‘I only knew a few things about chickenpox, but when my son caught it he was the first to fact-check me’

I buttoned up his colourful smock with some trepidation. I’m not so po-faced that I think there’s anything culturally insensitive about kids embracing music, dance, or even dress, from other cultures. It was just that I’m a self-conscious person and there’s always the fear, silly but present nonetheless, that I’d take him, a child so white he’s basically transparent, to school dressed in authentic West African dress and find I’d done something wrong. That I’d be met with an endless parade of kids in standard uniform and talk from their teachers of an email I’d never read, a sensitivity training I’d missed, as they batted me from the door while calling the police. I wouldn’t be able to hear a word they were saying at that point, of course, too distracted by the stern and anguished face of the Ghanaian ambassador who, in a stroke of bad luck, was visiting the school that morning on other business.

Thankfully, such internal terrors did not come to pass. At the event itself, everyone was delighted by his costume, and my knee-jerk horror of committing offence was holstered for the rest of the day. I was still riding high two hours later, sending videos to his mum on WhatsApp, when the phone rang. It was his school calling, in grave tones. No, they hadn’t received an arrest warrant from the cultural appropriation bureau at Interpol. I was to pick him up as soon as I could, because he had chickenpox.

I didn’t know much about chickenpox before this week. I certainly didn’t know you can have the disease for a week before the spots arrive and when they do, it’s sudden. You could have no spots at 10am and be utterly riddled with them by midday. This was, indeed, what happened to my son, who was as unblemished as a dry-cleaned marble when I saw him dancing to Fuse ODG just that morning, yet extravagantly bepimpled when I picked him up two hours later.

I rushed him to the nearest pharmacy so I could pick up the calamine, paracetamol and Piriton I’d be pummelling into him for the next five days. I did this in such distraction that I forgot entirely what he was wearing, reminded only when stopped by numerous kindly West African gentlemen, pausing to compliment him on his Bin’gmaa fashions.

The next few days went slowly, and my son and I made our entertainment how we could. Thankfully, his case was quite mild, meaning he was covered head to toe in spots, but they didn’t itch too badly, even those on his scalp and eyelids. He felt miserable, however, with fluey symptoms that left him too lethargic to countenance much active play, or even chess. In that odd way of dads, I began to fume on his behalf. It felt repulsively unfair that this everyday occurrence was happening to him. It’s all well and good when some other child gets sick, I said to myself, but why must mine suffer?

I was heartened that he was still fit enough to ask questions, however, so for the next week I spent every waking hour attempting to cheer up a fact-mad six-year-old who was determined to know every conceivable thing about his illness. Luckily, this fact-madness afflicts us both, and an exciting – if unedifying – sense of competition descended. He was initially concerned with how chickenpox is cured. I told him it was not really something you cured, you just got on with it. They used to think it was a type of smallpox, I said, which necessitated rather more discussion of a disease that’s killed millions of children. He scored a win by correcting me on the fact that chickenpox is just one word, and its technical name is the sultry and alluring “varicella”.

Desperate to counter, I overshot and told him chickenpox was so named because it was originally caught by people who handled chickens. Within minutes, he discovered this was false and that there exists no standard etymology for the name at all, with guesses ranging from a corruption of “child’s pox” to the rather more speculative idea that its pimples look like pecks from a hen’s beak. I tried to claw back some cred by saying I’d got my poxes mixed up. There’s so many, I said. It’s cowpox I had in mind: the very disease contracted from cattle by milkmaids, that led Edward Jenner to invent the first modern vaccine! Soon I was spiralling. I even told him the word “vaccine” derived from the Latin for “from cow” – a fact I repeat here for your admiration – but it was no use.

Soon he was telling everyone that I, his pompous, all-knowing dad, thought you caught chickenpox from fondling chickens too much. “I’ve never even touched a chicken!” he added, cackling, several times a day, to everyone’s delight. His misery lifted immediately and never returned. My defeat was complete, his recovery en route. That my debasement carried the secondary benefit of curing chickenpox provided no relief. It’s all well and good him being ill, but why do I have to suffer?

Photograph by Patrick T Fallon/Getty Images