Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The podcast about everyday stuff that turns out to be older, weirder, and way more meaningful than we realized.
### **00:00 Introduction**
You are seven years old. It's two in the morning, and you have just made a terrible mess in the hallway.
You are crying. You're crying because you feel awful. You're crying because the remnants of your dinner are now on the floor. You're crying, in short, because everything around you feels *wrong* on a fundamental level.
And then a light comes on. Somebody picks you up and carries you to a special place. Somebody else is already dealing with the hallway. You don't know it at seven, but you'll eventually learn that dealing with that hallway demonstrates a deep, pure love for you.
The person who carries you places you in a special place - somewhere you are not normally allowed to remain for long periods. A glass appears. It's clear soda, with no ice. Next to it on the table are a few soda crackers.
There was no pause to research or make decisions. Everybody just knew the steps, like dealing with your vomit was an old familiar dance.
It's not truly a dance. But it's probably a folk thing.
> **Intro Music**
Welcome to *It's Probably a Folk Thing* – the podcast about everyday experiences that turn out to be older, weirder, and far more meaningful than we realized. I'm your host, Aaron Crawford, and today we're talking about what your family does when somebody throws up.
---
### **01:17 Segment 1: The Steps**
At my house, it was 7Up and soda crackers. These, together, constituted an almost-mystical cure for any illness that resulted in emesis. My dad administered it in my house. It might have been your mom in yours.
For now, here's the thing I'm hoping you notice: The soda is the least interesting part of this story.
See, the soda came with a whole *procedure*. And I'd bet money you know the procedure, even though yours may have run on a different beverage.
It goes something like this:
**First, you get moved.** This is step one in almost every house. The sick person does not stay in their own bedroom, which is where they sleep every other night of their life. They get relocated to the most central, most supervised, most adult room available. At my house, that was my parents' bed. They had a TV in there. For my kids, it's the couch.
**Second, a container gets assigned.** Every family has one. Ours is a specific plastic tub that, once it was pressed into service, could never go back to being a normal piece of Tupperware. You cannot put a sandwich in that thing. Everyone in the house knows which one it is, and nobody has ever written it down.
**Third, somebody puts a hand on your forehead.** Let's be honest about what this accomplishes. It gathers no information. Nobody has ever taken a temperature this way with any accuracy. And every single one of us does it anyway, because it isn't a measurement. It's a greeting.
**Fourth, the rules go soft.** No school. No chores. No homework. No questions about the homework. And at my house – all the TV you want.
**Fifth, the small sips rule.** Enforced with total seriousness, by people who otherwise do not care how fast you drink things.
**And sixth, the loop.** Somebody keeps coming back. Not on a schedule anybody set. Just... every so often, the door opens, and a face appears, and asks how you're doing, and leaves again.
Six steps. No manual. Everybody in the house knew their part.
---
### **04:00 Segment 2: You Learned It Lying Down**
My dad didn't get this from a medical journal. He learned it informally - a certain hallmark of folklore.
You pick up most folklore by watching. You see your uncle thump a watermelon, so you learn to thump a watermelon. You see the whole stadium stand up, and so you stand up.
My dad may have picked up this routine by watching his siblings receive it.
But more likely, he learned it by receiving it himself. You are flat on your back, seven years old, miserable and frustrated and just generally out-of-sorts. So you're not studying it. You're not writing it down somewhere, thinking "I'm going to do this with my kids." But you're learning it nevertheless.
And so twenty-five years go by. And one night your own kid is sick, and you find yourself doing all six steps - properly, in order, like you've got a checklist in front of you.
Part of what makes this particular folk tradition fascinating is that you learn while your brain is addled. it's the exact wrong conditions to learn anything. But the lesson still worms its way into your brain.
---
### **05:06 Segment 3: Everybody's Is Different, Everybody's Is the Same**
Now, you've been listening to me say "7Up" this whole time, and you may have been getting a bit agitated about it. Because maybe in your house it was ginger ale. Or flat Coke, deliberately stirred flat, which is quite frankly a level of commitment I respect. Or weak tea. Or broth. Or, if your family was ahead of the curve, that electrolyte stuff in the terrifyingly-neon colors.
And the solid food might change. Soda crackers for me. Dry toast for others. I've also heard plain white rice, applesauce, and a banana.
Ask three people what their family used. You'll likely get three different answers. But you'll also very likely get an identical structure - or at least a structure that rhymes rather closely. Maybe the patient sat in teh recliner, or in the parent's bed, or on the sofa. But the where doesn't matter - the move does. Move the patient. Fetch the correct bucket. Touch the forehead. Suspend the rules. Small sips. Keep checking.
Folklorists have names for exactly this. *Multiple existence* – the same thing turning up in a lot of places at once, with no central office issuing it. And *variation* – no two versions quite alike. When you find those two together, you have found an example of folklore.
But this script really tells us something interesting: The soda was never the point. If the practice were really about lemon-lime soda, it couldn't survive being ginger ale at the neighbor's house. But it does survive, because the beverage is a prop.
The tradition lies in the script - in that set of steps that gets taken in households across the United States. The drink is just what the script happens to be carrying that night.
And now for my favorite piece that proves the script is folklore: The TV rule.
My parents did not restrict television. That was not a resource they rationed. My father fixed televisions, and so the television was perpetually on. So a "you can watch all the TV you want" rule granted me absolutely nothing. It was an empty permission.
They gave it to me anyway. Every single time.
A practical accommodation would not survive losing its practical content. But a folklore script can survive even a useless rule change. And it did.
(As a sidenote here, don't get too judgy on my parents. We all turned out okay, despite our television habits. I've got a brother with four master's degrees, a brother with a doctorate…but my sister only has one master's degree. She's the outlier.)
---
### **07:35 Segment 4: What It's Actually For**
So if the ritual isn't about the soda, what is it about? I think there are two answers.
**The first is that it really is about the sick person.**
Somebody keeps coming back to that person. That's part of the loop in every well-functioning household, that the adults return to check on the child. The child learns that they're not alone. They see active evidence that they are loved and valued. And they get that evidence every twenty minutes until bedtime.
I think, for the sick person, it's also the suspension. In the U.S. in particular, we don't often get permission to do nothing. We pride ourselves on busyness, even if that busyness is useless. But part of the ritual is the suspension of work. No school, no chores, no homework, no competence required of you at all. That's what the TV permission really says. It isn't about television. It's the leaders of the household formally announcing: *nothing is expected of you right now.*
**The second is for the person who isn't sick.** And we talk about this one less, but caregivers matter a great deal.
I'm not sure anything is harder for a parent than watching your child suffer when you really can't do anything to help them. And viruses are viruses - they come in, do their thing, and leave. There's not a lot that makes them speed up - and certainly nothing in the realm of regular parenting skills.
And so a parent standing over a vomiting kid cannot do anything to alleviate that suffering. The virus is going to run exactly as long as it's going to run. There's just the waiting, and the helplessness, and the hallway.
And then the script shows up and hands you a *job*. Relocate the patient. Fetch. Pour. Check the patient. Repeat.
Doing that job, performing that ritual, is bearable. Watching your child suffer because you can't do anything useful is simply unbearable. And so we find something to do - the same thing we watched our parents do for us.
Which is also, I think, why the ritual is so hard to skip. If you have a teenager who says *Mom, I'm fine, just leave me alone* – you go get the ginger ale anyway. You don't get it because they need it. You get it because you need to do *something*.
And maybe the best thing in that moment hails back to the first point: When we show our child we love them, we really are helping. Just maybe not with a virus.
---
### **10:08 Closing**
I don't know where this originated. Strike that - *nobody* knows where this originated. If you ask, you'll get "that's just what you do," which is a very reliable sign that you're looking at an example of folklore.
The soda didn't cure anything. Because, like I said, nothing cures a stomach bug. It runs its course, and then you're hungry again, and then you go back to school.
But ask anybody about being sick as a kid. They won't tell you about the medicine.
They'll tell you whose bed they got to sleep in. They'll tell you which bowl was *the* bowl. They'll tell you who kept opening the door to do one more check.
To see if you needed one more refill of the soda.
To feel your forehead.
To demonstrate, in a concrete and very tangible way, that they love you.
It's definitely a folk thing.
Until Next Time.