleaker than I thought.

For the next several hours, I keep the kids occupied while Michelle fights her battle in her preferred way—in seclusion. By now, I can smell scorched metal and taste the acrid fumes of burning oil. My stomach clenches.

March 9, 2025 – 19:28 Hours

The afternoon has passed by in a haze of screen time, applesauce, and steadying breaths. I get another text from Michelle:

“Can we talk,” she says, then: “Problem.”

I head downstairs. She tells me she has developed a few concerning symptoms, given that she is eight and a half months pregnant. (Forgot to mention—she’s eight and a half months pregnant.) We call an on-call health provider, and they recommend we go to the ER. Perfect.

“Wouldn’t be a pregnancy if we didn’t go to the ER at some point,” I say.

This trip will make us three for three. Michelle makes amazing babies—best in the world as far as I’m concerned—but she is extremely bad at being pregnant. The medical term for this is Hyperemesis Gravidarum. In practice, this means that her body’s reaction to getting pregnant is basically “Yay! Let’s kill ourself!” This condition—which my mother also happened to have—means that her nausea is so severe and persistent that she struggles with malnourishment and dehydration for the majority of the pregnancy. She loses weight when she should be gaining it, and soon she can barely function. When it gets bad enough, we end up in the ER for monitoring and fluids. Thankfully, this latest pregnancy has been the least bad of the three, thanks to a cocktail of meds that could probably settle a volcano mid-eruption. I had started to think we might make it to delivery without emergency medical attention this time.

Alas, no dice.

We call Michelle’s brother and ask him to keep an eye on our sleeping kids. He generously agrees. I pack a go bag so we can leave as soon as he arrives.

On our way out the door, Michelle tells me to wear a mask so I don’t catch what she has. Ah, honey. It’s a cute idea. But I’ve been on the front lines of this for seventy-two hours, and it is far too late. In the last six hours or so, my stomach has made it clear that it’s preparing for some real fireworks. The tanks are cresting the hill, one after another, crawling forward inexorably. A little mask can’t save me now.

March 9, 2025 – 22:12 Hours

We’ve checked into the hospital. After a long wait, we’re finally in a room with Michelle hooked up to an IV.

As we wait to be seen by the doctor, I am hanging on for dear life. My stomach has begun churning in earnest. But I haven’t let on. If she catches wind that I’m on the way down, then she’ll have that stress to deal with on top of her current health issues. I’m determined to hide it as long as possible. Fortunately, she’s not at her most observant at the moment.

She asks me to get her some ice. She might as well have asked me to bring her the Golden Fleece. I stand up very slowly and follow a nurse to an ice machine. Cup in hand, I take measured steps back to the room and present my suffering partner with my frozen offering. Now that she’s got some fluids in her, she takes her first real look at me of the night.

“Honey? Are you okay?”

“Um,” I say.

She gets a wild look in her eyes.

“Go,” she says. “You need to go.”

I start to protest.

“There’s a bathroom. Get in it,” she says.

Arguing is not an option. I obey.

March 9, 2025 – 22:25 Hours

Now I’m sitting by the toilet, rooted to the floor. The tanks grind toward me in slow motion, treads chewing the earth beneath them. I realize that if I breathe low and slow, I can slightly stall their progress. One minute passes. Then another, slower. Then another, slower still. Soon, time has dilated to one miserable Present.

In that state, I have two thoughts.

First thought: I am so glad I don’t have work tomorrow.

Because every single member of my family has the plague. And mercifully, that is the only thing that I have to worry about right now. As a lawyer, I never had much slack to play with. You never really get a break. Sure, you could call in sick—sometimes—but really that just meant you had double the work tomorrow. So a crisis at home usually led to a crisis at work. I know so many couples with two full-time careers and kids, and honestly they must be superhuman. It would be hard enough to manage the course of a regular parenting life while keeping two careers afloat—I have no idea what they do in an emergency. It’s not something I feel like I could do. While there are definitely hard things about being a full-time parent, having ultimate flexibility to absorb the impact of a crisis is an incredible benefit. Moments like this make me so grateful I quit.

If you’ve considered quitting work forever, my story may interest you

Second thought: I will never be able to repay the debt I owe to the mothers in my life.

I have been acutely nauseous for less than an hour, and I already truly wish for death. Both Michelle and my own mother went through unrelenting nausea for month after miserable month to bring their babies into the world—three times in the case of my wife, and four times in the case of my mom. It makes me sick to my stomach in a completely different way, thinking about it. They deserve medals of honor.

I say a little prayer for them—one for my wife in this moment, and one that I hope reaches back in time to comfort my mom. Then I say a little prayer for myself.

Something shifts inside me. Rather than prolong my torture, I resign myself and accept my fate. I kneel by the toilet and welcome the inevitable.

“I’m sorry,” I say to my wife through the door. I wish she weren’t on the other side of it.

A beat passes, and then: impact.

Sixty tons of armored steel crushes me. Engine noise bellows and gears grind around me, deafening. Water splashes my face.

I’ve known all along it would end like this.

March 9, 2025 – 22:40 Hours

At last, the tanks roll on.

Slowly, the smoke clears. In the devastation, there is stillness. Then, a relief that borders on euphoria.

I rinse my mouth and wash my face in the sink. I emerge from the bathroom to find the doctor in the room, looking at me quizzically.

“Are you all right?” she says.

“I’m okay,” I say. I’m much better than I was a few minutes ago, that’s for sure.

“You need to go home,” Michelle says. The doctor nods.

I want to be there for my wife, but I know they’re right. My relief won’t last long. Sure enough, as I walk to my car, I begin to shiver uncontrollably. I drive home, send my brother-in-law on his way, and put myself in bed. I won’t get much sleep—by then, the next assault is already underway.

March 11, 2025 – 09:40 Hours

It’s been about 36 hours since I faced my first barrage. It was not the last—but by now, I seem to be finally done heaving my guts. Michelle is not fully recovered but is at least semi-functional post-IV. She spent yesterday keeping the kids out of my hair so I could rest. I got a full night of sleep last night and I’ve awakened feeling half-human. Now Michelle is back at work, and Tom is at preschool. I kept Charlotte home; she spent the morning reading a Dog Man book.

After a slow morning, I take a few symbolic steps. I shower. I shave. I strip every bedsheet in the house, open every window, and turn on every fan. It’s time to start rebuilding.

Michelle comes home for lunch and brings Tom home from school with her. For a moment, we’re all together, and there is a beat of rare stillness. It’s the stillness of emotional and physical exhaustion and the promise of recovery.

The battle is over—at least for now. I know there will be another someday; there always is. We knew that when we enlisted. But I believe in the cause.

The sound of toddler tears interrupts my musings: my kids are fighting over who gets the green play-dough. It’s a new day—and right now, I just need to put one foot in front of the other.