Gremlin O’Brien

When I was a child, I quickly discovered that I could get out of tough situations by feigning illness. I would produce tears on cue. I would whine and complain about stomach and headaches until I was sent to bed – which is where I really would, in most cases, prefer to be.

I loved being sick.

No one expects you to do anything when you’re sick. People are nicer to you when you’re sick. When you’re sick, you can lie on the couch under a blanket watching cartoons and sipping ginger ale and nobody tells you that you’re being lazy, or self-indulgent. When you’re sick, you get to stay home from school.

This brings me to my memory. I was eight years old, in second grade. I disliked school. I was always being assigned boring kid homework and being made to sing and dance to group songs. I had become painfully self-conscious and being around other kids made me nervous and ashamed. I had a crush on my teacher and was always trying to get a reaction out of him, to limited success. Worst of all, I had started to develop a lisp and had to attend speech therapy sessions. I still have a lisp today, if you’re wondering how that turned out.

So I told my parents that I had a stomach ache. I’m sure I was very convincing. My mother asked my babysitter to watch me while she was at work. I spent the day watching television and playing on my own. It was Heaven. Then the next day I pulled the old stomach ache card out of the deck and my mother decided she should take me to see a doctor.

Our family GP, Dr. M, was very friendly and charming. He asked me when the last time I went poop was and I said I didn’t know. He told my mother that I was probably constipated. He may have prescribed something or told us to wait it out. I kept up my act, now knowing it was key to pretend like I wasn’t pooping, and continued staying home from school. We went back to the doctor a few days later and he wasn’t concerned. He said, “When it comes out, it’s going to look like an arm is reaching into the toilet.”

I stayed home from school for two weeks.

Then one day, my classmate brought me a hand-made Get Well Soon card that had been signed by all the kids in our class, as well as the teacher. I remember reading it while I sat on the floor of my father’s home office. He looked at me and said, “Wow. Now you have to go back.”

Soon after that, my mother caught me pooping and that was that. I went back to school. I hadn’t missed anything, because unsurprisingly not a lot of critical business gets done in grade two.

I stopped pretending to get sick once I graduated from high school and every obligation became optional. Now that I’m an adult, I can lie on the couch under a blanket sipping ginger ale and watching cartoons any time I want. Being eight years old doesn’t last forever.