Love

The last few days have been rough. The kind where I feel like it takes so much effort to keep it together, and to choose to be happy, and to not let things bother me, etc., etc., etc... And I'm tired of trying right now. I'm just tired. I don't think I've been sleeping very great. Disturbing dreams, being woken up by kids wetting the bed, or big wind storms, etc., etc., etc... I'll blame it on the weather, or hormones.

Any way, moving on. I have decided that since I no longer have to put forth energy into trying to be a good wife this is a great time for me to focus on being a better mother. This has been a 13 year struggle for me, being a mother is not easy. I'm grateful for the opportunity to take some time to really focus on it. I have some good news to report. I have not yelled at my kids for many weeks. This is a big deal for me. It is my goal to now slowly add into my non-yelling being even nicer and softer (you can still not always be very nice even if you're not yelling,) and listening better to my children. I don't know that I'm a great listener in general, but children are particularly easy to tune out. And it's hard to focus when there are multiple children vying for your attention at the same time! So these are my 3 goals for being a better mother: no yelling, be kind and soft, listen and pay attention to my children. Oh, and I'm also trying to do activities and build memories with them. I'm excited for nicer weather and have grand plans to spend lots of time at parks, or hiking, etc. We'll see how that works out.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading about what real, mature love is, as I think I probably don't understand it very well and do a lot of things wrong.

"There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love." - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving.

I recommend The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck (which has some great stuff to say on love, in addition to other great stuff.) In the book he defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." I've learned a lot of interesting things, though I'm not always sure how to put what I'm learning into practice or what it would really look like in real life. (Does that make sense?)

Here's the thing I'm trying to focus on: I need to focus on loving others, not being loved. Secondly, real, true love has nothing to do with a romantic relationship and so I have lots of love relationships in my life. I have my children, I have my family, I have wonderful friends. It's true there is something very special and unique about a marriage relationship and there is nothing that truly replaces that particular relationship, (which is what makes this so incredibly hard.) But I am trying to remember my life is full! Full of people to love and full of people who love me. Also, one of the big answers I seem to get when I'm really struggling is that I need to stop thinking about myself and figure out ways to reach out to others in need. I'm trying, sometimes I do better at this than other. It's the nature of humans to make everything about ourselves and I'm trying to get past myself.