I love my husband. You are supposed to love your spouse. But I'm fortunate enough to really know that I love him through thick and thin, sickness and health. Our love has been sorely tested.
Love gets tested from many directions. Fidelity, finances, and children are the biggies. And we were no different. I lost a marriage, a lifestyle, and financial security when my first marriage dissolved due to infidelity. His history bore the same scar. We both had a single daughter from our first marriages that we saw only sporadically thanks to custody battles.
We were mirror images on many levels; our children, hunger for a monogamous relationship, our emotional scars, our Harley Davidson motorcycles, gainful employment...What more do we need? How about love of God and compatibility? Sobriety?
About God, we both classified ourselves as believers. We weren't church attendees, nor did we belong to a congregation. If we did, we may have had some issues. But our church avoidance was another commonality. We seemed compatible to us; no overt problems seemed to be plaguing us.
We had no issues in the bedroom. In that department, we were sympatico. Straightforward, no frills, with an emphasis on ardent, loving embraces; it was my idea of perfect. I was sick and tired of auditioning in the world of singledom. I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse thus, all of my love relationships were colored by a dirty paintbrush. That was up until I began my recovery.
Sobriety is, and was, a huge priority; I was a year and a half sober for the second time and determined to remain so. Thus, it was ironic that I would find the love of my life at a cocktail lounge. I admit that I enjoyed the guilty pleasure of kissing him when he had just taken a long pull on a cold longneck. I should have run away, but that's just not my style.
As fate would have it, he put down the bottle on his own. I heard somewhere that it was better that way. However, my sobriety was predicated on working the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and attending meetings. His was not.
We lived together two years before we married since neither of us wanted to make a mistake. We survived some tough stuff; periodic unemployment, his father's stroke and eventual death, his severe back injury and major surgery, then my car accident, (I totaled his Lincoln), and subsequent, temporary, physical incapacitation, my debt load, his mother's active alcoholism, his family's alcoholism, his mother's broken hip, mental incapacitation, and rehab.
We figured if we could live happily throughout all that stress, surely we could graduate into happily ever after. We were married in the church I got sober in, by the pastor I knew and loved. Surrounded by family, friends, motorcycles, leather, skeleton-topped chocolate wedding cake, and Silly String, we rode off into uncertain weather.
Jobs would come and jobs would go for both of us. Most notably, he did HVAC installations in Seattle Children's Hospital, Tacoma Art Museum, Boeing, and the Seattle Tunnel project. After working for Hexcel, I took advantage of the economic downturn, post-9/11, and completed an accounting degree, breaking the educational ceiling for my family. I would cut my teeth, working a temporary gig with the Gates Foundation.
We lived comfortable lives, working during the week, heading to our vacation home, in the mountains, every weekend, taking little roadtrips on long weekends and periods of concurrent unemployment. Our non-working hours found us together, nearly exclusively. At home, working in the yard, she pushes the Toro, He's riding the second-hand Craftsman. He built the garage, she painted it. He worked the sprayer, while she edged and weeded, he followed, raking up the weed piles (bitching the whole time).
When in the mountains, he ran the chainsaw, we shared splitting duty and loading the truck. Together, we sanded drywall, installed kitchen cabinets, laminated countertops, peeled and pressed flooring, planted dahlia tubers, tilled the garden, stacked wood, added the water tank, added a deck, cleaned the gutters, freshened the paint, she neglected to clean the brushes, he followed, (bitching the whole time).
Our biggest arguments seemed to center on control. Would we go to the property? Take a ride? Stay home? Would we buy the range, with the pop-up ventilation, or somehow fashion a ventilation hood, for the vacation home? Trim the hedges? Work on the plumbing? So much to do...
Then, life changed.
A diagnosis.
A death sentence.
Where do we go from here? How do we live on one income? How do we hire help? Can we afford help? Is there help available to us? Is there any way to prolong life? Is there really no cure? What about chelation? Deanna Protocol? Exercise? Diet? Research. Research. Research.
Off to the Grand Canyon. Bryce Canyon. Zion. Grand Staircase-Escalante. Capitol Reef. Canyonlands. Arches. Tetons. Yellowstone. Navajo nation.
Back to reality. Declining health. Split loyalty. One trying to live. The other trying to make her admit defeat. She plans for homecare while he silently plots his retreat, her incarceration. He withdraws emotionally. He abandons her. She is betrayed. Hate and bitterness reign supreme.
He returns. She is captive. She runs him over with her wheelchair. It's a righteous hit. Slowly, she tries to come to terms with her incarceration, his betrayal, her family's betrayal, a nation's neglect. She forgives for her own sake. He must answer to God.
They are forever changed. A semblance of love returns.
Love gets tested from many directions. Fidelity, finances, and children are the biggies. And we were no different. I lost a marriage, a lifestyle, and financial security when my first marriage dissolved due to infidelity. His history bore the same scar. We both had a single daughter from our first marriages that we saw only sporadically thanks to custody battles.
We were mirror images on many levels; our children, hunger for a monogamous relationship, our emotional scars, our Harley Davidson motorcycles, gainful employment...What more do we need? How about love of God and compatibility? Sobriety?
About God, we both classified ourselves as believers. We weren't church attendees, nor did we belong to a congregation. If we did, we may have had some issues. But our church avoidance was another commonality. We seemed compatible to us; no overt problems seemed to be plaguing us.
We had no issues in the bedroom. In that department, we were sympatico. Straightforward, no frills, with an emphasis on ardent, loving embraces; it was my idea of perfect. I was sick and tired of auditioning in the world of singledom. I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse thus, all of my love relationships were colored by a dirty paintbrush. That was up until I began my recovery.
Sobriety is, and was, a huge priority; I was a year and a half sober for the second time and determined to remain so. Thus, it was ironic that I would find the love of my life at a cocktail lounge. I admit that I enjoyed the guilty pleasure of kissing him when he had just taken a long pull on a cold longneck. I should have run away, but that's just not my style.
As fate would have it, he put down the bottle on his own. I heard somewhere that it was better that way. However, my sobriety was predicated on working the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and attending meetings. His was not.
We lived together two years before we married since neither of us wanted to make a mistake. We survived some tough stuff; periodic unemployment, his father's stroke and eventual death, his severe back injury and major surgery, then my car accident, (I totaled his Lincoln), and subsequent, temporary, physical incapacitation, my debt load, his mother's active alcoholism, his family's alcoholism, his mother's broken hip, mental incapacitation, and rehab.
We figured if we could live happily throughout all that stress, surely we could graduate into happily ever after. We were married in the church I got sober in, by the pastor I knew and loved. Surrounded by family, friends, motorcycles, leather, skeleton-topped chocolate wedding cake, and Silly String, we rode off into uncertain weather.
Jobs would come and jobs would go for both of us. Most notably, he did HVAC installations in Seattle Children's Hospital, Tacoma Art Museum, Boeing, and the Seattle Tunnel project. After working for Hexcel, I took advantage of the economic downturn, post-9/11, and completed an accounting degree, breaking the educational ceiling for my family. I would cut my teeth, working a temporary gig with the Gates Foundation.
We lived comfortable lives, working during the week, heading to our vacation home, in the mountains, every weekend, taking little roadtrips on long weekends and periods of concurrent unemployment. Our non-working hours found us together, nearly exclusively. At home, working in the yard, she pushes the Toro, He's riding the second-hand Craftsman. He built the garage, she painted it. He worked the sprayer, while she edged and weeded, he followed, raking up the weed piles (bitching the whole time).
When in the mountains, he ran the chainsaw, we shared splitting duty and loading the truck. Together, we sanded drywall, installed kitchen cabinets, laminated countertops, peeled and pressed flooring, planted dahlia tubers, tilled the garden, stacked wood, added the water tank, added a deck, cleaned the gutters, freshened the paint, she neglected to clean the brushes, he followed, (bitching the whole time).
Our biggest arguments seemed to center on control. Would we go to the property? Take a ride? Stay home? Would we buy the range, with the pop-up ventilation, or somehow fashion a ventilation hood, for the vacation home? Trim the hedges? Work on the plumbing? So much to do...
Then, life changed.
A diagnosis.
A death sentence.
Where do we go from here? How do we live on one income? How do we hire help? Can we afford help? Is there help available to us? Is there any way to prolong life? Is there really no cure? What about chelation? Deanna Protocol? Exercise? Diet? Research. Research. Research.
Off to the Grand Canyon. Bryce Canyon. Zion. Grand Staircase-Escalante. Capitol Reef. Canyonlands. Arches. Tetons. Yellowstone. Navajo nation.
Back to reality. Declining health. Split loyalty. One trying to live. The other trying to make her admit defeat. She plans for homecare while he silently plots his retreat, her incarceration. He withdraws emotionally. He abandons her. She is betrayed. Hate and bitterness reign supreme.
He returns. She is captive. She runs him over with her wheelchair. It's a righteous hit. Slowly, she tries to come to terms with her incarceration, his betrayal, her family's betrayal, a nation's neglect. She forgives for her own sake. He must answer to God.
They are forever changed. A semblance of love returns.
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