Eight

🎱 to ♾️

Eight years ago today I married Turlach MacDonagh, and because this is a newsletter about my body staging a decade-long mutiny, it’s only fair I tell you what he was doing the whole time it did.

He was there. That’s the tribute. But you people want details, so.

We got married in the Class of 1959 Chapel at Harvard Business School — a piece of exquisite mid-century architecture whose ceiling windows throw rainbows down the walls and, at random, across the occasional upturned face. No one arranges it. The grandest decoration in the room is also the one nobody can aim; the light lands where it lands.

We did not get married and then hit the hard part. We were already in it. When I walked down the aisle in July of 2018, I was pregnant — too early to announce, but she was there, the two of us in that white dress. If you’d been paying close attention, you might have caught it: the bride drinking Spindrift, toasting with sparkling cider instead of champagne. A few people clocked the dry glass and knew exactly what it meant. (The transfer fell the day before my bachelorette — that was dry too.) Nobody said a word. The viability scan was already on the calendar for what should have been our “honeymoon.” The news there was not good. So the woman everyone was toasting was not at the start of a fairy tale. She was carrying a pregnancy she’d grieve within seven days, marrying a man who didn’t read the fine print and signed up anyway.

It took me thirty-nine years to find him, which felt at the time like a cosmic administrative error (the universe, apparently, had misfiled the paperwork) and turned out to be exactly on schedule — because the man I finally found was, it appears, custom-built for the specific catastrophe my life was about to become.

Here is the part that undoes me now. In his vows, standing there in a suit with no idea what was coming, he promised to be there “in everything we do, big and small, and especially in the challenges we encounter.” He promised to champion me and defend me. We’re a team until the end. People say things like that at weddings. They’re supposed to be beautiful prose, not prophecy. His turned out to be a to-do list. He read it out, in advance — in front of a beautiful stone altar, practically mounted on sturdy wheels — the exact job he’d be handed, and then, for eight years, he just did it, line by line, as if he were the lucky one.

And here’s the thing — he is not, by any reasonable account, a planner. Our officiant, in an otherwise flawless speech, described Turlach as “a planner, a thinker and problem solver,” and I am told that everyone in the chapel who actually knew Turlach had to physically resist the urge to pop up from their seat to object. A thinker and a problem solver — yes, to his core. Planner? Not so much. Left to his own devices, he’ll start cooking a full meal at 8pm and wonder why you’re not awake to partake. What he does is show up, every single day, for the thing in front of him, which it turns out is a completely different and far more useful trait when the thing in front of you is a disaster nobody could have planned for. He didn’t see it coming. He just never once didn’t come.

I said something too, that day, that I understand better now than I did when I said it: that his love grounds me and lets me go out into the world as the fullest expression of myself. I meant it as romance. Turns out, it’s architecture and mechanics, the scaffolding that partnership aspires to be. This newsletter — me, telling you the truth about a body that spent a decade being disbelieved — is the fullest expression of my self clawing its way back into the daylight. I could not be doing it without the ground he gives me to stand on. I named the reason at the altar and didn’t even know yet what I’d need it for.

He held me on the dining room floor after I collapsed at the news that our fourth pregnancy was going to be my third and final D&C. He was in the kitchen cooking dinner the night I got back up off a different floor in the living room — the one where our daughter and I built a wall of toy blocks — the first night I had the strength to get down there and, more to the point, get back up on my own. He got the girl dressed — to great comedic effect, in a red cat-print dress and mismatched grey-pastel-rainbow leggings and sunnies — and onto the school van solo, the morning a head cold flattened me. (A plain head cold. Not the Cushing’s. In this newsletter I try to keep my villains straight.) He never once made any of it a story about himself. He just kept showing up to do the damn thing, every damn day.

I’d like to tell you he’s a saint. He is not. He is irritable — a begrudger if ever there was one — he weaponizes fresh bread, and he keeps a running tally of the mice he’s dispatched, by hand, in defense of this household. Reader, I didn’t just marry him anyway. I married him because of it. Best decision from a body that has otherwise made some deeply questionable ones throughout its lifetime.

Eight years. Laugh, cry, good, bad, remission and relapse — it is all better with you.

Onward, my love. What’s next? ;p