50 Words - Misconceptions

I thought my husband would be my friend.  It never occured to me to ask him if he wanted to be my friend. Like a school girl at recess, I slip him that note that aks him to declare his friendship forever.

I'm afraid of his response.

__ YES
__ NO
__MAYBE?



I wrote this in this midst of the divorce activities. My thoughts were all over the place and I truly felt like a school girl that was getting rejected. I'm so grateful I am passed it all.  It was painful, but I am better for going through it. I'm praying for all of you going through relationship trouble. It's not fun, but life can be good afterwards.

I Shut Down

I'm spending a little time in bed tonight catching up on my online life and setting up my new A5 Filofax. There has been a lot of goings on here in casa Kansas, but none of it should have stopped me from blogging or writing or enjoying life. But it did. I am that person that completely shuts down when all is not right and it is driving me crazy. When one aspect of my life is going wrong, I shut down in all things and can't quite manage to keep going, at least not effectively. I still move, but I move without purpose and without fulfillment. Everything slows to a crawl until that out-of-place puzzle piece catches back up and gets in line.

But now that my life is not completely my own, I really have to work on changing this. I had a great week of wedding re-cap and a giveaway all planned and a life hiccup with my husband brought that to a halt. It is almost impossible for me to be upset about something in my marriage and try to write about how happy the wedding was. It feels disingenuous. So, I shut it down and took a little time to reset and repair.

In that time, I set some boundaries and made some positives steps forward to help me keep things together and moving. I also did a lot of comfort eating so you will be hearing about me and my new Fitbit a lot! Also in that time, I got a promotion at work which prompted the purchase of the new Filofax. I quickly realized I wouldn't be able to track my group in my personal size. I will continue to use the personal size for all things personal and blogging and as a wallet.

So, look for some changes from me soon. I am hoping to revamp the blog a bit as it's been a little while since we've refreshed. And I promise the wedding re-cap and giveaway are fast approaching.

A Labor of Love

I started a new project and I’m so thrilled and nervous about it. After getting married in November, my husband and I took a trip over to his mother’s house in North Carolina.  She was not there.  Unfortunately, due to health issues, she may never return to her home. One of things she asked us to do was take whatever family photos from the home that we wanted.

At first, my husband only wanted a few of his mom and siblings, but after spending more than an hour going through the albums and framed photos, he decided to take a few more.

My task over the next few weeks/months/hopefully not a year will be to get them all into a new scrapbook type album. Because there are a lot of pictures of people and events that my husband may not remember, I am not going for a standard scrapbook with journaling. I more want to end up with a family album that leaves space for someone to add names and details to later. Hopefully his mother and siblings will get to see it and help us get it all labeled out.

This is just the beginning!

Choosing The Wedding Party-The Brides Perspective

My fiancé came into my life at a time when I was not ready. You can counter this and say that we are never really ready for the little surprises that life will bring our way, but I was really not ready. He and I often talk back on the first few weeks of our lives together. We laugh about it now, but he was angry with me then.

He came at me too fast and I had a wall around me that I was not ready to let anyone get beyond. I went out with him and then I avoided him. I lost my cell phone during a road trip and took that as an out because I didn’t have his number anywhere else other than that phone. But then I saw him and I was drawn to him. I had to beg the boy to give me his number again. He assumed I thought I was better than him and tossed his number aside as I had tossed him. He was hurt and he was angry. I was scared and I wasn’t ready to be in another relationship.

Even when I started to give in and decided to give us a chance, I waffled. We went on a few more dates and then we moved in together. I still waffled. He proposed. I still waffled after asking for time. A month later, I said yes and I still waffled. I went back and forth, back and forth trying to decide if I wanted to be in such a committed relationship and if I wanted to be married. I doubted. I doubted my ability to be a good wife. I doubted his ability to be a good husband. I doubted our ability to communicate with each other. I doubted everything.

Getting married is a beautiful and lovely thing, but I couldn’t dive into the wedding until I was sure the marriage was going to start on a healthy foundation. We started marriage counseling with our pastor and I started having serious conversations with friends that were married, friends that wanted to get married and a few people that I knew had gone through a divorce. I questioned everything and I listened and I still continue to do so.

When I finally broke free of enough doubt and was content and happy with becoming this man’s wife, I could finally start to think about the wedding that would start our married life. My wedding day is not a production or a party. It’s an induction. And in order to be properly inducted into this life, I needed people with me that knew what I was getting into. For that reason, I chose a Matron of Honor and Bridesmaids that were married. These are women that have marriages that I look to for inspiration and guidance. They have had successes. They have had failures. They have had issues that threatened to tear them apart, but they are still standing. They are happy and they have no regrets about walking down the aisle. Will they always feel that way? Who knows. But today, they are my support system and they are who I need.

None of them are family and none of them have known me longer than 12 years and I have no regrets about that. Everyone likes to fantasize that their wedding party will be made up of their sisters and childhood friends. Often that is the case. But if you really want to see this as the start of a marriage and not just a wedding, you have to ask if sisters and childhood friends are really what you need. In my case, it is not.

I get questioned about this choice a lot. So many want to know if my sisters are upset with me. My answer is always and will always be the same. I am doing what I need to do to give my marriage the best start it can have. There are no doubts about that.

Sometimes You Just Need to Dance

Even though my fiancé and I are 19 years apart, there is one thing that we share that is very important to me. Our love for music and thank God that we actually have similar tastes. My vast music collection has always served as bit of a litmus test in my relationships. Even most of my friends give me strange looks at the selections that pop up on my shuffled playlist. I could be listening to anything from Michael Jackson to Mahalia Jackson to Snow Patrol to Darius Rucker (pre and post country), all in one sitting. I’m a very eclectic girl and my music collection reflects this with every press of the play button. I may have even lost out on a few dates after disclosing my love of country or classical music. Yo Yo Ma and Esperanza Spalding make my skin crawl in such a good way!

So, it was no surprise that I would cringe at the idea of our first 10 hour road trip together. I just knew he would look at me with that same weird look that others before had given me. But to my surprise, he loved song after song after song. He fell in love with Snow Patrol and affectionally refers to them as “Snow Ball”. The documentary, Thundersoul, was shown during the Blogalicious 2011 conference and I immediately fell in love with the music. It didn’t take me long to download three of the albums and play it for my honey. Of course he would love it. This was the music of his childhood! We had such a great time dancing in our small apartment, sharing what I now consider to be one of our great memories.

And all of this is on my mind because we are in the car, driving to our second marriage counseling session. Our homework was to make sure we shared one activity a week for the month between our sessions. Dancing around in our apartment was such a simple activity to share, but it sure was special to me.

Yay!