I was in the zone — a cross between Martha Stewart and Gloria Steinem. I can bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan… Everything was falling into place.

I found myself planning a luxurious summer Vacation — reserving ten days, not the usual seven. Not this time. There was a little extra cash in the kitty, so I opted for a ritzy condo complex with all the whistles and bells; a towering white stucco building with aqua blue shimmering pools both indoors and out.  It so happened that my youngest, Erica Rose, would be celebrating her birthday while we were there. I was able to shop, wrap and ship the gifts down in advance of her big day as well as order her birthday cake from a local bakery. Oh yes, I was in the zone. The MOMMY ZONE.

Feeling smug, I packed for the trip. We even brought our babysitter along. Who’s the man? I’m the man.

Tiffany was a twenty something elementary school teacher whom we adored. She arrived on our doorstep, having answered an ad we placed in the local paper for a sitter. She was quite devoted to our girls. The idea of a summer vacation in the sun was more than appealing to this single, working girl and she gladly accepted our offer to vacation with us.

I always feel like a kid, even at the ripe age of 46, on that first early morning of vacation. When my father would roust my brother and I out of bed, but we were already awake, too excited to sleep. I’m still the same way and so I was already up on our first day of this vacation helping Michael, my husband, get the troops settled in the car just before dawn. Cara, our oldest, along with Erica and Tiffany, piled in still wearing their pajamas and debated where our first Starbucks stop would be on the way down.

The car, an SUV (smirk, 8 years ago), was packed to the gills as we headed down to the Gulf of Mexico (which sounds lavish but who am I kidding, we were headed to the Redneck Riviera). Nonetheless, I was blissfully content.

The trip down Highway 65 included stops at my favorite haunts on the way: Calhoun’s in Nashville for the best ribs ever; the famous Foley farm market, Burriss’s, where I stocked up on all my favorite produce, like juicy, fresh-picked strawberries, green beans, and peas. Satsuma’s, my all-time favorite fruit of the south, unfortunately are only available in the fall. I had to forgo their pleasure this trip, for it was June. Only a minor inconvenience, I reasoned.

We arrived at the complex; the condo was perfect. Why? 3 beautiful bedrooms on the Gulf of Mexico with all the amenities we could want. The girls were enthralled with their surroundings. The babysitter had her own bedroom. All was right with the world. We were the Jones’s.

The next day I picked up the cake and we celebrated Erica’s birthday with royal reds, deep-water shrimp indigenous to the area and tasting like lobster. It is truly one of our favorite meals when we vacation in the south.

The following day we welcomed Michael’s cousin and his family to the condo. They lived in Mississippi where Billy was stationed as an Army recruiter. We went to the pool and beach, had dinner and ate the cheesecake Danella had baked and brought especially for us. It was delicious. However, the youngest of Billy’s children had not been feeling well. A spider bite we were told and Billy and the family headed back to Biloxi a little earlier than planned.  We turned in for the night.

The next day we headed out to the water park. Once again, another first for us, but we were determined this would be a vacation in which we indulged ourselves. I am not the great adventurer when it comes to amusement parks, so Tiffany and I headed to the lazy river while Michael, Cara and Erica headed for the inner tubes and the big, twisting slides.

After a couple of hours of drifting in the warm sunshine, we all met up at the wave pool. Now I must admit, I really enjoy wave pools. I guess it’s because they mimic the rhythm of the ocean, but I was really having a good time, giggling with the girls with each rush of water.

After a short while of drifting with the waves I got a very strange feeling; the kind you can’t explain. I don’t know if something happens during childbirth, but I truly believe mothers have a sixth sense when it comes to their kids. And something just wasn’t right. The hair on the back of my neck was up as I turned around to see my oldest, some several feet away, and the look on her Face said it all.

She was about to blow chow and I had to get her out of the pool before she cleared it on her own.

Try running in a wave pool some time…

I barely made it to her and told her to hold on. Actually I believe my words were more along the lines of “suck it up.”  She could not, would not throw up in that pool.

I don’t know where I found the strength to lift her up and out of the pool but I grabbed her and ran to the public bathrooms. I got her there in the nick of time.

What erupted in that stall defies description.

I was alarmed and extremely grateful we had made it, but the occupants of that bathroom beat a hasty exit. It was just the two of us, talking thru the door. Eventually she let me in. By that time she was sitting on the toilet and shaking but she thought the worst was over. I moved her to a chaise lounge in the sun and covered her with a towel. Too much sun, wave pool and corn dogs I reasoned. She was white as a ghost and lay very still under the warm beach towels.

One by one the other members of our vacation joined us and after a while we determined it was time to head back to the condo. Cara was not improving and she needed to go to bed. We got to my beautiful Jeep Grand Cherokee with black leather interior and piled into the car. All the while I was talking to Cara and reassuring her that this situation would quickly pass.

Once in, and with everyone belted, Cara began complaining again of not feeling well. Michael looked up to see her pale face in the rear view mirror and then turned his head to say something to her when without warning she vomited so forcefully that the ensuing projectile literally blasted the sunglasses right off his face! He was speechless and drenched. Can something be shocking and funny at the same time? I tried not to laugh. I didn’t want to appear insensitive to Cara. Needless to say my leather interior was never quite the same again.

“Not to worry,” (I was, after all, supermom this week), “We’ve got plenty of towels,” and with that I got out and went to the back of the car to retrieve one for her and another for Michael and the car, too. By the time we got to the condo parking lot Cara requested that we just leave her in the back seat to die.

Michael picked her up and carried her in and then went to take a shower. The next couple of hours were horrible for her. I’ve never seen so much (or so little, eventually) erupt from every orifice of a young person. Could food poisoning really do this? I was getting concerned. In between bouts in the bathroom I gave her spoonfuls of water or Gatorade, hoping that some form of hydration was better than nothing. She dozed on and off.

I sat down at the kitchen island and tried to relax. I called a girlfriend to chat. We were catching up about the usual odds and ends when out of the corner of my eye I saw a head of red hair flying by me. Tiffany had covered the full length of the condo in seconds, ripped open the bathroom door and began violently throwing up.

At that very moment, I knew, with great certainty, that we were all in trouble — deep, deep trouble. For, it occurred to me that it was not the corn dog Cara ate, no, this was something else entirely. And with an overwhelming sense of foreboding I ended my phone call.  “I gotta go Jeanette. I’ll call you back later,” and I tried not to panic. A little self-doubt was creeping in to Superwoman’s psyche.

I went to check on Tiffany. Now Tiffany is always a “glass is half full” kind of person. In fact, the glass is just plain full, or even overflowing. She brushed her flaming red curls from her forehead as she rubbed a wet washcloth over her face and proclaimed in her usual cheery voice, “I feel much better now, really.”

If I heard that once in the coming 24 hours, I heard it 27 times — for Tiff and Cara kept their doors open and actually kept score. No sooner had Tiffany proclaimed her wellness, than she fell to her knees and threw up again. This went on and on, always with the same response or denial depending on how you chose to look at it (I am clearly in the camp of “the glass is half empty” kind of person.)   “No really, I feel much better now,” she would say with a grin.  Two of our three bathrooms were now occupied and Erica said, “Mama, I don’t feel so good.” Michael, who had been conspicuously missing walked into the room.

Now panic was rising in me. I grabbed him by the collar.  “Get out while you can. Go to the store and get as much Gatorade and Saltine crackers as you can. This is about to get very, very ugly. GO!”   He looked around at the events unfolding, grabbed his baseball cap and left.

I began taking inventory of the situation. How many clean towels do we have? And sheets? Ice chips, washcloths, and clean pajamas. I speculated out loud if we would even get our security deposit back at this point…

While Cara and Tiff were making sport of the situation, calling out to each other their status, Erica was sitting on the sofa trying to watch television and ignore her stomach. I began wondering, what was taking Michael so long. The grocery was, after all, right across the street from our condo. It occurred to me he might be avoiding the return trip.

What seemed like hours later, Michael walked in, eating a Whopper from Burger King. He said nothing. He poured himself a great big glass of milk and pulled out a bag of Oreo cookies and began eating them and drinking the milk with gusto, like a guy on death row eating his last meal. In fact, he inhaled a significant quantity of food right in front of me. I was horrified.

Didn’t he understand what was about to happen to him?

“Where have you been for God sake?” I yelled.

He proudly announced, “I just put out a fire in the parking lot!”  “What?” now you need to understand, over the years I could send Michael out for a gallon of milk and he would come back 2 hours later with a microwave, no milk, and a ridiculous explanation of his absence.

“Seriously, some of the shrubs in one of the concrete islands dividing the parking lot had caught on fire.  I ran into the lobby and told them to call 911, grabbed an extinguisher and put out the fire” he was beaming, so very proud of himself. While mayhem was exploding in our condo, he was putting out a brush fire.

As I watched him swig down the last of his milk, I finally asked, “Are you crazy?” to which he responded, “I figured this was going to be my last meal for a while, so I might as well make it a good one”  I stood there, incredulous.

Erica started complaining loudly about her stomach, and Mr. Sensitive but his soda cup down on the coffee table in front of her and said, “Here, throw up in this.”  She looked up at him in disgust and got up and ran to our bathroom and the round robin began in earnest. All three bathrooms were now in full rotation and I was exhausted. I lay down in our bedroom and willed myself not to succumb to my stomach.

“What can I do?” Michael asked.

“Go stay with the girls. They’re both weak from this, they may need help,” I was whispering at this point with a washcloth on my face.

“What? Are you serious?” subtext: “I didn’t actually mean it, I was just trying to sound, you know, supportive.”

I pulled the washcloth off my face and looked him dead in the eye, “Am I serious?” I said in a low, menacing voice, “yes I’m serious. I need a break.”

“Where should I? How should I…” He was at a loss for words. A caregiver, he was not.

“Lay down in between the twin beds on the floor. Maybe the three of you can get some sleep,” I suggested.

“Okay” — but his facial expression read like I was sending him to the gas chamber. Because, dear reader, what you don’t know is this: Michael has a hair trigger gag reflex. If he so much as hears someone vomiting, he’ll lose it. So I knew what was going thru his mind.

And sure enough, I wasn’t horizontal for more than a few minutes when the bedroom door burst open. There was Michael standing in the doorframe breathing deeply.

“Cara is (gulp) throwing up (inhale) in her bed! And I (swallow, hard)… can’t… take it!”  With that he dropped to all fours, crawled to the bathroom, threw up repeatedly and passed out cold on the floor. A 250lb Italian stallion with the wherewithal of a mama’s boy had played nursemaid for all of 30 seconds. I sighed, standing over him, shaking my head. I went to go help Cara.

It was the middle of the night before Cara had begun drinking Gatorade. Tiff refused assistance and Erica was in the middle of the violence. I was up and down. I could hear the constant rattle of ice as Tiff scooped it into a cup from the ice machine. Yes, we even had a state of the art ice machine. She sucked on the tiny cubes all night long.

As I lay there in the dark willing my own self “to suck it up” I wondered how I was going to explain all of this to Tiffany’s parents? I needed to make sure she didn’t aspirate in the middle of the night. She seemed to be sleeping when I walked into her bedroom to check on her. I leaned over her face. I just needed to make sure she was breathing. Unfortunately, she opened her eyes to find a stranger in the dark just inches from her face. Of course, I succeeded in frightening her so badly that she fell out of bed, screaming.

I checked on Michael, still on the bathroom floor. He too was breathing. I threw a blanket over him, turned out the lights and lay back down, talking to myself and ignoring my symptoms. The last man (woman) standing. How could this have happened to my perfect vacation? There was a heavy air of irony enveloping the room …

As dawn broke, I found Cara eating a cracker in her bed. A good sign I thought. Tiff wanted nothing to do with food. Erica was still visiting porcelain but at least she was slowing down. I got Michael up off the floor and gave him some crackers and Gatorade. He seemed stunned. I sat him in the great room in front of the television and gave him the remote control — I thought the familiar would be comforting to him.

As everyone began recuperating the next day, I gave myself permission to get sick. Of course, I was sicker than all the others, enduring a cold on top of the stomach flu. While the rest of the family was on the mend and visiting the zoo, I was visiting the doc and ordered to stay in bed. Seems I had a touch of vertigo to boot. The elevator put me on the floor and to add insult to injury, I couldn’t go anywhere near windows or the balcony. I couldn’t even enjoy the view of the ocean. Of course, it had occurred to me that I had earned this — my penance.

Michael put in a call to Billy to let him know what had just happened in the event they too might have gotten sick. It turned out the ride home was more like a bad horror movie only unfolding in slow motion with almost everyone but Billy, the driver, throwing up in the car during the 4-hour drive. Strike that, throwing up in their skirts, diaper bags, anything within reach. I can’t bring myself to disclose the other expulsions; it’s too graphic and disconcerting.

I imagined everything that had happened to us only in a very confined space with no plumbing.  When Billy finally pulled into the driveway, he fell out of the car and allowed himself to throw up. He declared he would have to condemn the van for no amount of cleaning would make it habitable again.

For it turns out, dear reader, it wasn’t the spider bite after all.

To this day, we greet Billy and his family with hospital masks.  We left our vacation early, seven days, not ten and headed home in silence. Perhaps I should have titled this, “Pride Goeth Before the Fall…”