House Tearmainn

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I’ve actually been writing drafts and letting them linger half-finished due to time or focus issues. Looking over the half-written posts it seems like most of them pertain to either communication or managing others’ perceptions of my lifestyle. Given that those seem to be the big topics among M/s folks that’s hardly surprising, I guess.

What is a little surprising is how honest and open those posts are. I suspect that might be another reason why I’m not finishing them… the only thing worse than baring your soul to the Internet and getting mocked or bashed is baring your soul to the Internet and getting silence. Still, I think I’ll re-double my efforts and put them out there.

On that note I’d like to put down some recently hard earned thoughts on transparency. I’ve had a lot of back-and-forth with pais about transparency and how/when to communicate what she’s feeling. We each have issues around this topic that certainly exascerbate the proble. She has extreme guilt over any kind of negative feeling and that means it takes her a long time to get up the steam to communicate it to me. I almost always immediately notice that there is something up with her and have a nearly pathological need to find out what’s up.

It’s been a long-running issue, stretching back to before I collared her. I’ve tried a few different things including:

• Letting her sort out as much as possible on her own, and only bring to me the things she feels she needs to. The failure here being that she feels like she should never need to bring anything to me, which eventually leads to meltdown on her part or a freakout on mine when I can see that she’s struggling and not bringing it to me.
• Ordering her to bring any issues to me immediately, no matter how small. This worked in that I knew what was up, but failed in that, well, there are a lot of things that can be brought up. I just don’t have time to handle those conversations, and she felt like crap for having to bring tiny things to me that she was completely capable of handling on her own.
• Having a time set aside to discuss any issues from the day. This worked pretty well for her, since she could filter out any small things and only bring me the important ones. Unfortunately, it also meant that if there were no important ones the small things seemed bigger. The timing was also bad, at the end of the day when we’re both tired is bad, and the worst issues tend to happen in the evenings when the kids are around anyway.
• I used to have her journal for me. This particular method of communication went through several revisions and finally ended up pretty balanced. She could write as she needed to, delete small things or things she had dealt with, take the time to express herself well and politely, and append notes when she sent it to me explaining her current state.  This was the most successful, I think, but does consume a fair amount of her time which is extremely valuable to me. This fell by the wayside as she ramped up with work (or was it finals?) and time became compressed.

I know that along the way each of those took on different forms and shapes as I changed things that were obviously not working so it feels to both of us like this topic has been beaten to death. As of last night we’re back to journaling, and I think that will work out well if I a) can wait long enough to hear what’s up to actually get to post, and b) can give her enough time to do it effectively.