I remember complaining to a friend at the start of my relationship that while things were going really well, I wasn’t comfortable enough with John yet to talk about my stomach issues so I wasn’t enjoying the relationship as much as I could be. It’s why I prefer long-term relationships to the fun of a fling. And a healthy relationship gives you the space to be able to do that. Right now, I need to focus on getting better. And I really can’t waste my energy obsessing over how my stomach pouch looks while I’m sitting on a shower chair desperately trying to clean myself before the pain gets to be too much to handle.
I cannot become overwhelmed with worry that now that he has been my caregiver it will be hard for him to go back to just being my boyfriend. But I cannot live in a state of fear that if he (inevitably) gets annoyed at the situation, it will ruin everything. (That last one easier said than done.) I can continuously thank him for his help and let my love for him be well known. I can work my exercises around his schedule and let him pick where we order for dinner and try my best to wait until he is done with one task before asking him to complete another. I don’t have the mental energy to also meticulously monitor the amount of help I need. I need to be able to ask for ice whenever I need ice. In order for me to properly heal, I need to be able to depend on John. That weight will break me far faster than any of the other stuff. But I can’t operate under that assumption or in fear of that possibility.
ALLISON RASKIN NOSE CRACK
There is a small chance that the stress of my recovery from surgery will cause a crack in our foundation that might ultimately lead to us not making it. What’s less exact is how you let this reality impact your day-to-day life. They have the unique ability to rip the rug out from under you at any moment and upend your future. Whenever you consent to a romantic relationship, you are giving another person immense power over your life and emotions. One of the things I’ve learned from my broken engagement is that people can surprise you.
Even though I didn’t totally believe him. And then John came over to my corner of the couch, gave me a kiss, and assured me he wasn’t leaving. But I needed to get it out of my body and into the open. I said that out loud to all three of them, which, looking back, is a kind of strange thing to do. I announced that the real reason I didn’t want my parents to leave was because I was worried once it was all on John it would be too much and he’d leave me. I voiced this fear out loud for the first time the night before my parents left for New York. So while I intellectually know that taking care of your partner after surgery is simply part of partnership and one of the reasons people partner up in the first place, I am weighed down by the worry that if I ask for too much, if I make one too many requests for an icepack, John will snap and I will never see him again.
When things got a little tough with my ex, he straight up abandoned me. (Caregiver burnout is real and not something people should feel ashamed about! It’s one of the hardest roles out there and caregivers often need extra support and self-care to manage.) But I do wonder if I would be as worried if I didn’t have my history of things going terribly wrong. It’s uncomfortable to have to ask someone else to do everything for you and it is exhausting to have to do everything for someone else. Even if I didn’t have the trauma of my ex-fiancé walking out, it is always unnerving when there is a change to the ecosystem. It is the first time in our relationship that we’ve had such a dramatic shift in our power dynamic. For the next few weeks, John is not just my partner but my caregiver. But once they left it was just me and John and my vulnerability/helplessness had nowhere to hide. And terrifying.” For the first week after my surgery my parents had stayed with us, and my mom was able to take on the less glamorous tasks like changing my pants and attending to my wounds. As I sat on a shower chair asking to be passed my shampoo, with my right leg aching in a plastic bag, I thought, “Wow, this is intimate. It was in a “I’m recovering from major knee surgery and can’t bathe myself safely” kind of way. The other day my boyfriend helped me bathe for the first time.
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