Thanks for poking your head in, Betsey! I feel fantastic, and I have loads of energy - I'm back to yoga 4+ times a week, and am feeling stronger than ever. Talk to me in a few weeks, though, when temps get back up in the 90s and I am wilting like the lettuce in our garden.
Merrick, T has been hard, hard work. I hope it eventually does help S. get his confidence up to work on his own issues, but for now I'm trying simply to do the work that is asked of me - and more - and support him in any way I can. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.
Things are looking up in S&J land, friends, and I sense a shift. We are getting along, we are catching potential conflict before the 9-hour marathon Talk happens, and we are laughing and having fun together. I’m almost afraid to post about it, for fear that tomorrow things will plummet back to defensiveness and suspicion, self-protection and fear, accusations and self-righteousness. HowEVER, I will post, because I am feeling better about this R than I have in a long time.
The theater was amazing – Vanessa Redgrave and the RSC were fantastic, and S. was really excited to have been surprised with a nice date. He was strutting around proudly (because when you're pregnant, people look at you, and I must admit, I'd worn a striking outfit that showed off my figure, stunning jewelry, and had spent extra care on my hair and makeup), going way over the top helping me up and down stairs, and generally sticking to me like glue, very affectionate. He was so happy, in fact, that he dug into his pockets and took me out to dinner afterward, and not just to the old neighborhood standby, but to a nice little French place a little further down where we could “branch out and try something new.” We sat in the garden, and had a great post-theater conversation, laughed a lot, and had a lovely walk home.
Upon reaching home, things fell apart. We were gearing up to feed each other ice cream and cherries (those damned skewed cherries!! ), and lo and behold a misplaced, mistimed, and misspoken comment by me sent his defenses WAY up, then his reaction stung and my defenses shot up, and we spent about an hour getting through a failed attempt at mirroring, validating, and empathizing (MVE) before I completely lost it and cried my eyes out from frustration that I had planned this nice evening only to have it disintegrate into this. He immediately said, “Hey, we can salvage this – I had a really good time tonight, and it was very special for me to be taken out and surprised, and nothing is going to take away from that.” So we dropped it and went to bed. The next morning, we got into it some more, but were keeping much saner and he reiterated several times that nothing could interfere for him with the wonderful evening we’d had. He was being affectionate and sweet, and hugging me a lot.
Well, I won’t go into it further, because it’s water under the bridge, but the upshot was that my comment came from a deep-seated fear of moving into a tiny space together with a baby on the way (and my perception of his oblivion as to what that means), and his defensiveness arose from my cutting judgment of the importance of his things. A long powwow with H2H over it helped me to see the underlying issues and why we were both so reactionary over a seemingly innocuous comment that was meant to be a joke (albeit a bad, strained, and ultimately hurtful one).
So the good news is, I am seeing him much better as a person, and not as someone to struggle with and who is against me. It is helping immensely, and he is stepping up to the plate by taking great pains to take care of me – I am letting him even when I don’t need it, because I see that it makes him happy and gets us closer to what we both want – and we are speaking to each other with much more respect and goodwill, and the smiling has hit epic proportions.
I’ve done a lot of thinking on this these last few days, and though sometimes I feel he is the most controlling person on earth, and I feel squashed, I can see him as a person with his own issues and fears – someone who really is trying – and it makes me more compassionate toward him in his faults and not so inclined to point them out (Wendy, are you reading this?) I’m also realizing that we are so much more similar in our faults than I’d ever imagined, and NEWSFLASH! this is why I can see his faults so clearly – not to mention seeing that I rush to point them out so that I detract attention from my own.
So my plan for the week is to continue to work on seeing him as someone with warts like mine, and try to imagine someone pointing out my warts all the time, and act accordingly. In other words, keep on working my compassion toward someone I love and care about and am about to raise a child with. My other plan is to keep the good times rolling... more reasons to laugh, more reasons to smile, and smiling for no reason at all.
I feel fantastic, and I have loads of energy - I'm back to yoga 4+ times a week, and am feeling stronger than ever. Talk to me in a few weeks, though, when temps get back up in the 90s and I am wilting like the lettuce in our garden. 
), and lo and behold a misplaced, mistimed, and misspoken comment by me sent his defenses WAY up, then his reaction stung and my defenses shot up, and we spent about an hour getting through a failed attempt at mirroring, validating, and empathizing (MVE) before I completely lost it and cried my eyes out from frustration that I had planned this nice evening only to have it disintegrate into this. He immediately said, “Hey, we can salvage this – I had a really good time tonight, and it was very special for me to be taken out and surprised, and nothing is going to take away from that.” So we dropped it and went to bed. The next morning, we got into it some more, but were keeping much saner and he reiterated several times that nothing could interfere for him with the wonderful evening we’d had. He was being affectionate and sweet, and hugging me a lot. 
