Joining Ginny today for Yarn Along – always fun. I’m still knitting away on my husband’s raglan. It is fun to show today, since I finished the fair isle band and I’m really tickled with how it came out!
I picked up Eight Human Talents at the library a few weeks ago, and while I didn’t make it very far before I had to return it to the library, I really enjoyed it. It’s about the eight chakras, or energy centers in the body, and how to cultivate or access that energy, and work with healing those areas in your life. Very interesting, and with yoga postures and other exercises for each center. Made me wish there was a local Kundalini class – anyone know of one?
I wanted to say a few more things about marriage, to continue yesterday’s Get Real post. Each week I’ve wanted to add more, but this time I’m actually getting to it (everyone else went to sleep early tonight!). I talked about how my husband and I work a lot with not assigning blame, and I just wanted to share a couple of other tools that we have found so helpful. I’d love to hear your tips, too!
Gratitude. I know I talk about gratitude a lot here – what can I say, I talk about it because I like to keep it fresh in my own mind, and because I’ve found it so helpful and life-changing that I want to share it with you, too. Ben and I share a lot of gratitude with each other. Especially if we are in a rough patch, and I’m having a hard time feeling loving towards him, or finding myself annoyed about every little thing, I consciously start working on this. I just start saying thank you for everything I can muster – thank you for clearing the table, thank you for working at Wheatberry today, thank you for being so nice to me this morning, thank you for . . . whatever it is that he’s doing, I just start saying thank you. Honestly, I don’t know if Ben thinks about it like this, but he definitely does it. Every night when I make dinner, he very sincerely and with great pleasure thanks me for the meal I’ve made. And even though that might seem very small, it means a lot to me! (He also thanks me for lots of other things, that’s just one example.)
One other tool we use is just plain old support. When one of us is having a hard time, even if it seems silly that we’re having such a hard time, the other one almost always just backs us up. We take work off each other’s plates if we can – doing the other’s chores, trading work days at Wheatberry, doing the onerous task that’s been hanging over all of us. If we’re both really dreading making a certain phone call, and Ben’s having a rotten day, I choose to ignore whose “job” it might be, and I just make the call. And vice versa – if it’s my night to cook dinner, or we’re committed to take Ella somewhere, but the baby’s sick and crying and I’m ready to tear my hair out, Ben does what needs to be done. This is tremendously helpful – not keeping score of whose turn it is, or who owes who a favor, just dropping those ideas and moving forward together.
I’m lucky to have such a positive marriage, and we say that to each other all the time – we are so lucky. We make a lot of effort to make time to spend together – not only working, but also just enjoying each other’s company. When the kids go to sleep, we sit and talk – often, I knit, but sometimes even that is too distracting and I put it away so we can really be present to each other.
I’m glad to be knitting him a sweater, even if I could’ve made three children’s sweaters in the same time. I’m about halfway through, and only have the hood to go on Ella’s Phoebe sweater – I think I’ll finish them by next winter! Which means it’s time to start dreaming about what to knit next . . . I think I need to finish my Odessa, and then perhaps a Baby T-Shirt Vest for Gabriel. And this adorable squirrel turtleneck - how could I resist?
Oh, and I wanted to say that I think I’ve been torturing myself a bit lately about the fact that my family’s woolies always get so, well, lived-in looking. Sometimes I see other people’s handknits and they still look so perfect. I was quite pleased to see a photo of Ginny’s with her girls wearing two of her sweaters that were clearly well loved and broken in. Silly, but it made me feel a lot better.