Every day that I am home from the Camino, I am stepping more fully back into my life here with my family, Steve, work, and finances. Yesterday Steve and I got to spend the day together. We walked into town, ate breakfast at Lucille's, strolled on the Pearl Street Mall, walked home via North Boulder Park, where we lay in the grass and looked up at the clear blue sky until we fell asleep. So nourishing to just get to be together for a chunk of time during the day. For us, being together during the day means we get to be with each other at our best awake hours, and when we like to be with other people. For me, I like to be alone in the early morning hours to sit quietly, write and read. At night, I am just ready to go to sleep. So daytime dates are a new thing for us and I really enjoy them. We are talking about how to create this for ourselves on a weekly basis.
One of Steve's take-aways from my being gone was that he really wants us to become better partners in creating and living our lives. We are both independent people and we now know that we can do just fine and manage our lives, and the kids' lives, without the other one there. In some ways, it's actually easier. The bigger challenge is how do we co-create together? This must sound so funny. I mean, we have been married for nearly 24 years and shouldn't we have figured this out years ago?!
Many years ago a psychic shared an image of us as parallel train tracks who live with the illusion that off in the future and distant horizon, the tracks merge and come together. So we just keep doing what we've been doing in the hopes of that one day, some day, our tracks will cross and we will experience true partnership and intimacy.
We have lived side-by-side for a long time, and it has been comfortable and acceptable for both of us. Somehow, it's what we've known how to do. Most likely, it was modeled for us by our parents. It has been fine, especially since we were both immersed in it. It has been the water we have been swimming in for all this time. But my going away for five weeks creates an opening and a shift, and both a possibility and an opportunity for change.
Steve's request to transform what and how we co-create, co-manage, co-parent, co-habitate provides us with the context to re-enter with each other differently. His speaking it created a new question for us to live into.
Have you ever heard that our lives are a reflection of the answers to the questions we are asking. I love this, and realize that this opening is changing the question that Steve and I have been asking for the past 20 plus years.
It could be so easy to just fall back into the unconscious questions that we have been asking and what is known and familiar, but we both know we want something different. While I had not yet put into words what Steve voiced yesterday, I knew as soon as he started to talk about it that we were on the same page. I even told him that at breakfast. We are coming to this page from different perspectives and experiences, but we do both want the same thing, or at the very least, are both open to asking some new questions about our relationship and the lives we are creating together.
The funny thing is we had talked about co-creating something different for ourselves and our marriage 24 years ago when we first got married, and again when we were pregnant with our first child. And then life happened, and our baby was born, and more babies were born and without realizing it, we fell into what was known, what was safe, and what had been modeled for us.
I know for myself that my maternal instinct and hormones took over as soon as I became pregnant. I had always assumed that I would be a working mother when I had children, but while I was pregnant, I worked in a daycare center for babies and toddlers. This experience radically altered my whole perspective. No way was anyone else going to take care of my child(ren). I wanted be with him, take care of him myself, and much to my own surprise, become a stay-at-home mother. I also wanted to nurse my baby, on demand, from my breast, without having to pump, do bottles and the whole gamut. My desire and mothering instincts took over, and any and all thoughts of Steve and I equally sharing the whole work/financial/child rearing thing went out the window.
All that was okay while we had babies and the children were young, and for us that was quite a while. Four children, born over a span of twelve years, had me being at home with young pre-school ages children, or pregnant and nursing for a long time. In 2000, just when I thought I would be going back "out into the world", I unexpectedly became pregnant with Gracie, and experienced myself pulling back into the home and the coccoon of pregnancy, nursing, being with a baby, then a toddler, then a pre-school aged child, as my other children were dealing with elementary school, then middle school, then high school.
Here we are - Andrew is nearly 21 years old, and Gracie is in fourth grade and in the midst of the 9 year change. She is growing up from a young child to a blossoming girl who's just on the very far edge of beginning to prepare to take the next leap into adolescence. Not a teenager yet, but also not a young 6 year old either.
So, the times they are a-changing. My children are growing up. Steve and I are growing up. I fully realized while on the Camino that I am no longer a younger person. I am now a woman in my 50's, and Steve is a man in his 50's. We are no longer in our 40's and it feels very different. Nothing wrong or bad, but important to acknowledge that our 50's are a new era for us to live into and own. The time is now to ask new questions and to give ourselves a new context out of which to co-create our lives.
Suseya,
Sarah
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