Ramble On

Today Hubs and I have been married for seven years. Holy. Crap. We don't do cards, but we did exchange gifts. I got him gluten free cookies from Liz Lovely he got me a gift certificate to Knitpicks, which is pretty much the perfect gift for me. Earlier this week he also put together a toy chest for my to store my yarn in. That's love people, or he was sick of looking at piles of yarn in our bedroom, either way.

In 2007 we moved back to the north east from New Mexico. We weren't sure we were going to stay together. It upset me to talk about how close we came to divorcing but something changed, I'm not entirely sure what. But we both decided we needed to give our relationship another chance and threw ourselves into it. Things got better, we had our third child, and then things started getting bad. My mom got sick, then our littlest became chronically ill (our youngest has asthma, several trips to the ER and a hospital stay were involved), then I was diagnoised with Crohn's. Throughout all of this turmoil that was going on around us and to us our relationship seemed to become stronger than ever.

My husband has always been a good father but the attention and time he spends with the children when they are sick is above and beyond what I expected from him, that isn't to say that I didn't expect him to help or care for our children, but the compassion and empathy that just pours out of him amazes and starttles me.

When I got sick, he was the one who took me the ER and sat with me, for four days, in the hospital. Of course he was also going home to take care of the kids in the mean time and working. But each day he would come, and he'd sit on a chair he didn't really fit on and watch that tiny fuzzy TV that was attached to my bed. We wouldn't really talk, but he was there, and that meant more to me than anything.

Things changed then. I had always been the caretaker. When he was diagnosed with Celiac I took care of him. I made sure to educate myself on the condition and make sure that he was able to eat well. This time he stepped up for me and I was humbled. He's so supportive of my being on SCD, he understands how much time it takes to prepare everything from scratch and he takes care of the kids to give me the time to get things done.  Even right now, he's keeping the children downstairs so I can have time to write and work on my knitting samples.

I've read a lot that when things get complicated that the marriages dissolve that it takes too much out of the relationship. To have a sick child, or be sick yourself changes the dynamic of the marriage, and it worried me. I've seen it happen to members of my family when my cousins have been stricken by autoimmune diseases. The spouse just can't handle it, they leave, they don't blame them.

I know that it's early days in my illness and for right now I'm functioning as well as can be expected. I feel though, in my heart, no matter what is going to happen my husband is going to be there for me and do everything in his power to help me through this. Today I just want him to know, and the rest of the blog-o-sphere, how grateful I am to have him in my life.

Hubby and I