Last night, something very belatedly occurred to me. I think that this project is suffering from a definitional crisis. I'm afraid that I don't really have my terms clear in my own head or even necessarily my goals fully defined. What I mean is this--is my goal to be deliberately kind each day to Barney, is it to show him each day through a deliberate act how much I love him, or is the goal to deliberately find ways to make Barney happy each day? I have somehow muddled all three of these concepts into one murky idea, trying to make happiness, kindness, and love out to be synonyms, when of course they are anything but.
This has all come from a (rather painful) personal struggle that I have been facing in my faith walk and from a problem with separating out those ideas in terms of what God has promised us and what His goals are for our lives. I am learning a slow painful lesson on this that I tried to explain on here and erased three times before I gave up. I just don't have a complete enough understanding of what I'm learning yet to enunciate it on paper (or a screen as it were).
But, what I do know is that just as much as I'm making a muck of things in my walk with God, I'm in danger of making a muck of things here too. I keep thinking about this conversation I had a month or two ago with a woman from the church where I grew up. She was telling me that she was very excited about her daughter's newest relationship and felt hopeful that this one might be successful because her daughter was finally willing to make sacrifices for the new boy in her life in a way she had never done before for the previous guys she had dated. Apparently the daughter has been engaged on at least two other occasions, and both of those relationships were with a boy who was more in love with her than she was with him. The daughter received much out of the relationships in terms of gifts, adoration, and having a personal lap dog. But, ultimately both times it was the daughter who ended things with the boys who had so adored her. The daughter was getting so much but it was all the wrong thing.
I don't want to mis-characterize my relationship with Barney here--I don't think that there is an unequal balance of love. We truly are both soul mates and life partners, and I know that his love for me runs as deep as my love for him. However, I think that there is a danger to this project that I could allow the dynamic of our relationship to become corrupted if I don't get a handle on exactly what I am trying to do here. I know that my goal is not to wait on him hand and foot, and I know that my goal should not come at the cost of taking care of myself personally (which it has been lately on occasion). I've mentioned before that I'm a competitive person, and I somehow started competing with myself on here--feeling a need to one-up myself and feeling like I needed to come up with something new, different, exciting, special, and unique each day. Not meeting my goal has become tantamount to personal failure on my part.
This morning I got out of bed with a miserably sore throat and incredibly strong back pain. Ignoring both of these, I gathered the children, and we headed downstairs where I did a little bit of work before starting to work on breakfast. The menu consisted of cinnamon toast for George, oatmeal for my sore throat, and fancy cast-iron skillet French toast for Barney. It took me a full hour to get things cooked, eaten, and cleaned, and by the end I was hiding in the kitchen sobbing from pain. My tolerance to handle anything was dangerously low, and I had no idea if there were anymore reserves to tap into.
I knew even before I started my fruitless exercise for the perfect breakfast that I have gotten off-track somewhere. Something that started out as such a good thing has turned into an exercise in personal sacrifice. Somewhere, somehow this has become about me and my need to be successful at everything I do.
The first thing I think I need to do is to go back to the very beginning and re-think and re-define my goal. I still very much want to continue with this project, but in order to do so, I need a re-definition. So, my goal for the next few days is to spend some serious time in prayer and reflection figuring out just exactly how to turn this back into something about improving my marriage and--what?? making Barney happy? showing him that he's loved? brightening his days? I don't know. But, I promise to keep you posted.
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