Category Archives: Passion

Hidden Messages

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My husband is a self-proclaimed non-romantic. A bummer, I know. I have often dreamt of him having a romantic-switch buried deep down inside just waiting to be turned on. Of course, I’ve tried everyway I know from hints to outright asking him to try to be more romantic, attempting to will the switch on, and unfortunately the magical switch has remained dormant.

I used to think that him not being romantic had everything to do with me, as if there was a hidden message I should be reading into about me (e.g. perhaps I’m not worth being romantic for), instead of it having anything to do with him. I have learned over time and from some very wise sources that my husband is who he is and while romantic notions may be how I envision love being shown to me, he shows me his love in many others.

I started to think about hidden messages and how we can easily misconstrue what peoples actions or inactions, words or lack of words mean. This can occur not only between spouse or partners, but also between friends, and with our children. Specific to our children, meaning can be derived in the tone of voice we use, in the words we say or exclude. Do your children understand what you are communicating to them and why? Or are they reading into what you are saying without verbalizing it, much like I was reading into my husband’s non-cues?

While coming to the terms that having many romantic experiences in my life may not be in my future, I’ve recently learned that I may be wrong and that there is hope. Before my husband left for a business trip, we discussed how to stay connected while he was away. I told him how much I valued his observations or acknowledgements he makes about me or our relationship. He shared how much being able to see me and our boys meant to him. We connected via video chat each day after his departure, and he unveiled a hidden surprise. He left me notes hidden around the house. One for everyday that he was gone. How romantic! These hidden messages mean more to me than he will ever know. They not only helped carry me through the time while he was away, but have created a wonderful memory for me that I will treasure. The message was received loud and clear — I am worth being romantic for, and I still have a lot to learn about my husband.

Are there hidden messages in your relationship with your spouse or child? How do you ensure they are receiving your intended message?

Love is for Free

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For most of my life I believed that love was something you had to earn. In order to be loved you had to work hard, behave, be generous (with time, money, energy), do the right thing even if it conflicted with your own wants and needs, sacrifice even if it hurt and give until you don’t have any more to give.  I realize when I write it out that this sounds exhausting and not at all what love should be.

I’m still unsure where this notion came from. Did I learn this from my family, friends, the media or a combination of them all?

I was discussing love with a friend recently who shared a powerful insight. She said said, “Love isn’t earned, it’s freely given.” This was an ‘aha’ moment for me. I think on some subconscious level I always knew this to be the case, but my beliefs and actions were not at all aligned with this belief.

I was struck by the notion that my self-worth had gotten wrapped up in this warped belief of conditional love. When I had this jarring revelation recently, I became for the first time fully aware of how affected I’d been by this belief. For instance: any physical deficiency I had (real or imagined) I felt I had to overcompensate for in order to be liked and loved. Sad, I know, pathetic even. As a teenager and young adult I would get uncomfortable whenever someone showed me any affection. I can think of so many dates I went on where I got just plain freaked out if the person liked me and wanted to go out with me again.  How could they be sure they liked me? They hadn’t even seen my flaws yet, what was wrong with them?  In reality, nothing was wrong with them, and nothing was wrong with me other than my warped point of view. I wish I had been perceptive enough to realize how askew my thinking was at the time. I wonder sometimes what I might have missed out on because of my fears.

Thankfully I continue to learn more about myself every day and I’m so grateful to have had this revelation and to have found a way to allow myself to be truly and deeply loved.

After all, my husband didn’t marry me because he felt sorry for me and I don’t have caring friends because they pity me. Just as I married my husband because I love who he is, and I love my closest friends for who they are. There are no strings attached, no money needed, no conditions they have to adhere to. I love them freely and they love me back in return.

Love is sometimes easier to give than to receive, at least to those of us that are just figuring it out it’s for free.

Are you ready for some football?

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When you were a kid what did you love?  Was it a pet or a toy? Or did you have a favorite activity you just couldn’t get enough of?

Our oldest son has recently become very interested in football. Any football. College, professional, high school, it doesn’t matter.  He asks his father if they can go outside and play football every day regardless of the weather and regardless of the amount of daylight left—there have been many twilight games.  He loves the game.

It’s always a joy for me to watch them play together and hear their conversations during the game. Our son loves to tackle and be tackled. He loves to wear clothes that make him look like a real football player, and he loves to kick the ball. Above all else, he likes to make up new rules. The rules for any game change with almost every play and almost always lean in our son’s favor.  As I mentioned in my post a couple of weeks ago, winning has become increasingly important to my sons as of late.

While watching my husband and son, a number of questions have crossed my mind:

  • Where did his drive for winning come from?  My husband and I have worked hard to not place a high value on winning.
  • How do you explain rules, what they are and why they’re import?
  • Why must he want to play football?  It’s so dangerous!  While I’ve always loved watching college football, I hoped our children would love watching it with me, not actually want to play it.

It occurred to me that all three of these questions brought to mind a different parenting conundrum.

Where did his drive for winning come from? I don’t think our son is any different than his peers. Winning is going to be important, regardless of our efforts to downplay it. What we are trying to teach our boys is that of course everyone wants to win, and that while winning may feel good, you often learn more from losing. When we win we’ll often attribute it to our hard work, practice or execution of the game on a given day. Those things may be true, but what if the team that lost worked and practiced just as hard? We talk to our boys about how temping it is to become complacent and stop pushing ourselves when winning comes too easily, and that losing can be an opportunity to learn something about ourselves and allow us to improve. Talking about sports is great opportunity to discuss with the boys the merits of learning to win and lose with grace.

How do you explain the rules, what they are and their importance? Football has a lot of rules. While I’ve always felt I had a good understanding of the game, I didn’t appreciate the complexity of the rules in football until I listened to my husband and my father educating my son on the game.  Most of these rules make a lot of sense. They are needed to keep order and ensure that the game is played fairly by both teams. Rules ensure a level playing field where one team doesn’t have an advantage over the other. However, sometimes the rules don’t make much sense and seem to only create obstacles for playing the game. There is as true in life as it is in football. Some rules make a lot of sense and are clearly in place to protect us and keep us safe. Some rules are not as clear-cut; I’m not sure I’ll ever understand our tax codes, but I’m grateful for accountants who can make sure I comply with them.

Why must he want to play football?  It’s so dangerous! As an avid fan, I suppose I have no one to blame but myself on this one, but I honestly hoped he would just enjoy watching the game with me. I should have known that if he enjoyed watching football, he was likely to want to play.  I have conflicting feelings about  this. On one hand, I want to encourage his passion and football is his passion, at least for now. On the other, I’ve always believed that one of my main jobs as his parent is to keep him safe. In light of all the reports in recent years that show the long-term damage caused by the head traumas so common in sports like football, it’s hard not to want to keep your child away from the game (or any game where the risk of head trauma runs high). My husband and I haven’t had to make a final decision on this yet, as our son hasn’t asked to play on a team. For now he’s okay with just playing in the backyard or on the playground. But we suspect his interest will only increase as his friends get more serious about the sport and at some point, we’ll have a difficult decision to make.

This coming Sunday we will celebrate one of the most watched games in televised sports.  Most of us aren’t as concerned about who wins the game as we are with the ritual of watching the game. We watch because it’s an opportunity to get together with friends, we like to watch the commercials, or we just hope to see a good game. My son will be watching too, but for one reason only—because he loves it.

Energy Wanted

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What fills your soul/gives you energy?

I love asking this question when I do speaking engagements, it’s normally a question my audiences haven’t heard or thought of before.  I can’t take credit for the saying as someone posed the question to me many years ago, but it was very thought provoking.  There are many things that we do in our life out of necessity or because we think it is the right thing to do.  Think about what you do in your daily life, your list might look something like this:

  • Take care of family –fix meals, get kids to/from school, get kids to/from activities, get kids up/put kids to bed
  • Make money – go to job(s)
  • Volunteer/Serve on committees–support and participate in activities for a school, your church, community, etc
  • Take care of the house—clean, pay bills, scheduled or perform maintenance duties (cleaning/replacing/fixing), yardwork
  • Down time—reading, watching TV, exercising
  • Sleep

Where on this list is something that gives you energy?  Or better yet what fills your soul?  A lot of these activities take energy from you, it doesn’t give it back. It’s up to each of us to figure out how to get the charge we need.  If you are always giving energy out and not taking it back in, you’re less likely to be your best self and less likely to give your full self, because your desperate for the recharge you may not realize you need.

We do a lot of things because we have to: work, for example, we have to have money coming in to pay the bills and keep food on the table. We
also do things that we think we should: serve on committees, for example, because it seems like the right thing to do.

I was guilty of giving my energy away pretty freely until it became obvious that I wasn’t doing myself any favors. I was miserable most of the time and craved down time—time where I could tune out.  I was encouraged to seek quiet time and not down time to really figure out what I was missing.  Do you know what the difference is between down time and quiet time?

Down time—tuning out. Reading, watching TV, surfing the Internet. Any activity that doesn’t require you to think.

Quite time-tuning in. Allowing yourself to listen to what is going on inside. Recommended in a quiet environment, when your child is sleeping and you have no other obligations to meet (spouse, work or otherwise).

I had mastered down time early in time, quiet time was a new concept for me. Some people make daily time for quiet time through meditation
or yoga. I found quiet time came more easily for me if I just went outside on my back porch by myself when my child was napping. During the quiet times I would ask myself, “what do you need?” and “what are you missing?” It wasn’t easy at first, sometimes my mind would wonder back to the duties at hand, but after practicing at focusing on the questions, it would come to me.  I started to better understand what I was lacking and what I needed. I was starting to figure out what “feeds my soul.”

I started to reflect on where I was spending my time and what I needed to remove from my plate. Committees were one area that begged, “why am I doing this?”  I served out my terms on the various committees and politely stated I wouldn’t be able to serve on any future ones (at least for the foreseeable future). I also started to realize what I craved: community with my girlfriends, something that had waned since having children; pursuing outside interests from my daily job; connecting and communicating with my husband—discussing anything other than the kids, work or house.  These activities fill my soul and give me energy.  This is a dynamic list for me, so I know it will grow and morph as I continue to ask myself these questions “what do I need?” and “what am I missing?”

During a recent speaking engagement I was asking my audience how they were taking care of themselves. A couple of folks had gotten some time away from the baby—all of their children were very young, so that made sense—in the form of doing something they enjoyed earlier, like playing a sport, having dinner, or watching a movie.  One man in the group shared that he had taken back up with the soccer league he had been in earlier.  He said while he really enjoyed it, he felt guilty.  You could see the look on his wife’s face—I had given my husband that face before, it was the look of “of course, I’m going to let you go play soccer, because I want to be supportive of you, but can’t you see I’m dying over here and desperately want you to give me a break?” I think many of us have been there. I encouraged the group to look at what was shared.  The husband enjoyed playing soccer, and there were probably a couple of reasons why: it provided an opportunity for him to exert physical energy, it provided an opportunity for him to have community (play with friends) and it may have provided him a break (be it from the baby, work, etc). Who can fault anyone for wanting to do any of those things, they all sound pretty healthy and needed to me.  In fact, it sounds like a lot of these things could and should give him energy.  On the flip side, the wife needs to listen to her own cues. Many women struggle with feeling they might appear selfish if they try to get their needs met. In my opinion, there is nothing selfish about it.  It might be hard to figure out what you need, but it ultimately ends up being good for everyone—you, partner and child.

Don’t underestimate the need for balance. Just because soccer, or whatever the activity may be, gives someone energy doesn’t mean that they need to play multiple times a week at the expense of their partner’s well being. Negotiation will be key. Find a balance that allows both of you to get the charge you need.

Find time to answer the questions: “what do I need?” and “what am I missing?” Share with your partner what you uncover.

Do you have any creative ways you’ve found quiet time? How are your reenergizing yourself?