When men get sick

My husband is now home.  It's a long, sometimes bitter, story that I'll maybe go into detail about later, but suffice it to say, my husband is now home full time, instead of only half (or less) the week.  He came home on Monday. Valentine's Day.

Let's start there - Islamically, Valentine's Day is, well, non-existent.  Pretty much all schools of thought harp on the 'no-nos' of it, but quite honesty, in Canada and the US it's never been a religious holiday, it's always been cultural.  And, even more honesty from me, I AM Canadian and I do NOT have a problem with it.  Valentine's Day is also the day my husband took Shahadah.  He has now been Muslim for one full year, alhamdulillah.

Anyway, he came home on Monday night for good.  He brought me a dozen long stemmed orange and yellow roses.  First time ever that I got flowers from him in our eight and a half years together.  There's a long story about that that I'm never going to get into because, well, I'm just not.  But I got flowers.  And a feather could have knocked me over with home shocked I was.  However, that wasn't the only thing he brought home.

My daring, wonderful, loving, husband also brought home the chicken pox.  The giver of such a gift was our six year old son, who got them three weeks ago and has already been back in school a week and a half.  When asked what he gave daddy, Hammad giggles and says "the chicken pox!"  Now, Abdullah had the chicken pox when he was a kid. Or so says his mom, but then her memory isn't exactly reliable.  I'd like to trust that this, at least, she'd remember.  So it would appear that my 39 year old husband is on his second go round of the chicken pox.

And when men get sick, they're big babies.  Sorry, guys.  But it's true.  And the 39 year old is not handling the chicken pox better than the six year old did.  The six year old I never had to tell not to scratch.  The 39 year old?  Every five minutes.  "Abdullah, quit scratching!"

It's going to be a long week.