Marti had a root canal yesterday. Just the sound of it grates on me. Root canal… It sounds to me like a cross between a jackhammer and a pile driver. I remember trying to remove tree stumps with my dad when I was a kid where the taproot goes so deep you have to keep digging down around it until you can free it. The larger the tree, the more impossible this becomes, especially with a pick and a shovel. I think now they drill the root out from inside the stump – making a big canal inside it – which is exactly what a root canal seems like to me, only inside my mouth.

Marti has had similar operations like this before (she was not blessed with good teeth. If I had checked out her teeth like they say you should do on a horse before you buy it, I might not have married her) and each time I expect her to come home in great pain. I try to prepare myself for this and what I can do to pick up the slack around the house – sort of remind myself to enter into her pain, and yet each time, she comes home just fine. Business as usual.

I’m not sure whether this is due to newer technology, but I have a feeling it’s related more to the fact that Marti chooses to have a high threshold of pain. And the more I live with her, the more I get a sense of why this is true. She chooses to ignore her pain because she lives for her family. She lives for me, for Chandler, for the opportunity to be with Christopher and Beth or Annie… it’s what makes her tick.

So I call her because I wasn’t home when she got home and she sounds cheery and energetic. If it were me, I would be milking every moment of this for myself. She picked up Chandler from school, helped him with his homework and then did some work for me on her computer, and still had enough energy to give me time when I got home later in the evening. (I suck up a lot of her time.) She didn’t skip a beat. And all that on two Tylenol.

All this to say that Marti lives for others. She is always setting her needs aside for someone else. And I now realize that if she’s living for me that makes two of us, and that is one too many.