It had been over a month since my husband and I were in our house. Our new home had become a sterile room with a roll away bed, one pull out chair, and a constant beeping sound from carts with bags of medicine hanging from them. Around that time we heard the first utterance of what we imagined day in and day out, but sometimes still couldn’t believe was ever going to happen. The doctors told us we were almost ready. We were getting close to walking out the doors and onto the rest of our lives.
Those words brought me ecstatic joy, but I also knew that the hard work of rebuilding our marriage would also begin.
About a year before going into the hospital, John’s and my relationship began shifting from a typical, healthy, newlywed marriage of depending and helping each other to one where I took care of him every day – preparing meals and bringing them to him, helping him get dressed and prepared for the day, making phone calls about prescriptions and insurance, and consulting with teams of doctors on what treatment was next. One weekend I had to travel to Georgia for a wedding, and my dad had to come up to stay with him. Overnight trips to visit family and friends became no longer possible, and my errands had to be run quickly.
Our relationship shifted from husband and wife to child and mother. This is not what any young, strong man who desires more than anything to be seen as such wants in his life. He wanted to take care of me. But he couldn’t.
As we moved back into our house and John got stronger, our roles would have to go back to the way they were supposed to be. Otherwise our marriage would never be what it was meant to be. I would have to learn to let go of the child needing a caretaker and let John return once again to the strong man he had always been on the inside.
The rebuilding was not easy.
Maybe it was partly because our marriage was so new to begin with, but it was as if when we walked through our front door we were walking in for the first time as a married couple. We had to relearn marriage. We had to relearn our roles. We had to relearn what we were both good at doing. We had to relearn communication.
And I had to relearn how to submit. It was time for me to let go and allow John the freedom he needed to heal – not only physically, but emotionally and even spiritually.
It took time and even some arguments, discussions, and then more discussions, but through the rebuilding John transformed into a husband again. And I transformed into a wife.
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