Husband – What planet am I from again?

There are hundreds of books about relationships and the differences between men and women. Whether it is planets of origin or which brain hemispheres or whatever, we husbands really are wired differently.

When we first got married 13 years ago, my wife and I bought a few of those books and tried to better understand each other. I can’t count how many fights we had trying to make each other understand WHY something upset us or HOW the other could have phrased something differently. I wish I had all of that energy back.

Now I think we celebrate those differences in the way that we think. It comes in handy a lot of the time to have someone approach a problem from what I call (when my wife isn’t listening) ‘the opposite of logic’.

To illustrate the difference in the way we think, I would like to point to a conversation I had 15 minutes ago with my wife. I am working from home and she is watching the day after tomorrow. There is a part of that movie where the love-sick 17 year old, Sam, is talking to a girl he really likes but hasn’t told that. A boy from another school asks if she wants a tour of the school and she leaves with new guy. Just before leaving, she says “Sam, can you hold my drink?”.

I don’t know why but I told my wife the following “If you are ever single again and this situation arises, don’t make the dude hold your crap while you go off with some other guy. That’s just wrong.” After one of the most curious looks, she said “duh you idiot.. If a girl does that, it means she is coming back to you”.

Ah ha.. From my point of view, the girl is dumping her crap on ‘friend-boy’ while she investigates some dating material. From my wife’s the girl is dropping a hanky or ‘accidentally’ leaving her purse at his apartment.

So when I sat down to blog I was going to say how “gamey” girls are with stuff like that but in preparing to write it down, I noticed something. Leaving a drink like that is obviously a game but why did I think she was doing the wrong thing? Because “would you like a tour” is code for “let me get you away from all these other dudes so I have a shot at you”.

Here we are again. The exact same level of playing games but on opposite sides of the spectrum.

That is what you realize with time – On the scale of crazy, you’re both the same distance from normal, just in different directions.

Man – the medical problems

I have said in a few posts now that I would explain “the medical problems” when I got a chance. I suppose that if I don’t do it now, I never will so here it goes.. Keeping in mind that I am compressing 4 years of crap into a one page post so I will be glazing over a bunch of the details.

What the heck happened?

My wife and I had always had our share of problems and we laughed them off as they came. For example, when my kid was 2 months old my wife fell and broke both elbows. Let me tell you that when a spouse breaks both arms at the elbow, you get closer to them than you ever wanted to be.

I fed all 3 of us, bathed all 3 of us and was on diaper\bathroom detail for all 3 of us. And when my wife says “we breast fed our kid”, she actually does mean WE.. I had to help with that too and as far as I know, the ‘nipple nazis’ in the hospital still tell stories about us when discussing how important breast feeding is :-D

When my kid was 2, I got kidney stones for the first time and had to have the ‘go get them’ surgery. Not to bore you with the details, I will just say the word urethrascope and let you use your imagination.

Even with those problems, we were still in almost inappropriately good spirits.

About a year after that though, is when ‘the medical problems’ began and they were very hard to smile through. I woke up with kidney stone pain on the same side I had stones before and went to the ER again. After a CT scan, they told me that I didn’t have any stones on the right side so the pain must be something else. Thus began the land slide.

During the next 3 years, I had:

• 6 nerve surgeries on my back
• physical therapy
• 6 CT scans
• an MRI
• a bone density scan
• bone marrow biopsies
• pain management doctors
• passed one stone I had on the left side
• had surgery for another stone on the left side
• had shingles about 4 times
• 2 colonoscopies (I am only 33 for goodness sakes)
• About 8 ER trips for pain
• And a bunch more things I can’t even remember.

Each time I went to the ER, they found some other weird crud for me to add to the list. This or that would be bad which would spur more tests and worries. We went from thinking it was kidney stones all the way through leukemia to lupus and then to neuropathy (pain in your nerves for no reason).

I went from 170 pounds to probably 200 more than that, from having no debt to ridiculous amounts and from being a workaholic to barely able to function. Medication wise, I went from viccodin all the way up to oxycontin to control the pain.

The Results: Eventually, I just asked my doctors if they thought whatever was going on was going to kill me any time soon. When they said no, I told them all to jump off a cliff and began ignoring the pain and putting our life back together. I have been doing that for about a year and am making some progress with losing the weight and have dropped all pain and numbing medications. I’ll get there.

There are a lot of things during that time that I am proud of. For example, I worked from home so I never missed a day of work, I never took the pain meds when I didn’t need them and I fought my way from oxy (oral morphine!) back down to excedrin simply because I got pissed enough.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things I am not proud of too. In another post, I mentioned that I felt like I let this journey break me. I can almost pinpoint the moment it happened too. It was when I had everything taken away from me except my wife and child and my doctors began talking about my pain maybe being skeletal\bone cancer. They told me I wouldn’t be able to pick up my toddler any more and shouldn’t run or do anything else that might aggravate my body.

At one of the lowest points in my life I felt like someone was trying to move me out of the picture little by little. Then when I had almost nothing left, ‘they’ started taking my family from me as well which was more than I was prepared to handle.

It was at that point that I just gave up completely. I won’t tell you what life-changing moment I had since that is probably the only deeply personal subject I keep to myself but I can tell you what it was like afterwards.

I made my first rule of my new life. “God will never give you more than you can handle but the bible doesn’t say you have to handle it yourself”. I had always had God in my life but before this moment, I had prayed for him to help take care of my family – not me. Also, though my wife helped me without ever being asked, I learned to ask for her help when I needed it.

I also came to grips with my second rule. God doesn’t cause the pain in our lives but if you let him, He can use that pain for His purposes. It really helps to know that, with your cooperation, what you’re going through isn’t for no reason. That being said, God is big enough to handle it when you get upset so it is ok to say ‘this sucks’. He understands what is in your heart.

It is my belief that I may never know what good will come from my trials. It could be that 2 years from now, someone finds this post on the net and one sentence is the exact one they need to hear at that time. I don’t spend any more time wondering why it all happened because I trust that some good has already come from it and God’s plans are much greater than I can understand.

Even though in the big picture I may never know the answers, I have learned to take the good out of what happened. I realize that I didn’t get beat by this and I feel like I have survived a threat to my life even if that threat didn’t turn out to be a medical one in the end (that I know of). I am not scared of failing, dying or living any more and my ability to get upset by little things is now broken. I find myself taking less pictures than I used to.. I don’t want to look at photos to reminisce because now I bask in every Kodak moment and remember every second I have with my wife and daughter.

During my bad times, I was most upset that for half of my child’s life, I was hurting, having surgery or on medication. Now I realize when you’re seven, 4 years is a huge chunk of time. If I am around 23 good years until she is 30, 4 bad years will hardly be remembered.

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That normally would have been the end of my post but I wanted to add the following. If not for my wonderful wife, I wouldn’t have made it. With her broken arms, I helped her and kept her from having to call someone else but that was 6 weeks. My wife stood by me for 3 years of CRAP and 1 year of recovery so far and I would like to publicly thank her like I try to do privately every day.

I love you babe and thank God for sending me you.

Husband - on marriage and the split of effort

Before I got married, I had always heard that marriage was 50/50 and I was planning on living my life by that rule. It didn’t take me very long though to figure out that the 50/50 split is all wrong.

In my 13 years of experience, the split is more like 70/30 or 80/20 but that is only half of the sentence. The rest which is more important is that you have to make sure those percentages flip back and forth.

I can’t think of how many times my wife or I wasted feeling like a complete failure because we didn’t get the house clean or we didn’t feel like running to the store. We felt that if we weren’t keeping up our 50% of the housework or cooking that we were letting the other one down. I think the change in our thinking happened with our string of medical problems.

My wife broke BOTH arms at the elbow when our daughter was 2 months old. During that time, I obviously had to do all of the cooking, bathroom duties and bathing for my 2 month old and my wife. There aren’t many couples that mean WE when they say “we breastfed our children” but we can use that saying literally. I had to get up for every feed and help my daughter breastfeed.

Once we got past that little adventure, I got kidney stones followed by 3 years worth of mysterious pain of unknown origin. My wife was basically responsible for all of our family’s strength and most times the cooking and child care while I fought to make it through.

We realized during those periods that people who try and enforce the 50% rule like we did build up a lot of resentment. They feel like they are doing more than their share and any loafing on the other’s part means they don’t care anymore. We also realized how comforting it is to have your spouse say “Let me handle things for a while” with the trust that you will do the same for them.

Husband - on marriage – the off-limits list

I have been married to the same wonderful woman for 13 years now and recently a friend and I were discussing how marriage is hard work but very worth it.

We discussed a few of the things that him and I think helped get us through the hard times. The first was trust and the second was communication which I think I will save for different posts so for this one, I would like to take a look at number 3 on our list.

The off-limits list

When my wife and I were first starting out we decided to make a list of common marriage problems that we refused to let into our relationship. The list was quickly populated with things like cheating, leaving the house in anger, name calling, going to bed angry, throwing rings at each other or saying “I want a divorce” without being prepared to sign the papers. We did this at the beginning of our marriage but I think it could be started at any time.

I believe that list to have been a very important foundation for what we were building. Marriage is a very risky venture. On one hand, there isn’t anyone as close to you as your spouse but on the other, there isn’t another person who knows your past, your fears and your pressure points so well.

While we grew together, the list grew and changed. In a very short amount of time, the list went from a prenuptial contract to include a list of topics which were off limits for use later. That allowed us a great deal more freedom since we could share the most private thoughts we had with no fear of being hurt with it later.

For example, sometimes you might want to say that your family is full of a bunch of nuts but you wouldn’t want to hear that called up in the middle of a fight. There were times during the heat of battle where we would forget and say something from the list. The other only had to say “that one is off limits” and we would back off of it to explain what we really meant.

As time passed, some of the off limit topics quietly fell off the list. As we built trust that the other would never purposefully use something from the list to hurt us, we were able to take what they said at face value. We realized that “our family” now meant the folks living in our house and “extended family” now grouped together all relatives on both sides for example.

We also realized that both sides are full of a bunch of nuts :-). (sorry gang)

Husband - on wives working outside the home - random thoughts at 5am

Well here we go.. Can open, worms everywhere.. A subject close to my heart made more heart-breaking this morning (it is 5am now) when my kid spiked a 102.4 temp.

My wife works outside the home as a nurse taking care of extremely sick babies in a neonatal ICU. This is a job we both feel she was born to do and a very important one at that. Somehow though that doesn’t make things any easier when her kid is sick.

We share parenting 100% and have even worked our schedules to allow my daughter to be with one of us at all times. Usually when the kid gets sick, she will pick one of us to cling to and today that happens to be mama. The only problem is that the nifty schedule I mentioned requires that my wife works weekends which today is.

It really rips at my wife’s heart to feel torn between working one of her 2.5 days per week and being with her child. So far, mama is up and getting ready for work but I figure if my daughter asks to be held one more time that my wife will be at home today.

I know there are die hard feminists out there who say that a woman really can have it all and there are die hard homemakers who will use this as an example of why working mothers are evil. But as with everything, the true answer lies somewhere between the two extremes. Steph had a stay at home mom and I had a working one and we are both equally scarred :-P.

I know how hard it is for my wife to make the decision she will face in a bit but I am hoping it helps to know that if she does choose to go to work, our daughter will be perfectly fine 2 seconds after she leaves. There isn’t anything dad can’t handle or at least, dad is smart enough to know when he reaches that point :-).

I guess that is how all of us guys are as husbands. I think one of the best things we try to provide for our wives is stability and support. My wife is free to make whichever decision she wants and I feel like I have done a good job if she can trust that our kid will be taken care of either way.