Making It

I drew the pictures above for my spouse's birthday. 

They went with the gift, which was coffee.

Max drinks caffeinated coffee in the morning, and decaf at night. He does this with an air of ritual that I really love. There's a pretty, shiny kettle: 

and a pour-over funnel

and special filters

and a special thermos that it all goes in, with a lid that squeaks and rattles when it's tightened down. There's something very intentional about his coffee process, and how he drinks his coffee. It's the same with his fly-tying enterprise. And whenever I go in spaces that are specifically "his," these spaces radiate.

I know I'm not alone in my fascination with these items and spaces because Atticus also shares it. He's drawn to Max's desk. Anytime I leave him alone he beelines to the desk and makes off with something- a pipe tamper, a bottle of sealant, spools of glittery fly-tying thread. He loves to put a sweet potato in the silver coffee kettle, and then put the lid back on.

It's hard to claim space in a small house with an active toddler.

It's also hard for Max and I to claim space for our relationship. Our son has an aversion to the sound of us talking, so any attempt at conversation is interrupted by miserable wails and sputtering. We can get about four words in before it starts. It's like an alarm. We both brace for it.

This dynamic makes connection very hard. Planning is also difficult, and intimacy nearly impossible.

But each day that I wake up I'm glad to be with him. I'm amazed that he does what he does, and I'm grateful that we are somehow making it through this time in our lives.

Update

Forward and Back

Uterus Expressions

A couple of weeks ago I tried to get my IUD removed by the doctor who placed it. Due to the fact that the strings were far up inside, tucked under the IUD, he made (and I sustained) four valiant attempts to retrieve it before admitting failure. 

Since then I've made a plan to have it removed with some assistance. But four days after the attempted removal, I woke up in the middle of the night with intense pain in my uterus, a kind of pain that I don't remember experiencing during the old days when I had regular cycles. I was also really nauseated. Thinking that I would go pee & throw up, then drive myself to the ER to get checked out for possible uterus infection, I got up to go to the bathroom and ended up passing out. Max revived me and, very alarmed, called the ambulance.  

Having uterus-pain as your main complaint is a sure way to make medical personnel think that you're crazy.  There is the fickle and mysterious nature of the uterus itself, but I suspect a lot of the medical establishment's attitude is due to plain ol' sexism-- most of the people I dealt with that night didn't have a uterus, and seemed flummoxed.

Even the (female) PA at the ER seemed to chalk my experience up to being a woman; and since she also had experience being a woman, this further negated any chance I had of being taken seriously. 

I bumped my head when I fainted, and everyone was excited about this. Something that could be treated! I quickly got queued up for a CT scan, while four different people took a good hard look at the back of my head. But no one would go near my uterus. It was like it didn't really exist, like I was talking about a unicorn. It didn't help that my uterus pain had mostly gone away; had, in fact, gone away when I fainted. 

Everyone kept referring to the pain as cramps. This is another easy way for the medical profession to write off the actual experience.

I did get an ultrasound, and the female tech was incredibly kind and caring. There was no news, as I suspected by that point, but at least they did it. And there was nothing wrong with my head. In the end it was another waste of time at the local ER, and I wished I'd just asked for some Ibuprofen and gone back to sleep that night. 

On the bright side I have probably met my insurance deductible in January, so I'm set for the rest of the year.