Losing Perspective

To my surprise, there are some drawbacks to resuming a sense of normalcy in the Hall house.

Yesterday, we undertook a family project in our back yard. Our first endeavor of this sort since having Keira, we simply wanted to remove all of the debris on the east side of our house, haul it to the dump, and move the wood pile.

Pretty simple, theoretically, but Jeff and I bickered all day. I think he's too inefficient and unrealistic and opinionated. He thinks I'm too hurried and unrealistic and opinionated. Sigh. This is nothing new, really. But it is something that we hadn't done in a long, long time. "They" say that the thing you most love about your spouse is the thing you least love about your spouse.  He's the calm and easy going to my hurried and anxious. I'm the "just get it done" to his "trust the process."Sometimes this gets very frustrating.

We've been lucky. For many parents, transitioning to a life with a sick or delayed child leads to major depression for one or both spouses and often divorce. Jeff and I have felt, I'd say, closer in many ways. When apologizing to him this morning about being so easily annoyed yesterday, I told him that I hate feeling so scattered and anxious. It told him that, ironically, I feel like I do better, in some ways, when I'm in so-called crisis. He pointed out that in those circumstances, it's much easier to keep the main thing the main thing.

True. When Keira was born, and for the first few months, it was like we were forging a new trail. Everything, in a sense, was slow and steady and deliberate. Now, as things seem to be getting more "normal," and particularly as I try to add things back into my life that I had eliminated (cooking, housework, crafts, dance, etc), it's like I've gotten back on a 6 lane freeway. It's exhilarating to be going fast again and to be somewhere familiar, and to have some destinations that are recognizable to me, but everything going on around me is too much to take in. I can't possibly manage everything.

All that harriedness was commonplace for me before I was Keira's mom. I like to be involved in lots of things and thought that maintaining balance of these activities was the right goal. When she came, the resulting necessity of buckling down at home, simplifying life, and focusing on the most important things was a real blessing. Even if it meant eliminating things I loved.  In fact, I wonder if that wasn't a look at how I/we should be living all of the time.  There was a purity, even a holiness, to that period of time that I don't want to lose sight of. For Jeff and I, it involved giving each other a wider margin of error. We gave each other loads of grace and understanding because we knew so well that the other was in a very vulnerable state and doing the best he could. But the truth is, and the perspective that we are prone to lose is, that we are vulnerable and doing the best we can on most days, regardless.

So, for weeks, I've been getting excited about "getting back to normal" but have also been feeling somewhat trepidatious about it. Yesterday gave me some things to think about.

Must be time to delete my to do list again.