EA, being "friends" with OW, and Boundaries Part 2

[NikB]

Thanks Mepicurious for checking in.

The hurting myself thing ... well, he's always worried about it to an extent the way you'd worry about anyone you care about, but he has reason to worry about me more now than before. Sorry if the following is repeat info, I'm not sure how much of my past threads you've read. About 2.5 years ago I hyperextended my knee, shattered my leg, and have had a very long and slow recovery. I found out I had osteoporosis - the doc said "the bones of an 80 year old." As a kid I had a muscle disease that had already left me weaker than a normal person, but up until the injury I had been slowly but steadily getting stronger. The leg thing set me WAY back because I lost so much strength while it healed. I'm just now getting to where I can walk around for any length of time again. Obviously it's been hard on me, but I learned in our first MC session that this devastated H more than I ever realized. He knew all along I wasn't ever going to have normal strength but thought I'd keep on getting better - neither of us had any clue something this bad could happen.

So - he's legitimately concerned that if I get hurt it's a lot worse than your average person getting injured. I've been taking Fosamax (bone strengthening drug) for nearly 2 years though and my latest bone density test showed a lot of improvement. My doc's given me the OK to do more things as long as I'm careful. H is genuinely scared I'll hurt myself again, but it's a real balancing act - I mean, becoming a couch potato so I don't ever risk getting hurt is no way to live. And heck, skiing at an adaptive ski school is probably safer than the drive to work every day!

I completely agree it might be resentment or anger about positive changes, too. I think he's built it up in his head that I'm NOT active and that we'll never be able to do active stuff together again, but as I improve he'll be forced to change his mental picture.

That's where I'm having trouble deciding what to do. If he really is scared for me and what would happen to us if I got hurt again (and he has reason to be), I feel like it's pretty wrong of me to do the skiing. But if the skiing thing is the resentment or that he's trying to keep his mental "couch potato" image of me, then that's one more motivation for me to go.

What makes me think it may be the resentment or anger is that he said something about hurting myself on the treadmill. That part's just plain silly - we both know I absolutely need to do the treadmill. I even did a "test run" for a few minutes last week when he was home to make sure I could do it safely. I am really excited to be able to do it again and start getting back to normal (or at least, normal for me).