Let's get metaphysical

In the spirit of documenting the diamonds as well as the pearls, I have a momentous announcement to make – yesterday I had a turn at being down.

I don’t know why I couldn’t shake it. We took our son to the museum and the park, and the whole time I felt sluggish and irritable. Maybe it was accumulated weariness from the year or the constant, nagging, low grade pain in my gut.

And as I was going through the day, doing what I could to try and make it lift, I kept on wondering at what point my melancholy was going to have to compete for air time.

Usually what happens is that if I’m sick or unhappy, my partner feels worse. He cannot hold up the team, take over the helm, whatever tired cliché you can think up. It’s me bailing/steering/some other nautical metaphor or we’re sunk.

Yesterday though he just took over. The three-year-old was being particularly three-year-old in that teeth-gritting absolutely frustrating way that only a toddler can be. And his dad just took it in hand. He stayed mostly calm (I walked away a couple of times) and thought of distractions and even got angry when there was no known way that a human being could keep his cool – without that tipping over into depression.

I kept wondering at what point I was going to have to pay for this. It was like eating the most divine exotic and expensive chocolate in the world knowing that the experience will be over far too soon and that it will surely make you break out in pimples.

In some way it’s just another manifestation of the tallying; weighing up what I’ve put into the relationship versus what he puts in and feeling as though the scales always tip one way. Anything given on one side will need to be recouped on the other.

But perhaps it’s the valuation system that’s the problem. I heard about a report done recently on the way different jobs are valued in our society – say hospital cleaners versus bankers. It looked at value in terms of the positive impact a job has on society as a whole. No surprise that the hospital cleaner creates 10 times the value of their wage and the banker didn’t fare so well.

So maybe I’m looking at value the wrong way in this relationship. It’s not about the amount of things that get done (how many times I did the dishes versus how many times he did them) but the effort made according to ability and the love that exists but is not necessarily expressed.

Maybe I can look at the direction of the effort made, both of us facing forward rather than each other. So every bit of effort is something that takes us both into the future rather than something weighed up on a see-saw.

This one day of support, of feeling held up so I could flail about a bit – that was worth a truckload of dirty dishes. It was just so sweet. I wonder if I can store up the memory of it in a way that sustains me into the future?

Flo