Tag Archives: relationship

Choosing your life

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

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Most of my life, fell in my lap.

I stumbled into my job right out of college. I stumbled into relationships. I stumbled into promotions from success. I’ve been good at most things I try. Not number one, but good. My therapist says I need to try guided meditation and envisioning therapy. Like, visualize your goal and you succeeding at it. I’ve never really had a goal. I’ve just been doing. And if I ever had a goal, did I really work that hard to succeed at it? Or did it just come naturally?

I know you are sitting there thinking, wow, think highly of yourself?

I don’t.

We’ve been talking about moving lately. We’ve put it off and put it off for one reason or another. I do well with deadlines, and there is no deadline for moving. There’s no promotion or transfer at work. There’s no lease about to expire. There’s just the need for quality of life improvement. I need to be closer to work. I need to spend less time in my car. Although, on good traffic days, that hour is nice to just sit and ponder over things I don’t have time to wonder about.

We discussed moving the other night and he has been emphatic about this being the natural next step. My perception is that he is quite cavalier about it. Very much taking for granted that this is a choice. For once, we actually can choose. I don’t think people realize that every day they have the choice. Instead we make assumptions about life, and just continue on in our routine never stopping to say, “wait, do I want to keep doing this?” For us there are so many things that make that a scary question no one wants to ask.

Well of course we are going to keep going in this relationship. It would be hard to explain why we aren’t to Peanut. It makes sense to continue. We coexist well together. We help each other. We this, we that. At the end of the day, how many of you can honestly say, “I wake up every morning and choose to be with you”?

I asked this question of both of us, and we discovered some truth here. Neither one of us wakes up everyday and says, “I’m making a choice. I choose you.” With divorce rates in this country at a ridiculous high, no freaking wonder! I read this man’s story about wanting a divorce and started to wonder myself. He asks his wife for a divorce and she makes one demand: he must carry her from their bedroom every morning for one month, then she will agree to a divorce. In the end he falls in love with her again after making the commitment to her every morning. Are we making a commitment every day? I know we are sacrificing. Lord knows, we are challenged and sacrificing on a daily basis. I complain I have no choice, no say, no freedom anymore. This is one choice I can still make everyday. And by waking up and making that choice every morning, I am actively committed. I am actively choosing to stay together. I’m not reacting to the latest round of crap. I’m not doing damage control to piece it together. I am choosing, first thing, to be here, be present, and be a member of this family. Perhaps if I make the choice to be in this family, I can forgive myself for the heartache I’ve brought on myself by being in this family. It is still my choice. Everyday, it is still my choice to be here. So rather than feel trapped by external factors, some days I can feel empowered, I chose this. I’m strong enough, and this was my choice today.

Choice

http://www.godupdates.com/he-wanted-a-divorce-but-her-secret-brought-me-to-tears/

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/85608594@N00/12024129713″>Deepak Chopra No matter what the situation, remind yourself I have a choice</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a&gt;

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So you’re tellin me there’s a chance!

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Thank God the holidays are over. As much as I love 5 rounds of Christmas, two new years, and a couple double time birthday parties chucked in at the end; I’m happy to wave goodbye to that round of chaos.

Things escalated quite rapidly around here last week. I believe it was the illness plaguing everyone in our house for the last 30 days, making its rounds from one to the next and then back again, a flu that never really had to retire. Or maybe it was the stress of all of the planning and shopping and wrapping and strategizing and stressing and showering….at least I’m pretty sure I took a couple of showers last month. Regardless of the reason, my typically controlled, stoic, calm facade cracked in two pieces without warning. We went from a calm discussion to me nearly throwing my phone through a front window, only to be followed by a couple of framed pictures shortly after. Imagine the silent thud in the new fallen snow of both communication and history landing together in a perfect juxtaposition to the volume of my voice in that moment. I snapped. I knew in that moment I had snapped, I heard my inner voice frantically pulling back on the leash, flailing about and whispering “no! NO! NO!”. I didn’t care. In that tiny 2 second window of argument between me and me, I won with a simple, “I don’t care, what do we have to lose?!”

So I lost it, in the verbal attack sense. It ended with a demand to face the past and set out some boundaries and ground rules. To apologize and offer insight into history. To smooth the road so that I have a fair chance in this life I’ve chosen. It ended with an ultimatum.

I don’t believe in ultimatums. I don’t believe any true relationship should ever come to that. It should always be give and take, take and give. Never should one have to demand something from the other….or else. It’s not a great moment in our history, but I don’t regret it. In the end, the reason for my snap, my loss of control, my demands and ultimatum, was due to my own insecurity. In a previous post I mentioned how we do not have time for our own work, our own needs, our own insecurities and they pile up behind us. Well, this was the avalanche. My own insecurities won out against sanity and brains and took over. And it turns out…..I was wrong. Damn. I do not like being wrong. I don’t do well with being wrong, BUT I can find the silver lining in being wrong. I was wrong, but look what came of it!

Because of my temporary loss of control over my emotions we are now looking down the barrel of a long life that is just starting to build itself. Their relationship has been taped together through communication and honesty, for the time being. My relationship with her is new, fragile, and uncomfortable for both of us. I feel that we both want to dive in head first and skip all of the steps we need to take to build and establish trust in one another and start swapping recipes and Peanut stories like old chums. My sanity has returned enough to put the leash on this at least. I’ve stopped myself from unnecessary texts to try to force a relationship, but at least for now there are two new key elements to this awkward family dynamic:

1. They can talk to each other honestly, at least for now.

2. She knows now I have no intention of taking her place as Mommy, and will even go so far as to defend her role to people she doesn’t know.

I think that we have a chance. I am caustically optimistic as I’ve been burned by blind faith before. But if nothing else, it’s a start. I’m a good person, and maybe one day she will know me well enough to believe that.