There’s No Gift Receipt

I woke up this morning with a swollen, painful foot and some lingering calf-cramps that I was prepared to ignore until my facebook friends intervened and ordered convinced me to go see the doctor, just in case there was a nasty clot lingering in my veins, waiting for its chance to make a break for my lungs.

Unbelievably, I found a babysitter in about ten minutes flat and took off to the doctor sans minions for the first time since we moved to Florida. Also unbelievably, the wait was about three and a half minutes, which normally would thrill me but today annoyed me since I’m just getting to the good part in the first Game of Thrones book.

The doctor examined my foot and leg and pronounced it clot-free. She advised me to wear tennis shoes instead of flip-flops, advice which I will heed the day after never, gave me a Tdap booster, and then we talked a bit about the increasing frequency of my super-fun pregnancy-induced migraines. She’s a good doctor, but very tentative about writing prescriptions (understandable, since there’s that whole other pesky person in my uterus to worry about and all, but still annoying), so she suggested that I make an appointment with the neurologist downstairs and see if they could work together to come up with the safest treatment plan since my current meds are not exactly working. I agreed, and went downstairs to snag their soonest available appointment two weeks from now.

Two weeks is like an eternity to a migraineur. It’s like two centuries. Two painful centuries. I managed not to grumble my annoyance at the receptionist and limped out of the office, mentally cursing my stupid foot and my stupid head and my stupid doctor and my stupid, interminable pregnancy. The 2 minute elevator ride improved my mood significantly, since it was punctuated by yet another friendly stranger assuring me that my baby was going to be huge, since I’m already enormous and I still have two whole months to go. (Dear strangers of the world: never ask a pregnant woman how long she has to go and then gasp and repeat it ad nauseum. Trust me, we know how large we are. We know how far we still have to go. You are making us want to punch ourselves and then you. Or the other way around.)

On the way home, since I’m just a glutton for punishment, I called my father-in-law, the Ever-Teacher. He recently had knee replacement surgery and is miserable, and he’s made it his stated goal to make sure that I know what I wimp I am for constantly complaining about how hard it is to be 3000 weeks pregnant and currently husband-less. He told me about how he wrenched his knee last night and what a huge set-back it was for him, but how his wife had reminded him to accept it in a spirit of gratitude, and then asked how I was. I told him that I was miserable and he laughed a little and then reminded me that all this is a gift, “to teach you how to love like Christ.”

Last night I spent twenty minutes explaining to the Ogre just how tired I am, just how hard it is to be the sole caregiver to three boisterous minions when I can’t even get off the couch without help, just how impossible it is for me to get a good night’s sleep when he’s gone, since serial killers will easily get the better of me even if I manage to roll out of bed and attempt to defend the children, and just how much all of this is his bloody fault for not being here.

I haven’t exactly mastered the whole “learning to love others like Christ” thing. But I’m an expert in gauging whether or not people are loving me. Usually I leave out the “like Christ” modifier and just insert “the way I want to be loved.” So last night when the Ogre finally told me that I needed to change my attitude, that all this complaining was just making things harder on both of us, I sputtered angrily, “You have no sympathy for me! You have no idea how hard it is to be hugely pregnant and alone with a bunch of kids and you don’t even care! You get to spend hours alone in the library, swilling coffee and reading and being surrounded by silence, while I spend all day surrounded by screaming, fighting, punching, biting and begging! You’re so selfish!”

Yeah. He was definitely being the selfish one in that scenario. I’m not even sure how I wanted him to respond. Verbal self-flagellation, maybe? Groveling apologies followed by promises to never leave again? The immediate purchase of a one-way flight home? A mail-order nanny? All of the above?

The trouble is, none of those responses are Christ-like. His actual response, the one that pointed out the simplest way for some of my misery (and his) to be lifted, was Christ-like. It wasn’t sentimental or indulgent. It wasn’t an attempt to make me feel better. It was my husband, loving me enough to want what was best for me, instead of just going with the easiest way to calm me down and shut me up.

The totality of marriage and motherhood are gifts. There’s no denying that. They’re also trials, sometimes downright painful ones. But it’s times like these, when the burdens seem too great to bear the the rewards impossibly distant and intangible, that are the greatest gifts. These are the times when I’m forced to truly see myself, when complaining and whining and self-indulgent martyrdom utterly give out and I’m left with two choices: cocoon myself in a shell of finger-pointing bitterness, or take a long, hard look in the mirror and force myself to really see what’s looking back.

It isn’t Christ-like love looking back at me right now. It’s just me, hanging pathetically from the giant cross of my own self-sacrifice that I’ve nailed myself to. It isn’t that I’m not actually making sacrifices and working hard; I am. It isn’t that my husband being gone isn’t hard; it is. It’s just that I’ve chosen to lament the injustice of it with twice the energy I’m putting into making it work. I might as well just look up and say, “Thanks for the thought and all, God, but this gift sucks, and you forgot to include the gift receipt.” That would actually be more more honest than pretending I’m suffering nobly and setting my cares aside for the greater good. In reality, I’m setting the greater good aside for my cares.

The thing is, the best gifts God has given me don’t come with gift receipts. I don’t get to return my husband when there’s no longer a spark or when his eternal stoicism finally drives me to madness. I don’t get to return my children when they stop being charming and adorable and wake up. I don’t get to return the dark years I went through that led me to where I am today. And I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to return any of it, not for anything, because all if it has made me who I am and led me to these four people who surround, confound and infuriate me, and who I love desperately. This time, too, is a gift. It’s a totally lame gift, sure, like getting a cilice for my birthday, but there’s beauty, truth, and virtue to be found in it nonetheless. I just have to stop looking for the gift receipt long enough to see them.