Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing my husband in the bad-drunk category. It started off cute enough – he told me how beautiful and wonderful and smart and sexy I am and how much he loves me. Then he passed out. Then he woke up. Then he leaned over and puked all over me. Then he smashed his head on the wall and knocked himself out for about five minutes. Then he woke up, puked some more and sat in bed for a while.
In hindsight, I probably should have taken him right to the hospital to have his stomach pumped but I was concerned about the cost. At this point in our careers, we don’t have the income for hospital visits in non life or death situations. But in the five minutes where Brian was knocked out, I questioned whether or not I would be able to save his life if he began to choke on his own vomit. Thankfully, I never had to find out.
The point of this is not that my husband is a drunk – he’s not and when he tells me this was the first time he got sick from alcohol, I believe him. The point of this is that in marriage, you end up in a lot of places you never thought you would be.
I never thought I would spend twenty hours cleaning up vomit. But from two in the morning on Sunday until ten o’clock that night, cleaning it up was what I did. Brian probably never thought his wife would be coaching him through a shower and forcing him to drink water. But we did it. He also probably never thought that I would be waking him up at eight on a Sunday morning because I was mad at him for being drunk, but I did. Because if I had to suffer, he did too.
It is only during the unpleasant moments of marriage that we truly realize how much we love our mates and how much we actually are capable of doing. In college, I was notorious for what I called a “death fear of vomit”. I made girls in my sorority house who were sick (whether it be from booze or a stomach bug) go to the basement bathroom to throw up because the mere knowledge that vomit was happening near me was enough to push me over the edge. Yet somehow in the early hours on Sunday, I learned that I could survive. My urge to care for my husband was stronger than my own urge to throw up everywhere, although not by much (once a sympathy puker, always a sympathy puker).
Marriage is not always pleasant, although Disney would have you believe otherwise. Prince Charming does some dumb-ass things from time to time. The true test of the strength of a marriage is not whether or not the poor decisions happen but the way you cope with those decisions the next day.
Besides, it is only a matter of time until I do something dumb too.
PS - Taco Hell, I mean Bell and cheap Canadian whiskey are always a bad idea.
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