Better an empty house...

 

What do George Bush Sr and I have in common? Well, last week I was staying with friends. Ten of us were sharing a bathroom and, thanks to a raw foods meal heavy on the broccoli, I contracted food poisoning. The chances of the loo being free when I needed to throw up were slim, so my friends gave me a plastic container. Rather disconcertingly, it had measurements marked up the side, which is how I know I threw up almost a litre of broccoli and other raw delights.

I’ve never loved broccoli. Having been nose deep in the scent of partially digested florets for an evening, I’d have to say I like it even less now; and thus George and I finally have something in common.

Presidential comparisons aside, I was completely knocked out, and it took me a good two or three days to recover. As six kids – theirs and ours – swirled around me, I felt so apologetic.

I don’t know how many times I said sorry: for contracting food poisoning, for needing the vomit bowl, for throwing up, for washing the bucket out in their laundry sink, for needing to lie around for a couple of days, for being a bother, for being useless.

I could hear myself apologise again and again, and as I listened to myself I wondered. My friends are good kind gentle people, which is why I love them; and they treated me with a care far beyond the call of duty. They tried to take the bucket from me and empty it; they made it clear that I was to wake them at any time I needed them; they insisted that if I threw up on the bed or floor, they would clean it up. I wasn’t to do a thing other than be sick, and rest.

With such gracious friends, why did I apologise so profusely? Contracting food poisoning is hardly a moral failing. Do I think I am lovable only when I am active, healthy and useful, loading the dishwasher and hanging out washing and taking kids to the beach? Do I fear that my appeal will drop away the instant I reveal myself to be a sick, weak, vulnerable, embodied human being?

Yet it is our embodiment that has built the friendship. We’re not friends because of years of dry intellectual discourse; our friendship is based on walking together and sharing meals. It’s been years of swapping clothes and holding each other’s babies and giving each other a hug now and then; it’s being there for long hours when one of us needs to cry and the other has a safe warm room and some tissues. The very things that have cemented our friendship – our bodies which are flattered by similar clothes, our bodies which love good food, our bodies which walk and talk and relax at the beach – are what make us vulnerable. It is only because we can become bright with wine that we can be bent over by bacteria in our gut.

And I am the same person, well or ill. Better an empty house than a bad tenant, I said late at night, before cleaning out a warm bucket of sick; and, as I apologised for the bad joke, my friends who like me however I come looked directly at me, and laughed.