"In July?" he asked.
I know, I know. But it isn't like my body has a history of handling things normally. So I went home and went back to bed and by the afternoon I had decided I should probably visit a clinic considering I had chills and felt like I had been hit by a truck. The clinic confirmed I was ill, but it was not the flu.
Apparently, I am one of the lucky few to get mono more than once in this lifetime. Since it's a virus, it's always in your body after you have it (I was a senior in college on the first ride). And if you really overdo it and wear your immune system down enough, the virus can reactivate and voila - you are sick again.
So, trying to redo an entire house - including a complete kitchen renovation and a partial bathroom do-over - in about a month can result in your immune system going on a quick vacay. Particularly when your partner in crime broke himself physically on demo day and you are down one man. I worked myself to the point of having mono again. I was out of work the rest of that week as well as the following one. The following two weeks I worked half days. This past week was the first one where I put in close to 40 hours.
Of course, all of this happened about 10 days after we moved into the new house. The kitchen isn't finished (no back splash, trim, filler panels, toe kicks, cabinet pulls - like hella not finished). The wallpaper in the bathrooms isn't up. The hallway needs to be painted. The painted rooms need to be touched up. My husband's music room is full of tools. My sewing room is just boxes. You get the picture. So, my husband broke himself, and then I broke myself, and then we just had to sit there and look at everything that wasn't finished while we are both healing and can't do anything about it... and not go insane. I may have failed on that last one.
In the middle of this, on top of breaking himself on demo day, my husband was diagnosed with a diseased gallbladder (full of stones) and needed surgery to remove it. I mean, gallbladder surgery isn't a major thing anymore if you can have a laparoscopic surgery, but since he nearly died of pulmonary embolisms (yes plural) when he had surgery 8 months ago, the prospect of this was wrecking both of our nerves.
So, he was prepping for surgery and we were both broken. I couldn't kiss him and risk making him sick with mono on top of everything else. I mean, you would think that not kissing him wouldn't be a huge deal, but we kiss a lot. And (more so than I even realized prior to this point) it is a really big part of the intimacy between us. There is all this stress, and the house is chaos, and we're both broken, and he needs to have another surgery, and I can't even kiss him.
I just wanted to set a clear stage for everything before I proceed with how I went nuts.
Switching gears (it will come full circle momentarily)... in general, I do not think of myself as being sexy... or really even as being a sexual being most of the time. I know that when I was in high school and college it was totally a defense mechanism because I was one of the few obese chicks around at the time (it was the late 90s and Kate Moss and her waif body were the "norm"). I just automatically put every person in the friend zone because I assumed that was where they were putting me. I did not want to express an interest in someone and be cruelly rejected in the ways I expected that I would be.
Fast forward twenty years and I never really acquired any capacity for flirting or really expressing myself as being sexy. I am usually completely unaware when someone else is flirting with me. My husband just sort of embraced this as some (additional) odd part of my personality and it was never really an issue. Although sexually our relationship has never been lacking, when I specifically try to be sexy, it's mostly just awkward. Sometimes I think I am accidentally sexy, but it became sort of a running joke between us that we could both laugh about.
Well... we could both laugh about it until all of a sudden stress overload showed up coinciding with illness and a lack of intimacy because I couldn't kiss him and I was feeling really insecure. I decided I was going to be super sexy and I put on an outfit for him the night before his surgery. I'm not going to lie, the trauma of what happened last time he went in for surgery left the possibility that he may die lurking in the back of my mind, and I wanted to make sure he didn't go out of this life sexually frustrated because his dumb ass wife worked herself into a second round of mono (at the worst possible time).
Well, it went as poorly as you can imagine it would. Not overly sexy woman puts on sexy outfit in the middle of a period of super low confidence and insecurity and lack of intimacy with her husband. Yeah, great idea. My husband handled it as well as he could, but there was a lot of laughing. I mean, I was laughing too, but my laughter was coming from this other "OH MY GOD WHY CAN'T I DO ANYTHING RIGHT" nervousness of like if I don't laugh right now I am going to cry instead sort of place. His laughter was coming from the same place it always had, and where mine used to reside. (If any of my close friends want details and particulars of how exactly horribly wrong this went so we can laugh about it - as I can laugh about it now - feel free to message me.)
The following morning, a plus sized model that I follow on Facebook (who he also follows) posted this photo of herself mostly naked and styled as a pinup. She works on the campaign for Dita Von Teese's lingerie line, so it isn't like this is the first photo styled in this way that she has posted. It isn't like this is the first photo of her that my husband and I have discussed. None of this is new. He showed me the photo and smiled and casually said something like, "She knows how to be sexy."
I snapped back something to the effect of, "I would know how to be sexy if I looked like her." His response included commentary that the sexiness conveyed in the picture more so comes from her confidence, not necessarily her body. But my reply was, "And I would feel confident too if I was walking around in her body!" And I went to the bathroom. To cry.
I knew he didn't know how much he upset me. And I didn't want him to know because we were literally getting ready to go to the hospital for his surgery... where I was petrified something was going to happen to him. I didn't want my last interaction with him to be an argument about me feeling insecure about my body. No thanks. So I cried in the bathroom, regained my composure, and wiped my face.
Well. I let it build up in my mind for over a week. I didn't know how to talk about it or how to even bring it up. I just knew that it was turning into this whole other thing. By the time I did tell him how I felt, I had decided that he didn't find me sexy at all, and that he thinks I'm goofy and awkward, and that he laughed at me when I tried to be sexy for him, and not only am I not sexy, but I also have a body that is damaged and broken from nearly dying that will never be attractive again, and I don't even know why he is with me.
If you are a woman reading this, you are probably thinking... well I could see how all of that would kind of lead you down this path to feeling really insecure, even if it wasn't true. And if you are a man, you are probably thinking... how the hell did she decide that the man who *married her* didn't think she was sexy?
When all of this came flying out of my mouth, with tears streaming and snot everywhere... to be honest he looked blindsided. Because he kind of was. This thing that was sort of this joke between us, was beaten and broken down into wreckage by a battle that was only happening in my mind and with myself. To him, I was still the same quirky weirdo that he calls his cute bean. Our interactions about me being awkward were the same lighthearted silliness that they always were. The lack of intimacy because we couldn't kiss each other on the lips was being propped up by all of the other ways we show that we totally dig being married... specifically to each other.
In retrospect, I don't think that my internal battle really had anything to do with something he did. I recently came to the realization that I am probably not going to have surgery to fix my body from the damage from nearly dying. When I look in the mirror, I see someone who looks like they were broken and glued back together. I don't like the way my body looks. The thing is, I never have. The only difference is that now, there isn't some future date when I think I will like my body.
When I weighed nearly 300 pounds, I decided it wasn't important for me to love my body because I would love it when I lost weight. When I had the gastric sleeve surgery to lose weight and all I saw was loose skin, I decided it wasn't important for me to love my body because I would love it when I didn't have loose skin anymore. When I nearly died and had multiple surgeries that left scars scattered among the loose skin, I decided it wasn't important for me to love my body because I could love it when I had a tummy tuck to fix everything. And here I am, in the same body that my mind sees as broken and ugly, trying to accept that it will more than likely never be "fixed". There isn't a future end date for when I can just love my body. I have to accept it as it is. Which is what I should have been doing all along, but that is a story for another day.
And that, I believe, was the bigger source of my insecurity. If I don't love this body, why in the world would my husband? If I stand in front of a mirror naked and I hate what I see, why wouldn't he see me the same way?
The thing is, he has loved me and my body all along. When I was morbidly obese, he loved me and my body. When I lost weight, he loved me and my body (even the loose skin bits). When I nearly died and ended up scarred for life (in more ways than just on my skin), he loved my body even more for being *alive* and scarred. And when I went nuts and accused him of not thinking I am sexy at all, he still loved my insane ass. Sometimes, I am not sure why.
My therapist, when I unloaded all of this on her, asked me to name one thing I like about my body specifically. I responded that I think I have pretty eyes. So she said, "That is a place to start." It is the tiniest thing, but I guess it is a place to start...
