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Not quite two-thirds of the way through the month, I’ve been afflicted with bacterial vaginosis, a cold, the flu and now another version of the cold which has rendered me so snot-filled-stupid that not even eardrum-rupturingly loud music can shake me from my torpor.

Yes, it’s really that bad.  “You’ve got a sinus infection, poor honey,” opined my partner.  “You need to get some antibiotics.”

No, I whined.  No doctor was going to give me antibiotics for a bad cold.  I’ve had sinus infections, I pointed out to him.  I know the miserable pain, and while this cold has me absolutely dejected, I’m not in sinus infection territory.  Yet.

And then I proceeded to tell him the story of my very first sinus infection, which occurred almost exactly three years ago.  “Here, I wrote about it.  Let me send you a copy,” I said, and after a few moments of digging through ancient history on my private archive blog (closed to the public for many reasons, chief among them embarrassment), I found the post and sent it off to him.

We read together, or rather he read and I tried not to cringe at the sound of my three-year-old words.  Perhaps a tiny handful of you remember the tale.  Sick and miserable one morning, I asked the husband for help in dressing children because my face threatened to peel away from my skull if I bent over even one more time.

He was angry.  My request interrupted his breakfast routine; he didn’t want to allow his oatmeal to grow cold while he wrangled children.  I sobbed, he yelled, the children worried, and some small thing shifted in my heart.  Many more months of shifting (and another child) were required before I was ready to be done, but that morning of oatmeal and sinus infection angst marked for me a new acceptance that our fundamental differences could not be overcome.

“I would have helped you,” my lover said quietly, having finished reading the piece as I drifted back from the past.  “I would have made you go lie down while I got the kids through breakfast.”

“I know you would have, honey,” I told him.  “I know.”  I know it so deeply that it’s as though the present has gone back and corrected the past, smoothing over that hopeless morning enough that nothing is left but the distant memory of a very bad dream.