Still Dating

[labug]

In the midst of the hustle and bustle of holidays and birthday, S 21 went out for a few hours in the afternoon with some friends and I was here in my cozy little house all by myself.

I had a small project to work on. I have a good friend with multiple chemical sensitivities and she didn't decorate in any way this year. I turned on White Christmas and got busy making a tree (about 12 inches tall) out of a cone and jute twine with a little gold ribbon.

In the midst of that I had such a peaceful feeling. I recognized it and enjoyed it.

I think I would have felt that no matter the state of my sitch because this feeling was about me and being completely OK with me.

On the R front, H and I took S21 out to dinner for his birthday. H's first experience with sushi, sashimi, nigiri. He tried it, not crazy about it but he tried it.

Here's what I noticed about me, where my work is. A few things happened during the evening that made me want to fix. (almost like made me want to use, huh?) When H arrived he looked either unhappy or in pain. I asked "Are you OK?" he said yes but I could feel the "I have to make this better anxiety" creeping in...but I am present enough now to ask myself, what is this I'm feeling, is it mine to do anything about it?

My answers: I'm feeling anxiety for no reason because he said he's fine. If he's not fine, it's his unless he asks for my help. And no matter how he's feeling, it doesn't have to change how I'm feeling.

Bam! I sat down and continued to enjoy the peace and White Christmas.

There were a couple of other incidents. We had given S21 the time we wanted to leave because of traffic, length of drive, etc and he was late. I was OK with that but I wanted to make H OK with it and he hadn't even said anything to make me think he wasn't OK with it. Again, not mine. We did talk about an alternative plan.

So I have lots of old stuff that's popping up and having this opportunity to continue to work on me is good. When making custard there's a point where eggs are added to scalded milk. If you mix the eggs and then add them directly into the hot milk, you will have hot milk with scrambled eggs, not custard.

To prevent that the eggs must be tempered. To do that, the eggs are placed in a bowl and whisked. Hot milk is added gradually to the eggs and whisked, bringing up the temp of the eggs without cooking them. The egg mixture can then be added to the scalded milk and the result can be a very lovely, creamy smooth custard.

I like to think of this phase of my process as tempering. These small amounts of challenging interaction with H are allowing me to slowly incorporate him into my life without making scrambled egg of it.