In it together

On Friday I had a spontaneous adventure to meet up with my best friends for one of their birthdays. It was a long drive with two small kids, and I was taking Advil all day for my back and neck pain from the car accident. Still, it was one of those opportunities I felt like I just couldn't miss.

The trip did not go as planned, first, I left half an hour late. Then, I accidentally went through an ez-pass lane because I forgot I didn't have it in my rental car. Several wrong turns, a couple stops (one on the side of the road) so that Miles could go to the bathroom. But we made it there and back in pretty decent shape.

The thing that struck me most, was how calm I was. I usually tend to get stressed out, especially on long car rides with the kids. But there was one noticeable difference: My husband wasn't with me. When I'm by myself, I just roll with the situation and make the best of it, but when I'm with him, it's like he becomes a magnet for any little frustration and we fall into this dynamic where I start getting worried or annoyed about the situation, and he reassures me and calms me down. It made me think about how we often take things out on the people we love when they don't deserve it. I realized that many times, just his mere presence gives me an excuse to blame someone else or an object to vent my frustration on, instead of dealing with it. It's so easy and tempting to do, and yet, when I was alone in the car with the kids and had no one to turn to, I just took it in stride.

Yesterday was Father's Day, and even though the kids were cranky and I was exhausted, I let my husband take a good three hour nap. I thought, if I can recognize when I am getting frustrated or putting blame on him then maybe I can learn to take things in stride and relax when he's with me too. How much better could our relationship be if I were able to do that? What kind of new dynamic could we create? Old habits are hard to break, but I'm going to try and be a little less dramatic whenever my husband makes a wrong turn or forgets to take out the garbage. After all, we're in this together.