"I felt the tug on my sleeve and looked down to find him standing motionless. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t make out his words. His quiet body in the noisy room caught me off guard. I bent down to find his voice."
"Once intimacy begins to wane, it can become hard to get back on track. One of the keys to reconnecting is understanding that intimacy is a multifaceted thing. In fact, there are five different types of intimacy, and only when we keep all five functioning can we have marriages that feel profoundly connected."
Don't assume no one cares. Instead, you can safely assume someone probably feels defeated and a bit like she's failing. You can assume she's overwhelmed. Frustrated. Hopeless to the point where she's considered burning the place down and starting over somewhere new. You can assume she's tired. Soooo dang tired.
"I carry the mental load for this family, I complete the invisible and thankless tasks. For me it's not just that one task, it's one less thing on my list, one less thing on my mind."
Someday, our windows won’t have tiny fingerprints covering every square inch of their glass. Someday, the trash won’t fill so quickly, and the fridge won’t empty so fast & dishwasher won’t need ran so often, and the hamper won’t always be overflowing.
She is tired. She is overwhelmed. She’s running this ship alone while you wait to be told what to do. She is hoping one day you don’t await her instructions, and you just do the thing that needs to be done.
Marie got me thinking beyond shelves and cupboards about what sparks joy in my own life, and reflecting on what I need to say good-bye to. We can all be honest and admit that there are things that take up valuable room in our hearts and block anything else from coming in.
People in the community started blaming his mess on me, because I was a woman. “Joy, you’re the woman of the house, you need to get in there and throw some stuff away. It’s gross.”
