Eureka!

I've had it all wrong. I kept thinking that the point of all the effort is to make things better, to change how it is. If I do this or that it's going to reduce the pressure on him and therefore make him happier and make it alright between us and our lives will be wonderful forever more amen.

In fact (and here is where the breathless Eureka moment comes in) the point is survival; it's getting on with it. If I do certain things it's because those things constitute living the good life without waiting for all the components to be right.

Up to this point I've been looking for my efforts to have a result. But if that result is his happiness (and consequent fairy-tale as outlined above) then I will fail - over and over and over again.

So I had this particular epiphany last night after aforementioned efforts had no result except more silence (unless you count chatting with the cat who gets an awful lot of attention on nights like that). Maybe it was the weird blue-grey light from late night current affairs shows that stimulated a kind of Damascus light effect. Who knows?

Anyway, I went to bed with this tired but emotionally uncluttered expectation that things were going to be, well, silent for a while. That's all.

And sure enough we had a morning where two out of three of us talked when we woke up, talked in the car to day care. Then nobody talked on the way to work.

It felt a bit crap, but not as bad as you might expect.

Flo