Let Me Take Care of You

I’m back to struggling doing too much, or so Beautiful says. One thing that I’ve learned in the last 9 years is that woman is very rarely wrong when it comes to how much work I’m doing. She has questioned if I’m working before (/grin) but I don’t think she’s every been mistaken about me working too much for my own good.

I’ve mentioned (or at least I started writing the post one day) that I’ve wanted to be the sole breadwinner for the family since before we were a family. I always saw her having a job as a means to an end to get us more stable and get the things we needed to settle down to start a family, however that was going to happen. Being self-employed has given me the opportunity to have more freedom in my schedule to work when I at at my best and to take breaks when I need to, even though I know that means more work later. We have definitely taken more time off this month to do what needs to be done, but I am also working much harder when I am working to try to “get ahead.” Now that I am the sole breadwinner, doubt creeps into our conversations recently about the wisdom of relying on my ability to work without getting sick.

Today was one of those days.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to get a job?”

“Absolutely! I’d rather have you here, happy, taking care of the place the way we like to have it, and not complaining about work and always being exhausted.”

“But I’d rather have you healthy than working until you’re sick and we don’t have any money because you are our money. I won’t complain about my job.”

“I’d be working this hard if you were still working because I have a backlog and we need business savings before I feel comfortable pulling back to work on residual income.”

“What can I do to help you be happy?”

“I am happy.”

“You don’t look happy. You aren’t eating. You aren’t sleeping. You look miserable like I’m forcing you to eat lunch. Should I ignore you and go get a job anyway?”

“I didn’t eat lunch half the days when you were at work. I was too busy. I’m trying to be happy, but there’s just a lot of pressure to earn all of this money. I thought I’d be more successful by now… this isn’t the lifestyle I thought we’d have.”

“What are you talking about? We wouldn’t have been able to take Monday off to go see Denise if you still had an office job and I was still working. We go to the pool, too. I don’t think you’re remembering where you were 3 years ago.”

“Was I still at the office then? Yeah, I was working 40 hours/wk…”

“Fifty.”

“… going to school for 8 hours every week, working on the side after you went to bed. I feel like we had plenty of money there for a few months. Was it more than we’re making now?”

“No.”

“I’ll be fine when we have some wiggle room. I want to start on projects for residual income so I don’t have to be working to earn money.”

“How about you finish your projects we have now and get paid for those and then work on residual income? You are successful; you’re just harder on yourself than anyone else is.”

“Okay. I’m going back upstairs now so we can take the weekend off.”

What is so great about what we have together is a nearly opposite perspective on the same situations that involve emotions and the same perspectives on the big things that make life itself work. When we sit down to have a talk about feelings, if we are both on the same page, it’s like a divine message that we need to take action on those feelings. Most of our talks are very back and forth like this with one of us being up, down, worried, or confident with the other pushing or pulling in the opposite direction in order to center ourselves as a couple.

It works most of the time, but it’s not without its own stress that causes its fair share of conflict – healthy conflict. How do your relationships work with the ups and downs of life?