I have struggled on a topic to write about the last few weeks – I have noticed a lot of differences in the Kevin who I am married to today vs the Kevin I was married to before the tumor was removed. I wanted to write about those differences, but then I would become distracted, wouldn’t find the time and wasn’t exactly sure how to put those things into words.
This story begins 3, maybe even 4 years ago. We had just built our barn, got electricity and water run, built some nice little fences on the inside and then bought some gates to use to section of the pens on the inside of the barn. I used these little pens for a variety of things, to keep my goats inside when it was close to birthing time, to separate the pony off from the goats and to keep my mean ol’ ‘Billy’ goat away from my does when I didn’t want him running with them. Billy was aggressive, he was hard on things and if he didn’t want to be separated from his ladies, he took it out on my metal gates. Quickly, he started to tear these up, despite my best attempts at using zip ties to continue to fix them (just like duck tape, I am convinced that zip ties fix about anything). This upset Kevin, that this goat was so incredibly destructive, and so we ventured off to build a bigger and better wooden gate that Billy wouldn’t be able to rip up.
At that time, Kevin built the gate, but quit one evening, and never came back to that project. It sat in the barn, in its unfinished state. His tools sat next to the unfinished gate, collecting dust, getting lost in the dirt and constantly were in my way. I would occasionally ask Kevin to finish it, or to do something with it because it was too cumbersome for me to move it, and I didn’t know where any of his tools went. This gate became a contentious topic, it became one of those buttons I knew I could push if I wanted to pick a fight with Kevin. In fact, this summer when I was seeing a therapist before the brain tumor was discovered, I spent an entire session bemoaning the gate. It was no longer just ‘a gate’ and it now represented a bigger picture of frustrations in my life. It represented the unfinished projects, the things that that been started and never finished, the feelings of doing life alone, the feelings of parenting alone, trying to do everything and feeling successful at nothing. The feelings of being inadequate because I didn’t know how to finish a gate, hang a gate or anything that had to do with construction.
Today, Kevin finished the gate. Today, Kevin hung the gate. Today was another one of those symbolic moments that the Kevin I am married to today, is not the same man from a year ago.
Life at 40 MPH 