Measuring up
I’m scrubbing the bathroom toilet while listening to Alison Armstrong’s audiobook “The Amazing Development of Men.” My husband is away on another business trip. I’ve decided today not to work on Minerals for Migraines, because last night, which is usual when my husband is gone overnight, I stayed up way too late writing, building coursework, and responding to clients. Turns out I don’t always practice what I preach when it comes to sleep hygiene.
So I figure today, i’ll give the house some love and listen to some audio. And as I scrub, I muse about how my husband hasn’t been keeping up with helping out with the bathroom cleanup like he had promised he would (given, it was after a glass of wine that he proclaimed he was the new “bathroom nazi” – umm, not so much). But for a nice change of pace today I’m actually not feeling angry about it, just a little sweetened by his clear desire to respond to my needs, even if he falls short. I fall short of keeping the bathroom clean as well. It’s basically guaranteed to fall short on keeping up with the incredibly intense demands of life with little kids. And yet we’re doing an amazing job.
This is the inherent messiness of life. And today I’m thinking about my man. And despite him only having scrubbed the toilet about an average of once a year in the ten years we’ve been together, I’m thinking about just how much he’s measured up, how much he’s actually exceeding even what my imagination would have conjured of the Ultimate Man, the Ultimate Husband, the Ultimate Father.
He exceeds my imagination partially because he truly is so wonderful, but also because in my imagination, I never dreamed I’d get chronically sick with migraine headaches so early in our marriage and have to witness what a badass he’d be in dealing with that despite the fact this wasn’t exactly our plan.
Life is chaotic, and it’s hard to keep up, to always measure up. Especially if you have little kids. It’s hard to measure up to our own ideals, to our culture’s unrealistic ideals, to raise kids without a village, to take care of yourself while raising a family with a chronic inflammatory condition.
It’s probably been pretty hard for my husband to be married to a wife obsessed with everything related to migraine, too. The constant preoccupation and research, the constant experimentation, the cost of yet another supplement to try, the emotional highs and lows of trying different things out, the incessant drive to get better amidst the irony of spending so much time focussed on sickness.
Today we’re celebrating ten years together, and instead of geeking out about minerals, or critiquing how bad our mainstream medical model is at keeping people healthy, today I just want to tell you about how much I love and appreciate my husband Nicholas Clare McCormick.
This blog post is also a way for me to say directly to you, Babe: “You’ve totally measured up. You ARE the Man. I have YOU to thank for where I’m at now. And I have you to thank for just being you, beyond what you do for me.”
Remembering the importance of adventure & fun
As Alison points out, boys and men want adventure and fun. (Turns out a lot of us women do, too – motherhood, dishes, c-sections, missing village, migraines, screaming kids notwithstanding). But the adventure of helping me navigate my way out of chronic migraine is certainly not what my husband had in mind when he married me, nor has it been much fun at all.
In fact, migraine is one of the most debilitating conditions, but millions of sufferers, most of them women and mothers, are expected to go along acting fully functional. That usually means an increasing load of medications that cause “rebound headache” much of the time. I refused to go down that road. Having migraines was not fun, but being dependent on suppressive medications seemed even less so.
Despite this lack of fun, amazingly enough, my husband has shown an unflappable sense of stability and positivity through it all. It’s something I surely have taken for granted in the midst of the self-centeredness that is almost inherent to the persistence and dogheadedness needed to pull yourself out of a chronic condition.
But when Nick first met me, I was full of adventure. I had lived in exotic countries and roamed the far reaches of our glorious Mama Gaia, connecting with the Human Family of kindred in different lands.
At the time he met me I was living illegally (ie, a squatter) in my art studio in a big cold and drafty building in downtown Portland – the floor above the parking garage where seamstresses used to make costumes for the Porland Opera House back in the 40s.
The one huge furnace bellowing through the drafty building was no match for the cracks in the glass windows, and the lack of heat had driven me to the nearby cafe where Nick and I met.
When I invited him back to show him my place, we were both shivering so much that I offered him to sit on my massage table, which had an electric table warmer and at the time was serving as my bed. I also offered him some tea and hot water bottles and assured him I wasn’t coming on to him, but dang it was cold! (And actually, this is honest – despite his hunky appearance and incredibly clear shiny soul, I was not on the lookout for a relationship at the time – not that this could have stopped the inevitable from happening).
He was 22 and I was 31 and although I didn’t know quite how young he was I was starting to get the picture that he might be younger than his wise soul seemed. But the adventure of our lives together pulled like a taut cord, bringing us out to the Columbia River Gorge where we fell in love and promptly moved in to an old farmhouse that had been stripped down to the studs and had no hot running water until my valiant man put on a hazmat suit and braved the slimy underbelly of the house to get us civilized with hot showers.
It was an upgrade from squatting in my artist’s studio. And the farmhouse, however decrepit, was situated on the most sublime farm property, with rolling hills of hay, and a view to the snowcapped peaks of Mt Hood across the river, and the mystical fog that settled upon the trees like a Japanese watercolor painting, and a big hot-bellied woodstove that kept us warm.
When you’re in love what more could you need? Adventure, warmth, homemade bread, a breathtaking landscape, wild mushrooms, the smell of sap that clung to him after chopping wood, and the potent potential inherent in all new beginnings and the unknown of where it will all lead. That is all that sustained us – and that beginning still sustains our love.
But since becoming a mother, since suffering from chronic migraine and working steadfastly to heal myself, my idea of fun in life has radically changed – or rather, my original inclinations for worldly adventure got buried in sickness and laundry.
My life adventure into motherhood has taken me to very unknown realms – through a c-section operation that cut into the very core of the most sacred center of who I am. This event catapulted me and our marriage into an entirely unrecognizable space.
My idea of fun consists now mostly of online research and geeking out on nutrition. I no longer seek out the satisfaction of meeting people in foreign lands to listen to their music, share their food, and look up at our common sky together. Instead, it’s been the satisfaction of helping support people from all over the world who feel like shit to feel less like shit.
The courage to procreate
As Alison Armstrong warns me in her audiobook “The Amazing Development of Men“, women are smart to heed the statement by men that they are not ready to commit or have kids before they are ready. It does not represent a lack of love.
When I met my husband, he didn’t even want kids. This seemed more of a conceptual, and very common-sense approach to someone belonging, as he described, to a species as destructive and stupid as ours. But the drive to procreate can trump all drives for freedom. And, recognizing this, he had the courage as a 23 year old to propose to a woman almost nine years older than him, and have kids earlier than he honestly wanted.
His inner warmth and love of family, coupled with his lack of interest in celibacy, and my lack of interest in hormonal birth control, plus a few souls waiting in the gangplanks for incarnation, all led him despite his intellectual objections to the inevitable role of Fatherhood. He became a father at 24 – not particularly young by many world standards, but incredibly young by ours.
Of all the masculine traits that Allison speaks of, my husband’s courage to procreate seems to have been stronger than his will for adventure and fun. I don’t mean to say that they’re all mutually exclusive, but the adventure and fun that I know he still longs for is of a different flavour than the adventure and fun of domesticity and the chaos of raising two little male humans bursting with testosterone.
We did wait 3.5 years before having our first son, but when I found out I was pregnant at 34, he admits he was terrified. He had four years to escape before getting me knocked up!
Then Fatherhood arrived and it came time to demonstrate how to show up, how to be an incredible father and partner to his wife whose body, mind, life, purpose, and physical wellbeing was turned upside down when my initiation into motherhood coincided with that dammned c-section operation.
I still curse the day, even while recognizing it as one of the most ecstatic moments of my life to become a mother and meet Orion for the first time. Still, recovering from c-section has been physically, emotionally, and spiritually relentless, compounded by the relentlessness of motherhood. I am fiercly angry at the high rate of unnecessarians. It is an immense tragedy that so many women (and kids, and families) are being initiated into the most strenuous years of their lives in this way.
Nick has been helping me to process that event, almost daily, in the six years since.
All this to say: I realize I’m long overdue for a really big Thank You.
And thank you to all who may be reading this for witnessing this lengthy eloquencing.
Thank you Nick for the days when you took the kids when I could not watch them because we had no family nearby to help when I was so sick. Thank you for all the years of listening to me share my research into migraine. And thank you for all of the people that YOU have inadvertently helped through me.
Thank you for supporting my business, paying for the childcare I needed to get things going. For helping me continue to see why it’s worthwhile to invest in this, and to invest in people getting better.
Thanks for being so incredible at what you do in your work, for being so versatile, adaptable, robust and vital in all that you do.
Thank you for challenging me in all the right ways, for not being a pushover, for knowing your inner core integrity, for your patience too.
Thank you for your intelligence – mental, emotional, social, spiritual, which you display in your manly way.
Thank you for all the cooking and cleaning you do inside the house, and all you do outside to steward our amazing homestead.
Thank you for your strong body, thank you for taking care of yourself. Thank you for being a healthy version of manhood that our boys can emulate, and for being a present, engaged, and comitted father to Orion and Quinn.
Thank you especially for helping me to find the courage to have a freebirth the second time around, for being my most impeccable midwife. To the end of my days I will cherish you for this support you gave me to choose a birth undisturbed by our absurd medical system. The birth of Quinn was the most empowering experience of my life, and I thank you for talking me back into doing what my heart yearned for eventhough it also terrified me. In this way you helped me to give birth to myself and my direct experience of my own Feminine Power. It’s my prayer that all women are given the opportunity to have the space to birth at their own pace, and by extension, that all babies are given the opportunity to be born at their own pace.
You have taught me that men are trustworthy and incredibly compassionate by way of how you have embodied that.
You have taught me to trust myself and my motherly intuition. Thank you for standing by my side as I paused before vaccinating and eventually decided to opt out of all vaccines for our kids after extensive research. We will not contribute to the epidemic of more kids made sick by our sick corporate medical system (and fuck you, Google, if you penalize my website for saying it).
Thank you too for your sense of adventure – even though it was hard to move so much in some ways with little kids, I still appreciate that we have lived in some incredible places – from the wild forests and oceans of Oregon and Washington, to the high mountain desert of New Mexico, to the quaint forest villages of Vermont. May we discover more fun and adventure and courage in the years to come with our amazing boys.
Thank you for being such a Lover – for having blossomed me into fertility, making me a Mom. Thanks too for being a lover of nature, of animals, of people, of Walking the Beauty Way.
Thank you for being such an incredible musician and bringing people together through the Ultimate Medicine, music.
Thank you for tending to the warmth and the coals in the belly of the woodstove that is our love, chopping the wood by hand to feed it, and smelling the fragrant sap of how sweet our lives truly are.
I love and adore you.
