Five Day Weekend

So, in honor of the end of my five day weekend, and since I’m fairly well rested and alone for a time, I thought I would finally post some kind of substantial update.  I don’t have a structure to what I’m doing so, we’ll see where it goes.

So, in the forefront, and update on Tina and I.  Things have actually been going pretty well lately.  We’re still learning how to communicate with each other, and that will be something that’s more or less constant.  That’s the biggest back and forth battle between us.  When I’m trying to communicate something to her, I liken it to trying to crack a safe where the combination is constantly changing.  Ask in just the wrong way, and it makes her upset.  Rarely to I feel a sweet triumph like the few occasions that I hit that combination right on the nose and it isn’t met with some form of defensive lashing out.  As much as I try to convince her that not much of what I say or ask her is an attack, I guess it’s something that I will always have to deal with.  As someone in our group put it, do you want to be right, or happy? Ugh. Hard concepts to put into practice.

I’m really struggling with the notion that it will take a really long time for us to ever be able to consider adoption or anything like that.  I work a job and a half and really feel like that is as much as I can do.  Tina does childcare and really can’t hold down a job where she has to interact with other people.  She’s just so oversensitive to everything, so that makes it hard on her.  It also makes it very difficult for us to make a budget or know for sure what money we have coming in.  So we have to keep putting off our dream to be parents.  We struggled for years with infertility, with Tina suffering multiple miscarriages.  Those losses work against us as far as considering foster care just because of how she reacts when she’s allowed to watch children and they get taken out of her care because of changing circumstances in the family.  In vitro and surrogacy are out as well, because they’re both ridiculously expensive.  The only real option we see is adoption, which also costs a lot of money. Every day, I see that dream slipping further away, and it crushes me.

A real bright spot in my life has been this small group of people that we’ve been meeting with since May.  Most of the people we know here are about 10 years older than us, so it’s really great to get to hang out with people who are closer to our own age.  Several of these people are in recovery and really experiencing life for the first time in years without some substance weighing them down, and it’s been great to encourage them and hold them up.  There is one person in particular that while not a recovering addict, is a bit strange.  I could tell when this group first started meeting that with her personality, she hadn’t found many places where she could connect and feel comfortable. I can tell that having people accept her and love her regardless of her quirkiness has really made an impact on her.  The group as a whole has impacted my life as well, and I feel blessed to know all of them.

For some weird reason, I have run out of things to say.  I had a whole list, but they’ve somehow dissolved.  Oh well. At least I gave you all a small update for a change.  Hopefully I’ll write more soon.  And hopefully, DePhoMo will happen again this year.  I need to start taking more pictures and challenging myself creatively, and that’s a great outlet.

Until then, take care of each other. 🙂

Here, hopefully, is some music I’ve been digging lately…