Mo sickness, mo problems

Sometimes a post gets away from me and I lose the thread of what I intended to say. My last post was supposed to be about me trying to figure out how to treat my husband like the decent human being he is - and in so doing, model a "healthy" marriage for my daughter. Somehow, I lost my husband in the writing, which I think might say something about how things are going in our house as well.

@ is sick with something chronic that has been kicking his butt for three months now. There are a lot of things that make this a challenge for both of us. For him, this is the first time in his life that he's encountering an illness that won't be cleared up with some rest, fluids, and maybe a 10 day course of antibiotics. It's causing him constant pain, and while the doctors know what's wrong with him, their remedies don't provide much relief.

For me, I am struggling with trying to be sympathetic to his discomfort. The problem is I am nursing a not-so-secret resentment that he's being melodramatic. His condition is a perfectly run-of-the-mill sort of thing that you see ads on television about all.the.time. People live long, relatively healthy lives with it, so it's hard for me to watch as he dissolves into tears about his long-term survival prospects. And even if I weren't rolling my eyes so hard that I might pull something, here's the Big Thing about it all:

I am not the nurturer in our relationship.

This is not to say I am not tender-hearted. Those Sarah MacLachlan ASPCA commercials make me cry the same as anyone. But I more readily reach for a barb than words of solace. I do it without thinking, I am sorry to say. I love my friends and my heart breaks when tragedy strikes them. I want to be one with supportive and reassuring words, one with open, non-judgmental arms. It feels unnatural to me; maybe feels so for everyone, but when I feel out of my element, I revert to sarcasm.

This is one of the things that I like least about myself, especially since @ is effortlessly tender and giving when I am under the weather. I don't generally want to be coddled when I'm sick. I want to be left alone to sort it out and recover. I'll take something or not, but I don't want you to hover; I jealously guard my emotional resources.

After a couple of weeks of my husband's pain, I shut off. I stopped engaging in conversations about what he was going through because I didn't want to say something tactless like "man up, buttercup". He's been spinning his wheels, seeing specialist after specialist, trying supplements he heard talked of with great promise online. He's even on a new diet designed to relieve his symptoms. I know that mockery is a bad portent in a relationship, so rather than engage in it with him (I'm not a saint - I mocked him plenty to others), I just walked away. If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

I think that's hurting him as much. He feels alone in all this. The doctors tell him, I tell him, to stay out the message boards, to get off the internet self-diagnosis merry-go-round, swapping stories with strangers. However, it's the only place he can find to talk about what he's going through without judgement since I won't be his sounding board.

I'm trying to be better. If this is what he needs from me, then I need to step up and support him in the ways that he needs. So, I suppose, this is my turn to say to myself, "man up, buttercup". Marriage kind of blows from time to time.