It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m feeling tired and happy. Tonight will be my husband’s last bout of night float for intern year. And better still, once night float concludes, my guy will be on his last rotation of intern year. Just a month in the ER, which everyone says is a fairly light weight rotation in the scheme of things. I have finally given myself permission to feel optimistic relief, to consider to possibility of a less demanding lifestyle. What a happy feeling to look forward to living into in these coming weeks! I snuggle into my Love, and our son who has joined us in bed for a little nap.
Suddenly I smell something and it isn’t good. A girl appears in the doorway and she is the picture of a princess in pink: velvet leotard; chiffon skirt. head held high.
“I pooped.”
Yes, there is a clear pronouncement if there ever was one.
“Where?” I inquire, dreading the truthful response I’m sure to get.
“I pooped some of it on the stroller and some of it in the living room and part of it is in the bathroom and there’s some in my undies.”
I follow the trail of brown smelly substance on an obstacle course throughout the house and finally back to its source. Lovely. Avsi’s wipe down is quite an understanding, but she stands there quite patiently. Eventually she is more or less de-pooped and ready for a bath. I watch her poor water and soap on her terry-cloth frog, cleaning him as I have just cleaned her. I wonder how much poop residue a microscope would find in the water that is “cleaning” her frog.
With that taken care, it’s time to get ready to go. I’m meeting up with a friend at Living Room Theater, and my Love is joining for the first little while before he has to get sign out from the daytime at the hospital and start his night shift. I’m doing some very minor primping when he walks in the door with a frown and sad, downcast eyes that would leave a toddler’s sad face in the dust most days.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. concerned.
“You know how there was that weird thing that was supposed to be at the end of the year that I told you about, well somehow it got switched around and I have to work tomorrow. I tried to get out of and trade with someone, but I couldn’t.”
Tears. A feeling like being punched in the heart with disappointment. A feeling like it is personal, like the program must have somehow known that I had just mustered up the faith to feel it’s okay to feel like the worst is over and they wanted to sock it to me one more time. It’s irrationally. I don’t care – that’s what feels true in this moment.
What makes this moment different from others like it is that we reach for us each other. Instead of my enemy, this is my friend, the one with whom I’m linked in body, heart and essence, happily so, even in times that just seem unfair. We hold each other and it’s okay that I’m crying and he looks like his eyes are breaths away from letting out their waters. It’s okay to feel…fully…in each others’ presence…about that which formerly stood as the great impassable wall between us.
Upon seeing me cry, Avriana stretches up her arms to be picked up, then wraps her entire being around me. “I love you,” she whispers. Avsi, my Love and I hug each other for a while, then I fix my eye liner, wipe my tears and give a few quick instructions to the sitter.
Our friend doesn’t know my hubby is joining us for a for a stretch before work, so my Love calls her on his cell (since I don’t have one,) and leaves a message, which sounds normal until he pauses at the end of it and says, “I love you, bye,” and then looks at the phone like, “What the?”
“Did I just say “I love you?” he asks, clearly disoriented.
“Yep, you did.”
“That was really surreal. My brain is doing funny things. Well, don’t worry, I don’t feel any eros (ie romantic) love for her.”
I’m laughing and crying at the same time, because I totally get that when you’re zombie-tired, you do things on autopilot – who does he usually call and leave messages for? Me. What does he typically say at the end of whatever other content in the message? “I love you, bye.” So his resource-depleted neurons have made the equation as simplified as possible: When leaving a message, end with saying “I love you, bye.”
Whatever. This is what it has come to – my husband is so damn tired that he is like a robot, telling another woman he loves her, bye.
It turns out our friend, to whom my husband has unwittingly professed love to is held up at a meeting and will be late which gives my Hubby and I a chance to have a little date. I go ahead into our chosen location, Living Room Theater, while my Love continues the search for parking. We hardly ever have to deal with parking, living downtown, but we’ll be parting ways after Happy Hour, me to go home and watch over our roost and him to go to work and watch over patients hooked up to various machines.
I seat myself at a cute little table with a couch on one side and chairs on the other. When our server approaches, I beg off the mandatory alcoholic beverage that is usually part and parcel of ordering off the happy hour menu and order an acai white tea instead. I’m on a cleanse, designed to help my overextended adrenal recover from the last few decades of life.
Soon our sweetly skinny, eccentric and almost certainly gay waiter sets down a lovely goblet of tea in front of me, along with generous a hummus platter, augmented with with thick, round, warm pitas. I It’s lovely to be together over yummy food. I learn from my Love that the first official artificial life has been created – a DNA strand identical to that of a known bacteria – a bacteria within a family of bacteria that can be harmful to people. So now there’s this constructed life form that can independently replicate itself and I think to myself, Wow, another potential way for humans to destroy themselves as I dip my pita bread for more hummus. We hold hands, look into each others eyes. Perhaps the thought of the world ending is helping me keep own destructive emotions in check, at least temporarily.
Eventually our friend shows up. She isn’t totally sure she heard the message right. I assure her that she did and then my Love explains how tired and out of his mind he is and we all laugh. Then my hubby has to go. We kiss sort of wistfully and in a whoosh of scrubs, he is out the door. It still feels lie our weekend has been ruined, but at least in this moment there is the sweet presence of love as I watch him exit.
I linger and chat with my friend for a while and it’s a good time. We talk about the different kinds of love there are in the world, about mother-daughter tensions with our kids, and about what makes connections magical. Before I know it the clock as struck 9 and I’m a few minutes late home to a house full of kids who have been tucked in to sleep. Within minutes, one sleepy little boy pads down the hall and hops into the pullout bed and squirms until he has found the perfect position.
Life of An Intern's Wife 