Your guest host!
Not long after I started this blog I told Brandon if he ever wanted to “guest write” he was more than welcome, and I’m ecstatic to say he took me up on my offer. When a good friend heard she joked that, this being the internet, “no one wants to hear the thoughts of a privileged, employed, straight, white, middle-class, cisgendered male, jeez!” While that a.) made me laugh and 2.) may be true, aside from all those things (which he owns accordingly, by the way!), he is a minority of sorts as a full-time caregiving husband, and I truly think his stories and experiences are just as worthy of sharing as my own.
Not to mention – and yes, of course I’m biased! – the guy’s pretty damn hilarious.
So with this entry we launch Standing Room Only, Brandon’s corner of the cripLOLd universe. Please to enjoy the thoughts of the man behind the curtain…or rather, the caregiver behind the crip!
NOTE: As the title implies, this post mentions what’s oft considered unmentionable. We feel strongly it’s not at all graphic, but if the mere idea of someone outright stating we all poop is upsetting, this isn’t for you.
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Here’s the thing: when Chris asked if I had any thoughts to add to this, I was initially flummoxed. I have a lot to say on the matter, but she very eloquently covered my biggest “thing” regarding the whole mixed-ability marriage deal. But, I do have some things to say, and not all of them will be my normal stern bullshit about responsibilities and whatnot. Not that there WON’T be some of that too, because that’s kinda just who I am, but I’mma try to keep this light and fun. I’m good at precisely neither of those things, unless a bunch of Jameson is involved, but I’ll do my best.
Also, I have a (deserved) reputation as being way too serious, and kinda grumpy, and I don’t want this to come off as pontificating.* I’m not suggesting at all that our marriage is some shining paragon of awesomeness, nor suggesting that what works for us is the only model. We have our own deal, forged over the last decade, and some of the forging has been directly related to Chris’s disability. This is a bit about the product of that forging.
Okay, look, when you’re in our situation, modesty dies a quick death. This has come up very recently in the Facebook feed of our close friend Nate (of The Funniest Guy at Work) in regards to pooping with the bathroom door open. Specifically this:
I’m not saying people can’t have their peccadilloes, but when you’re in charge of another grown person’s bathroom time, poop modesty is like on page 300 of things you actively care about.** In a lot of ways, I actually like that there’s such a prerequisite intimacy for Chris and me – and not the sex kind, you pervs. (Not that there isn’t that kind of intimacy either, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)
When you peel back the artifice (argue all you want, but all modesty is artifice), you see what the other person is, laid bare, and it is incredibly hard to give a crap about modesty anymore when you have to help someone pee. Now, I’m not saying that this makes our relationship better or anything, that’d be unfair; it does make our relationship different, in that it’s really hard to have any of those “eww, I hate his/her dumb habit/weird thing” or whatever when you are responsible for a person’s physical care.***
The strange thing, for me at least, is that this is actually very freeing. It takes a ton of pressure off a person to not care about the modesty anymore. When you don’t care about the basic modesty stuff – peeing, pooping, etc. – you start to care less and less about baring the real emotional you, and you let your guard down and relax a little. Now, unless the real emotional you is an asshole, getting to the emotional core of yourself in your relationships is only a good thing, especially when you have someone (wife, husband, partner, friend, whatever), on the receiving end of your own brand of nuts that is not only also nuts, but accepts your nutbaggery for what it is – a part of you. Believe it or not, pooping with the door open is part of this. Bodily functions are easy to lay out there when you implicitly trust the person you are with, and an implicit trust is easy to build when you HAVE to trust each other about things like bodily functions.**** It turns into an emotional feedback loop, where our emotional bond is often strengthened what we go through together physically.
Here’s where it gets weird.
All the implicit trust and emotional bonding fostered by seeing a person’s grossest moments up close and personal don’t do you a bit of good when it comes down to business time, because if it did, that would be SUPER WEIRD. (No shame if that’s your kink – it’s super weird for us because it isn’t and has never been either of ours. –Ed.) As much as the physical caregiving has given Chris and me a kooky shorthand about nearly everything and a damn near unshakable trust in each other, that does not mean that I don’t have to have a reinforced concrete partition between husbandly doodies and husbandly duties.
(I laughed for a full minute after writing that sentence, because I am awesome, but I digress.)
I have been asked this question once or twice: “How do you separate caregiving from…y’know…umm…sex stuff?” The short answer is you just do it, because it is TOTALLY necessary to do so.
The longer answer is, well, longer.
The caregiving aspect of our relationship is by necessity. I don’t do it for giggles; I do it because Chris needs it, and I need her. There has never been a Bill Cosby “Did you see the poo-poo? Ooh, look at the poo-poo!” moment in this house. EVER. Poop is gross. Pee is gross. Well, other people’s waste is gross; mine is funny and often charming. Ask Chris sometime about my epically long pees. (They. Are. EPIC. –Ed.) Anyway, the point of all this is I am a “normal” person. I have to separate the gross stuff from the…y’know…umm…sex stuff. You do too, though – you can’t be in a long term relationship without seeing the gross side of the other person. I just happen to see more.
If we all didn’t have a quick disconnect between the gross and the sex stuff, “he sleep farted on me” would be way more common as a reason for breakups, and Chris would’ve divorced me a zillion times by now. Because let’s all be honest: people are gross. I’m not trying to get all Jonathan Swift here, but when you break it down, we’re just hairless apes, barely evolved past the whole poo-flinging bit. It’s only the emotional bonds we form that keep us from fully realizing how gross we all actually are.
I’ll prove it: go to your closest location where all types of people gather – your Secretaries of State, your Walmarts, your bus stations, what have you. I’ll wait. You’re back? You saw some FILTHY human beings there, didn’t you? Just terrible, right? Now picture yourself on a hangover Sunday, with your partner taking care of you. Hangover Sunday!you looks exactly the same as that example you saw when you really stopped reading this and ran full speed to your nearest humanity hub, as instructed.
I firmly believe that Chris and I are just at Old Married Couple levels of “don’t give a shit about the gross stuff anymore,” rather than some aberration born of our mixed-ability situation. Okay, well, it is born of that, but it’s not some weird thing I have to ~OVERCOME~ to make sex at her. The caregiving stuff is what it is: you do it, and move on to the real stuff in a marriage – emotional growth, love, laughter, and knowing that the fun will continue as you grow old together.
And obviously, as she has discussed, we have SO MUCH MORE IN COMMON than bathroom whatnots. We’re the dorks that saved the rest of the world from each other. The bathroom stuff is incidental. However, it has freed the both of us up from weird relationship modesty, because when you complete each other, poop is just a thing that happens, and not a shameful thing that must be hidden. Sure, a sense of decorum is good, and part of the social contract. But in your own house, with the person that you love most in the world? Decorum can be a weird cumbersome thing that you force yourself into because you feel like you have to. For us, that’s just never been an issue, and I’d like to think that after ten years of marriage, even if we weren’t in our particular situation, we wouldn’t do it any differently.
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*I have a foam pope hat that my best friend once left in my car. I really should wear it to establish when I am pontificating, which is often. (back)
**Some things that come ahead of poop modesty for me: getting to sleep at a reasonable hour, wrestling fantasy booking, Miguel Cabrera’s ISOP, putting our cat in a fake sleeper hold and laughing like Ted Dibiase, and now (as Chris is listening to music from Disney World), getting the Splash Mountain theme song out of my head. (back)
***Chewing with the mouth open is a PUNCHABLE offense, though, so don’t do it around me, no matter how many times I have wiped an adult butt. (back)
****I think this is both a tautology and a teleological argument. Again, I am awesome. (He is! –Ed.) (back)
