You never know what you don't know until you need to know it. One of my children's favorite stories is about the day I realized I didn't know how to cook.
As a young bride I had exhausted all the recipes on the back of the Bisquick box in about a month. We were on a tight budget and I was trying to make every penny count. We'd been eating various versions of the ham my husband had gotten as a Christmas bonus along with some form of baked dough. Now I was to the end portion of the ham. Placing it in the wedding-gift crock pot, I seasoned it up (maybe I smothered it...) with all the fancy (and mysterious) herbs from the wedding-gift spice rack. Then I covered it with barbeque sauce. It was the first time I cooked something with no recipe. I waited in eager anticipation. Of course my new groom would be dazzled!
Here are his exact words, "What is there about ham, that ham always is?" Hu? A riddle? He repeated himself, "What is there about ham, that ham always is?" (This is where my children scream out the answer. "It's SALTY!!!") One taste of that herb crusted, 10-hours baked, smothered salt-lick and I burst out into tears. Then my true-love added in a quiet voice, "and I am not going to eat Bisquick again for the rest of my life."
We all have stories about the things we didn't know and the scarey, silly, crazy circumstances that revealed it to us. I find that people have missing information in four general categories. Physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional. Physically would be the "how to" stuff; cook, type, change a tire. Mental is the intellectual stuff that we gain through school, training and philosophy. Spiritual would be the truths of God and scriptural instruction as they apply to our lives and troubles in the here and now.
Most everyone I speak with agrees with me that we all have deficits. And we are all responsible for them. We may choose not to find or fix the missing pieces. But they are still our responsibility. It gets a little trickier with emotional stuff. We don't know what we are missing until we begin to have struggles in life because of other people. We feel unloved, disrespected, unwanted or unheard.
What we don't realize is that this pain hurts in THIS particular place because of something within us. Something missing. When I ask people have they felt this emotional pain in other relationships besides the one with their spouse, reluctantly they admit, "Yes".
Their next, immediate question is, "How do I fix it?". The good news is, I have the answer. But before we go there, I'd like you to sit with this information for a while. Sit there on the park bench, or the therapist's couch with Unloved or Disrespected. We are going to help get rid of them, but I want you to make sure you know exactly what they are, and exactly why you want them gone. There is some work ahead and I want you to spend your energy on something that will actually work. So, what do you need?
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This post reminds me of a particular closet in my newlywed house. As my hubbin and I have gone through a year of merging our lives (mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, etc) we seem to continually be working on "the closets". You see, in the rush of wedding planning, honeymooning, and house making all of our stuff was just stuffed into all of the available closet space until it was out of the way. We avoided dealing with it for a long time because we wanted to enjoy ourselves, but those closets haunted us and drove us crazy. It's been quite the daunting challenge to motivate ourselves to go in pull it all out, sort it, purge it, merge it, reorganize it, label it, and store it for good use. When we do manage to identify the things we don't want or need from our individual single lives we decide to sell it...and so we have a closet now called "Sell Closet" (and it is bursting at the seems for spring). On more than one occasion we can't find something and out of frustration we go tearing through everything including the sell closet--what a mess! But this is the process isn't it: being willing to go through the mess together...to grow and simplify together and share our stories of "stuff" along the way to grieve and rejoice in our shaping from the past and our building together for the future.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly enough...usually when we go tearing through the sell closet, the thing we are looking for isn't there...we must be keeping the right things. Also, I see it as a metaphor that whatever we need to make our "together" life work isn't likely to be found in reverting to patterns developed as "single" adults
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