Thank God I Figured this Shit Out Just in Time

Okay, so this is NOT yet another article or blog post or list-icle about New Year's Resolutions.  I stopped doing resolutions many years ago in favor of setting intentions, but then even those eventually fell by the wayside ("I will be more kind" sure appeared on there for a few years in a row, though I'm not sure I ever got very good at THAT).  I didn't do any sort of list-making last year, either, as we were totally caught up in the drama of getting ready to sell our house and move the family to Idaho and completely up-end our lives.

That whole process didn't need to be as dramatic as it was, of course, but I really went all out on the drama scale, let me tell you.

She is freaking out because her waist is soooooo tiny.  And because she has to move.

In any case, though I didn't do resolutions this year, I did do some 2014 wrap-up work, motivated by this guide from Rachel Davis and also this one from Katie Den Ouden.  I printed both out and set aside some time to work on them a few days after New Year's.  And okay, there's some intention-setting work in there, but what was also really interesting with both of these was the invitation to think systematically about the year that just passed, which I hadn't done before.

One of the things I realized from doing this work was that 1) I wanted to ramp up my spiritual life more consistently in 2015 and 2) things were definitely not going the way I wanted marriage-wise.

Scary to put that second one out there.  More on it in a second.

The first, though, is kind of an ongoing desire for me, always...part of Shtopping has been a spiritual journey; moving here has had something of a cosmic come-to-Jesus thing going on; and spiritual practice has just always been really important to me, even if I have sucked at maintaining those practices consistently.

But 2014 made clear that my spiritual "dabbling" wasn't always serving me--I had major freak-outs about moving, finding the "perfect" house, having our income cut in half, E. finding a job, you name it.  Any notion of "faith" or "trust" basically flew out the window as soon as uncertainty hit.  I sucked at this religion game, see?  No good.

I don't think I'm being unnecessarily hard on myself here--I know that moving is one of the most stressful things you can go through, and we weren't just moving, we were moving back to my home town, which had all sorts of crazy, unresolved emotional associations going on with it, AND on top of that, we were dealing with a long-term unemployment situation that is only sort of semi-resolved even now.  Stress, stress, stress.  But at the same time, I really let it freak me out, and I acted badly to my loved ones in ways I'm still ashamed of, and I felt like I really went to some dark places this year.

Which maybe all was necessary, spiritually, because I had to hit rock bottom, trusting-in-a-higher-power-wise, in order to really get clear about how to feel more secure, no matter what particular shit is hitting the fan.  Reading this short, delightful, quirky little book helped a lot.  Talking to Angie has helped immensely.  We got lots of support, pretty much the minute we needed it.  And doing the end-of-year inventories above made it clear to me, too, that I could get more serious about maintaining the faith side of things in my life.

For instance, I haven't once gone to church since we moved here (and I never was good at going regularly).  So this Sunday, despite the never-ending gray skies and snow and magnetic pull of the couch cushions, I got myself in the car and made the drive out to Boise's Religious Science Church, which I have always lovingly called "unchurch" because it's just so different from what you might normally think about when you think of church--for example, the service started with a reminder to everyone about an upcoming rally at the Capitol to end discrimination against GLBT folks, and then they lit candles honoring Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Baha'i faith, in addition to New Thought.  Unchurch!  Those unorthodox rascals.  I love 'em.

The second thing is much harder for me to write about, and that's the marriage piece of it.  It has been the one area of my life where I feel I haven't been able to grow.  I haven't been able to budge it.  This is probably because I felt like E. wasn't willing to change, and our marriage couldn't change unless he changed.  So what if I changed, as long as he didn't?  Stuck.

Oh boy.

Crap, though, I hate feeling stuck, and have great faith in my ability to change things if I need to.  Work?  Found a new job.  Am much happier.  Frustrated with the kids?  Read some books, got myself some new parenting strategies.  Peace at home!  Overspending?  Shtop!

But the marriage stuff.  Man, just even thinking about it made me well up with tears.  I'll be totally honest:  I have been thinking hard this year about whether it made sense to try to hold this thing together.  I have been thinking a lot about divorce.  And talking about it, too, with E.

Maybe "threatening" E. with it is a better word.  Just being totally honest here.  A little piece at a time.  Bear with me.

Okay, so if I'm even more honest, I've been thinking for years about this, off and on.  We have been through some tough stuff together.  We have been tough on each other.  There were times we barely squeaked through.  If it weren't for E.'s total commitment to seeing it through, and to a lot of therapy, I'm pretty sure we would have split up by now.  I have wanted to run many times.

[It's super scary to write about this here and be so vulnerable with all of you, but every once in a while I get an email from a friend asking me for a therapist's phone number or telling me they are having a tough time in their marriage or with their kids, and I know it is only because I put my own struggles out there that people feel they can do this.  It's only by showing off our own crappity-crap-crap that we can connect, yeah?  So I'm writing this both to heal myself and to try to give permission to other people to have their own truly shitty time of it.  Because all of us have a shitty time of it now and then.]

But the other truth is that this is not what I want, divorce.  I want my family to stay together.  I don't want to be a single mom, and I love my husband.  But you get miserable, you know?  You get stuck in your ruts and your habits and your behaviors and the thought of another round of therapy just wears you out.  It is hard to feel so down.  It is hard to feel blue the minute your partner walks in the door and to think about what would happen if that didn't happen every day.  It is hard to fail and keep failing.

The other option, the one where nobody walks in the door at the end of a long day, starts to look easier.

That's where my head was on the way to Unchurch on Sunday.  I was crying and it was snowing and I was going over all the many ways in which we are struggling and how mad I was and I asked (whoever) for the millionth time to please, please help me because the misery felt so large and the stuck-ness very sticky and I could not fix it myself, obviously.  You could say I prayed this.  You know, to UnGod.  I prayed for anything that might help me crack open this foreign code that is marriage so that I could finally understand and do better.

And then at the Unchurch bookstore I just happened to pick up this incredible book, which I've been slowly reading and working through, and which I swear to UnGod changed my view of E. and our marriage immediately:

I feel like I've read every relationship book under the sun.  They usually just make me feel worse, like nothing is ever going to fix us.

But for some reason this one made sense.  It made things clear.  It's not Jesus-y or blame-y or unfeminist.  It is good.  And it's like I was able to just see E. and drop my anger and resentment and frustration like that.  I was able to actually look him in the eye.  I feel love for him.  I feel like we are in this together.  I am glad when he walks in the door.  I am happy we made it.

Hallelujah, hallelujah.  If that's not a New Year's miracle, I don't know what is.

At Unchurch, the minister talked about how we live our life by these Thoughts, which we treat as Beliefs, as things that are Real about the world.  We can also think about these Thoughts, however, not as if they were Real but as if they were written on a chalkboard.

In other words, we forget that we can erase the old thoughts and write new ones.

Another piece of the puzzle locked into place.  I came home and wrote down every negative thought I had about E. and our marriage.  There weren't very many positive things on that list, and a lot of them were mean and nasty and unfair.  But I let them spill.  I made them as ugly as I needed to, and I cried over them and felt sorry for myself.

There were a lot.

I may have filled a few pages.

It was a little surprising.  It made me laugh a little, at the end, actually, to see them all written out.  I saw myself reflected in all of that spinning emotion and victimhood and felt a little, well, abashed.

And then I asked UnGod again if I could have some help erasing those old thoughts and writing some new ones.  Then I started reading Baer's book.  Then I felt instant relief and love for my husband.

Now:  Movement.  Unstuckness.  Miracles.

Bring it, 2015.