Logjam clearing ... ice breakup ... or??

Dunno what metaphor to be using just now. It feels like the spring breakup of the ice, when suddenly the surface of the river can move after months in stasis. It feels like someone pulled out the keystone log in the jam, and suddenly the river surface is alive with half-ton logs caroming wildly down river.

My cold's not fully over, but yesterday I had some energy and today I woke up with a serious head of steam up. My depression's probably not fully over, but today I feel like it's lifting.

It's not 2 pm yet and I feel like I've made serious progress on several fronts at once, as well as doing more decluttering and more laundry. I've worked on the student handbook's latest revision, looked at scheduling for the next 18 months and made some decisions (and identified two hard conflicts that I don't know yet how to solve), cleaned up my inbox in several important ways.

Part of this is probably physical. But part of it is certainly the result of a couple of valuable hours with my therapist in the past couple of weeks.

Sometimes there's nothing like a sharp-minded good listener who askes the right questions. Where did I decide that I can't stand up for myself? Where did I decide that I didn't have a voice, or had to come in second? What is it that shuts down my ability to negotiate until, finally, I have to 'get sick so I can go home' ? As, manifestly, I did during the end of February.

Process: follow the thread back.

From a present conflict between what my Dear Husband would like (me beside him in Guatemala even if there's nothing much for me to do there) and what I would like (important work, a sense of community effort in which I can participate meaningfully, plenty of deep and personal conversation with likeminded companions) ... and the freedom to come and go as I please ...

Back through the 1980s when I often felt that what he wanted, as he traveled in his job, was to come home and find me exactly where he'd left me, doing exactly the same things I'd been doing, with the same train of thought waiting at the same station. That is -- I felt that he wanted to be able to come home to 'the same' relationship as when he'd left. He didn't want to come home to a mate full of new enthusiasms or fresh from new experiences. Even though, of course, he'd had some new experiences while away. ...

Back through a previous marriage in the early 70s when I had even more strongly that same experience, with a man who traveled even more constantly ...

Back through my 1968 grief at losing my brother and my simultaneous overwhelm at new motherhood, and the slow-to-materialize awareness that my life had changed radically while my then-husband's life had changed little. ... and that this created trouble and distance for us. ...

Back into childhood, where (surprise) my father traveled on business in a predictable pattern, and so our life at home had a predictable rhythm. And here I can see the dysfunction: that predictable rhythm.

Dad liked order and neatness, well-behaved children who were more into 'seen and not heard' than otherwise.

Mom liked frivolity and tended toward clutter. Especially when deprived of the company of her mate, she liked children who were willing to play with her, tell her all their troubles, go for long rides with her.

So, we developed a pattern that was very orderly and neat when Dad was home, with dinner at 5:30 after Dad got home at 5:15, with breakfast at 7:15 so the first kid could go to the schoolbus at 7:30 and still have had breakfast reading homework while Dad read the paper, with committee meetings and scouts and choir.

Whenever Dad left, usually on a Saturday or Sunday, Mom and kids would relax into gleeful abandon. We might eat spaghetti for dinner at 7 or later; we might go out for a hilarious dinner at Friendly's culminating in a contest to see who could order the most peculiar mixture of their 28-flavors for desert. The next week, or usually two weeks, we might get our own cereal or we might have breakfast together, we might leave our schoolbooks all over the dining room table for a day or two at a time, we might not hang up our jackets at all. We might go shopping with mom all afternoon and then do our homework over take-out Chinese food.

Until Dad was due home. Then there would be two or three days of Mom screaming and yelling at us until we had put our rooms back in order, hung up all the coats, put away all the schoolbooks, cleaned up the kitchen, and helped her with the backed-up laundry. Then we would go pick up Dad from the airport and live orderly and neat lives for three or four weeks until the next trip. When Dad was home, they spent several evenings together each week, and didn't want much interruption from us kids. When Dad was home, it mattered which kid was not yet in bed at eleven, it wasn't okay for Mom to sit up and talk with one of us until the wee hours.

So ... Mom could live the way she wanted only when he wasn't there ... and saw it as her obligation to make all of us live the way he wanted when he was there.

Add to this that both of them saw it as her job to raise the kids while he traveled on business and worked in an office all day ... and that once the last kid was in school and she got the job they'd always talked about her getting, it turned out he hated the fact that she had it. And saboutaged it at every turn.

Hmm.

Fast forward to the way my DH and I each independently tend to negotiate anyway.

I like to put all the possibilities on the table and look at them together. It's not uncommon for me to let you have the first move after they're all out there. What would you like? What would you not like? What seems best to you? Now that you've said that, I might disagree ... but it would often be my preference to know where you stand before I say what I want.

My DH, on the other hand, often prefers to take a position: Here's what I want. And wait for the other person to say, No that won't do, here's what I propose instead.

If we were labor negotiators, my way might look like 'let's look at the company's budget and the cost of living, talk about what the company needs to spend money on and what kind of lifestyle the employees would like and then look for common ground, overlap, possible ways to generate a win-win solution.' DH's way might look like 'the workers want to get paid a zillion dollars for doing nothing and management wants them to work 168 hours/week for zero pay: where in the middle can we meet?'

There's nothing wrong with either technique, but we are constantly getting into trouble when we each try to use the one we like best, while the other is using the other method.

Just now I feel like 'all' I needed to do was let myself sit down and 'choose' what I want to actually do with the next few weeks. And suddenly it seems much easier to divide my time between home and Guatemala and other travel I feel like doing. So just now I don't have anything nailed down yet, but I have a pretty good idea what the dates will look like when the dust settles. Two phonecalls to make, and a conversation with DH, and then I should be ready to mark things on the calendar in ink.

Just now it's time to go back to work.

Yippeeeeeee!