Enough Already!

My husband is an athlete. He is great at tennis, and basketball as well. But therein lies the problem.

Since I have known David he's played a lot of basketball. We have a pretty liberal relationship, he and I, that is, he is not averse to doing "woman's work" (sorry, I just used that phrase for the sake of ease) and if he comes home... baby, and my house is dark and my pots are cold...well, he doesn't complain. As for me, well, I like to, but don't often, tell him exactly what to do with his life.

But I have told him that he is forbidden from playing one more game of basketball. Ever. Alas, he doesn't listen.

In the last eleven years or so, these are the injuries he has sustained as a result of basketball games:

Sprained wrist;

Cut on chin requiring stitches and which area no longer harbors facial hair during beard-growing seasons;

Severely poked eye which prompted an ER visit and caused a couple of weeks of lingering swelling and black and blue, not to mention annoying jokes about me beating him up;

Knocked out teeth. He has three fakes ones in all, all from basketball mishaps. The tooth he last got knocked out was already a fake;

And the grandaddy of them all...a torn Achilles tendon.

It was the day after Thanksgiving, 1999. Madeleine was almost two. David was at the health club playing the game with a bunch of outlaws and one of them managed to step on his heel and keep it under his foot while David kept going. The result? A completely ripped Achilles tendon that required major surgery to repair, lest it roll up inside his leg like a window shade.

For the next two weeks, David lay around in a full leg cast. When I say full, I mean from the tips of his toes to the top of his thigh. The man could not get a glass of water on his own. I had a baby on one hip and a grown man on the other. Then he got a walking cast and things got slightly easier for everyone.

Now, I do not begrudge my husband the care he deserves. He's been there for me plenty. But the man is still flying around on the court. Basketball is his Diet Coke.