For years we joked about it as if the entire episode was, in fact, made up—an excuse to get a break from the relentlessness of parenting small children. When one of us would feel a cold or sore throat coming on, and bedtime duties or dirty dishes hung on to us like sandbags, we’d climb into bed, pull the covers up, and say, “I can’t. It’s rhabdo. It’s rhabdo.”
