Monday, July 6, 2009

When the children are gone

There's a post over at Chef Penny's where she's talking about what life is like when the children have gone. Her children aren't gone yet, and she was referencing someone elses blog. (Beth at livingproofministries.blogspot.com)

Anyway, formalities and reasonings behind the existence of this post over, the post itself.

She was writing about the need to keep the marriage alive, even through the children, so that when there are no children, the marriage is still there and the parents don't look at each other like strangers. She was writing about the work that it needs to keep a marriage going.

Now, as the Dear Reader already knows, I'm not married to R. I've been married twice. The first time, I married my best friend, and we thought that would be enough. We were wrong.

The second time, I married the father of my imminently arriving Adorable Child. I thought that that would be enough. I was wrong.

This time? This time there is just R and me and the boy. This time there is a knowledge, not given to us by our parents, but learnt by hard work, and loss, and rejection, and the fearful fact that all *can* be lost. Because it already has, for him and for me.

So what do we do? What can we do? We work at our relationship, that's what we do. How? There's the question. There are so many small ways, small things that we do for each other, everything, from cups of tea to remembering things for each other, to helping out, to touching on the way past.

We have both lost so much.

We will not lose it again.

Both our pasts speak of feelings of neglect, and of not knowing what to do about it, and so each of us withdrew from our respective partners - until we were accused of neglect in return. We didn't talk, thinking that we were being strong and brave and that turned out to be the wrong thing because we were not sharing ourselves. It didn't matter that we had been ignored and not listened to when we did speak, it didn't matter that our opinions didn't matter. we made the wrong choice, and marriages fell.

So we talk. We talk a lot and more importantly, we listen. We listen and pay attention and love.

Love is the vital part. He is not a competition prize or a trophy, he is R. I am not his bit of skinny blonde, or his "tits and ass", I am just me. We love. We love with a passion, physically, actively and, (and this is vital) regularly. We were both so rejected, physically, by our previous partners, that individually we had begun to think there was something wrong with us, that we wanted it, enjoyed it too much.

And then we found each other, and realised that for us, this is normal. Now we have something that is amazing, that is all about us and the physicality is a huge part of that.

We have each other. And when the AC grows up, there will still be us. We have lost too much to let a chance like us go. So we'll work on it, not let it to fate, not let us decay like we did before, and enjoy being with someone who loves us just for us.

It's all good.

HAH!

I am not in the best of moods.

I have had a lovely day with the lovely children, and I mean that in all senses. They are adorable, fabulous people, and I will miss them like mad.

I then ran a staff meeting for a staff who are over worked, over stressed, over tired, and had to teach them new things. This went well in some quarters, not so in others.

I then came home to a letter from Lloyds saying I was in arrears!

I most certainly am not! I phoned, and oh yes, there we are, wrong letter, sorry madam.

I am going to have a LARGE cup of tea. And biscuits. And read the quilt magazine again.

I might go on WoW.

I might put on the tv and be amazed at other peoples lives and feel better because actually, I *do* know who my baby's father is, it's not from a short list of 5, and he is being raised wonderfully.

Cross me at your peril tonight people. Fair warning given!

LOL! (see, the crossness is wearing off already - I am so bad at this!)

Is life too short to pair socks?

I have a large basket of socks that needs pairing. And I mean LARGE!

It's massive.

In a while, I will sit down and pair socks in the quiet of the morning, in the peaceful bit before the world gets up around me. I will check the emails (putting it off after yesterdays "peculiarities!") I will check BBC weather forecast, I will pootle through a couple of blogs that update late at nights US time. I will potter around, just being me.

In this time of the morning, I cannot sew, the machine will wake the child, and besides, I need time and thought to sew, not something I have acres of first thing in the morning. I cannot bake, I cannot empty the dishwasher as that *will* wake the child, and he needs all the sleep he can get.

Around 6am I will have my shower, and wake R for his, and in small domesticity, our lives will continue.

We are a very domestic family. But not mundane. I was talking to friends of ours who do SCA, and if you aren't an SCA person then you are generously referred to as "mundane", and she said yes, we were in that sense, but in no other way was our family mundane!

Domestic things figure quite highly on our lists of things to do. You know what it's like with a house, there is always something that needs doing. R is not such a big person for domesticity as me, but he likes to do his bit and especially when I'm ill, which is what he considers me to be at the moment. He works in flurries, and in a short space of time he'll do 10 things, and then that's him done for a while. Yesterday, in the space of about 20 minutes he did the cats box, cleaned the kitchen, emptied and refilled the dishwasher, made a cup of tea, loaded the washing machine and tumbler, and made the AC some juice. I would have taken longer to do all those things, which were the things that needed doing, because I would have read a bit of something, checked for an email from the SEN company, talked to the boy about something, forgotten I was changing the cat litter and started cleaning the bath, that kind of thing.

But everything gets done eventually in this house. The house is never dirty and disgusting. It's often "lived in" and verging on messy, and upstairs is probably more than verging right now, but it's nearly the holidays, and I have to choose where to spend my energies at the moment.

So I should pair socks. I don't pair mine, I just put two together. I pair R's and the AC's, because R has to for work, and the AC's father throws a fit if I don't, even though the AC says that the socks don't have to be pairs and it doesn't matter to him. He likes to chose two socks that have something in common - a colour, a word, a vehicle, whatever, and then I have to guess why!

What else was I going to write about?

I can't remember. It's the tiredness lol.