I find myself planning our retirement, all the places we’ll go when the kids are up and out of our laissez-faire care. Alaska. Antartica. Australia… Bolivia. Bulgaria. Botswana. We’ll be super fit and will have replaced afternoon wine with afternoon tea, mania with meditation, Netflix with naps. We’ll meander through the alphabet. Colombia, Comoros, Croatia …
“Uh… hon?” Billy says, snapping me out of my geographical reverie with a sad smile, “This is our retirement. You’re looking at it.”
So we’re dipping into savings now. Money that could’ve helped buy a house, another car or been parlayed into a low risk mutual fund (still not quite clear on what that is). We’ve fled the city that filled the coffers without any intention of going back. We don’t have life insurance. We brush our teeth in the shower. We are, in a word, Eh?
And there is no but… to follow that eh. I mean, I could try: But we could be dead tomorrow. But we’ll never know unless we try. But it’s not like we’re crackheads.
And then I think, when you need to compare yourself to a crackhead to feel better about your situation… maybe you should at least find out what a mutual fund is.
(Editorial note: Just spoke to Billy. Turns out we do have mutual funds. Turns out its been explained to me a million times. Turns out the truth is snooze-ville and I’m going to stop fact-checking these blog posts starting pronto.)
But these were not the thoughts running through my head when Nakota started screaming in pain 20 minutes into our drive up the coast, with Mirleft in the rearview and the blue dot on the Google map crawling towards Taghazout. No, I wasn’t thinking about mutual funds at all, I was thinking about how, when we arrived in the surfer paradise, I would buy sunglasses and the Moroccan version of Tom’s and that maybe, just maybe, I’d even smoke some kiff… if the kids were asleep and I stumbled upon it naturally and it was clear that it was the culturally respectful thing to do. Like Anthony Bourdain eating goat’s ass or something.
And then, My neck!!!
I figured it was the car seats. They’re cheap and lacking shoulder pads, so I stuffed my scarf into Nakota’s strap for cushion and we kept driving. But she kept crying. So we pulled over. And we’re in the middle of nowhere. And now she’s screaming. And when I take her out of her car seat she’s hot and sweaty and can’t move her neck, and there’s a rash nowhere near where the strap would’ve been cutting into, and somewhere in my dust bunnied stash of a brain a word billows to the frontal lobe:
Men…menin…menin-fucking-gitis.
MENINGITIS
That blue dot on the phone? My eyes were locked there because Billy and I decided it would be a waste of money to buy another SIM card for Morocco when we were leaving in a week, so we’d just do it old school (I use that term loosely) and follow the blue dot without putting in directions. But now we needed directions. Fast. Directions on what to do if you think your kid might have meningitis. Directions on what meningitis looks like. Directions to the nearest hospital. So we turn on roaming and within 15 minutes I’ve wracked up 100 dollars worth of terrifying information. How a fever with a stiff neck should be considered meningitis until proven otherwise. How brain damage can occur within hours. And how, if left untreated, you die.
Nakota and Wilder were what they call “spontaneous twins,” meaning, it wasn’t our fault. Or, if you get me on a good day, we’re so lucky! When I’m feeling quippy I say that having twins is like winning a lottery that makes you poor. But I digress. And now I’m going to do it again because having twins means you get to do everything twice...
Despite searching out a practice that had a high rate of delivering twins “naturally” my doctor and I had a contentious relationship. He said most twins come early. I said, “What if they don’t?” He said, “We don’t like to keep them in after 38 weeks.” I said, “I think they’ll come when they’re ready.”
My womb was monitored like a nuclear disaster site, bi-weekly stress tests and weekly ultrasounds and sure as shit, in the 38th week, Nakota, Baby B, had an irregular heartbeat.
The doctor was summoned. The nurse and I waited. She was in her 70’s and Southern. She told me that on the first twin birth she witnessed they were stitching the new mom up when the second baby started coming out. “There weren’t all these tests back then,” she said.
The doctor was pissed but I carted those babies around in my belly for another two weeks, poking Nakota every 5 seconds to make sure she was still kicking, before, alas, they were yanked out at 40 weeks. Considering how long it takes them to get their shoes on, it's no surprise they weren't in a rush.
So suffice to say the girl has kept me on my toes since before she took her first breath. And even though I’m prone to overreacting, I really hate to overreact. And when it comes to my kids, it was a lot easier to trust my gut when they were stationed directly underneath it like a pair of watchful guards.
We drove three hours to Agadir (the nearest hospital) with Nakota riding shotgun, splayed on my lap, crying herself to sleep. I, meanwhile, racked up more roaming fees reading about the horrific conditions of the Agadir hospital while Billy did a phenomenal job of navigating Friday Holy Day traffic with a stick shift. We bought a thermometer, pulled over to a café and got on the wifi. Nakota rallied slightly (no fever) and downed two pints of orange juice. Wilder puked and shit his pants (yup) and then put on a dance show for the other customers. (I think he was feeling ignored). Billy and I debated. Go to the terrible hospital? Drive 30 minutes north to our non-refundable Airbnb in Taghazout? Drive 3 more hours to the private hospital in Marrakesh and call it a day?
We drove to Marrakesh, checked into a crappy hotel and slept with the kids between us, ready for a midnight run to the ER, waiting for her to cry again.
But she didn’t. She woke up laughing and went immediately into her morning workout of bed jumping and Wilder wrestling. It was a neck cramp, I guess. The rash just irritation from her squeezing it.
We headed to the breakfast buffet. The kids gorged themselves on pastries and yogurt, spilling one cup of orange juice and then another, squealing with delight at the bounty of food and life in general. Familiar disorder restored. Billy mopped up the orange juice with the worlds smallest napkins and I got back to my list.
Denmark, Djoubiti, DRC... Ethiopia, Estonia, Eritrea…
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