A whirl of events

Sunday was intense. Apologies for not responding to comments on my last one, there are reasons, and I hope I’ll get around to catching up.

Cristina has been working on hair and makeup for the ballet version of Peter Pan, and she got tickets for Sue and me on the last day of the run, at noon (an odd time for a ballet, but so it was). I woke up sneezing and blowing my nose (running constantly like a broken tap), feeling a little achy. I had a feeling of dread but really wanted to see the ballet both because I wanted to see how ballet dancers work with flying and because it featured the music of Elgar. Took a Covid test. Negative. Checked my temperature. Normal. Sue felt fine. So we masked up and went.

As we took our seats, I got a What’s App message from Lebo, Palesa’s biological sister in South Africa. (For those new to my journal, Palesa was my elder daughter. She died of Covid-19 in 2021 in South Africa, aged 38. Her baby’s first birthday was ten days after Palesa died.) The message said Palesa’s baby, Kamohelo, now three, was in hospital. The lights went down on the ballet before I could respond. The remaining details of the day are for my records, so feel free to go on to other things if long posts are not your cup of tea.

The sexual politics of the ballet were infuriating. The choreographer gave all the new, exciting movements to male dancers (angular movements, leaps, and acrobatics including voguing and very athletic spinning while flying) but the female dancers had only sterotypical “pretty” and “graceful” movements on pointe. The “boys” got to be wild and adventurous in their movements, while the female characters—the fairies, the mermaids, and “Wendy” --were utterly conventional and restrained. “Wendy” had two important solos, one a love duet with Peter Pan (he did the soaring) and the other a frightening duet with Captain Hook in which he dominated her and tied her up. Ugh. “Wendy” does the whole play in her nightdress, and in the last scene (still in her nightdress) she is seated, holding a baby next to a man in a suit standing beside her, the three of them encased in a picture frame. Peter Pan sails off into the wings and “Wendy” accepts reality and her role as wife and mother, reifying the heterosexual male-dominant nuclear family. Multiple ugh.

After the ballet, I sent a message to Lebo asking about the baby. No answer. Feeling like I’d come down with something contagious, I went back to my house instead of spending the rest of the day with Sue. I took the antibiotic my doc has told me to keep around because I get frequent sinus infections, and toward evening I texted my son to see if anyone in their house had a cold. I was surprised to hear that Evan was in the Emergency Room with respiratory problems. Cristina had gone straight home from working on Peter Pan to take Evan to the hospital while Seth stayed home with Bella. By 9pm Evan had been tested (all normal) and sent home, and he was feeling a little better. He wasn’t having cold symptoms and his breathing was back to normal.

Monday morning update: Kamohelo has Intussusception. She has been transferred to the very hospital where Palesa died, and Palesa’s sister is there with her. I was able to calm Lebo and give her information I got from Dr. Google concerning the treatment for the disorder. The medical staff had not given her any of that information, and she had feared the baby was about to die. I feel optimistic; at least we understand what the problem is, and there is a treatment protocol for it. Lebo sent me a photo of Kamo taken Monday morning (see extra). Evan felt well enough to go to school, and my symptoms are resolving. Whew!