The 45 Project, part 2: Marrying the Right Man

My 45th birthday — shared with Juneteenth and with Father’s Day — marked two weeks of recovery from fibroid surgery, a step along the path to trying to get pregnant. Any abdominal surgery means a careful and intense recovery — affecting our ability to move around on our own power, care for ourselves, and do even the most basic things. So it felt like a bit of a triumph on the morning of my birthday to take a shower, get dressed in real clothes, put on earrings, and go out to breakfast with my husband.

I’m moving around with more ease and less pain than I feared I would, and I’m proud of myself for taking my healing seriously. For taking two weeks off of work (unheard of for this recovering workaholic). For truly resting.

I’m proud of my body for doing its healing work to knit me back together, for handling pain as well as it does, for adapting to huge fibroids shifting things around inside me over the years, and for now adapting to their sudden absence. My body always, always does its best for me (whether I help it along or not).

I’m grateful to my Bear, for caring for me day and night for those two weeks, postponing the start of his much-anticipated new job so he could be present to do whatever it took to help me recover. As I reflect on (and continue) my recovery, I credit his caretaking as much as my own healing powers for my progress.

Yes, it was a big help that my husband is tall and broad and strong — the nickname Bear is not an ironic one — and so I knew he could physically move me from lying down to standing when needed. But as I experienced actual physical helplessness in the early days of my recovery and reflected on the true vulnerability of that, what struck me most was not his strength but his trustworthiness. I could heal, I could rest, I could accept care because I can trust him to take care of me. He won’t forget to check on me; he won’t resent re-filling my water glass for the hundredth time; he won’t sleep through my middle-of-the-night round of medications; he won’t give up or freak out when it gets hard.

No other man I’ve ever been in a relationship with — and I was a serial monogamist between age 16 and meeting Bear at 41 — could have taken care of me like that. Some were too overwhelmed with other responsibilities. Some were too self-focused to truly take care of someone else. Some inherently lacked the ability to be consistent. I would have been watchful, worried, and agitated if any of them were caring for me. I would have tried too hard to get self-sufficient too early and set myself back. I would have asked my mother to move in for two weeks and avoided the disappointment entirely, wearing her out in the process.

These reflections come with a shadow of sorrow — that for so many years, I chose men who weren’t truly equipped to support me. For a lot of reasons that it took a lot of work over a lot of years to unearth and unseat — the aforementioned workaholism, unresolved daddy issues from my teenage years, a lack of faith in relationships after my own parents’ divorce, and a stubborn savior complex to name a few — I chose the wrong man for me, over and over.

What shines out for me now is the multiple layers and dimensions of healing that I have worked toward in my 45 years — what it took to get here, to heal the patterns of the past, to finally choose my Bear. So many hard truths and dark nights to face. And always more to do. But without question (and with deep relief), I married the right man.

This is part of a monthly series, The 45 Project, reflecting on the first 45 years — find the other installments here.