Today I am thankful that it was Indian food day in the office cafeteria. It’s damn cold outside and one of my bad-weather boots is held together with red duct tape (really — I made the repair this morning. The red is very nice against the brown suede of the boot. Too bad it’s not an effective fix.) so I didn’t want to leave the building for lunch. Everything in my office cafeteria tastes like cheap Italian dressing, except the quite nice Indian food. Lentils, ahh….
So what’s happening with my intentions? This checking in business seems antithetical to the spirit of intention setting in the first place. In yoga parlance, checking in seems to be grasping, directing, rather than letting go, observing-without-judging. On the other hand, it also seems like a good way to make change. I want not to forget this. I want to have different habits. I don’t know of another way to create them.
Intention 1: Sitting in the living room: Dorothea, on Thursday night: “Let’s go sit in the living room.”
Daniel:”Why? We don’t have to” (turns back to newspaper)
Dorothea: “No, really, let’s go sit in the living room” (but starts to chop an onion for supper)
Daniel: “No. It’s okay. We don’t have to. Why…?”
Dorothea: “Well, I mean, I don’t understand why you don’t want to do it now, because you said it’s important to you and I’m offering to sit in the living room now, so…”
Daniel: “Okay, let’s go sit in the living room” (while remaining rooted to his spot in the kitchen and not taking his eyes off the paper. The living room stayed dark and un-sat in.)
When confronted with Daniel’s complaints, I look for behavioral prescriptions. I need him to give me specific instructions on what to do. But what he really wants is not so much a different way of doing, he wants a different way of (me) being. My sweet husband isn’t really that into doing. It’s the theory, the tone, the atmosphere, that counts for him. Alas, I am tone deaf, colorblind. When you don’t get something, you… don’t get it. So I want behaviors — I can work backwards from those and figure out tone.
What Daniel wants is to walk into a home in which sitting in the living room is a possibility. So, hardy behaviorist that I am, I am going to continue telling myself that, at any moment, I should be willing to drop that chef’s knife and sit on the couch. Whether or not we get there is secondary.
Intention 2: keeping intention in mind on the commute home: Well, I haven’t forgotten about it. I set a reminder in my work email/calendar. Every day at 5pm I get a note saying “Intentionality, Shalom ha’bayit [peace in the house], What are you going to do about it.” Of course, I ‘ve taken to dismissing the reminder without reading it. On the way home, I’m likely to think about dinner, or the day, or some ridiculous song, or work. I may let this intention go. I don’t think I can be focused every minute. Some time has to be for idling, for brain static.
Intention 3: Stay out of Daniel’s health business. I cheated by spending a lot of time saying, “Are you okay?… Are you feeling okay?… How are you feeling?… I just want to make sure you’re feeling okay.” But I refrained from giving specific instructions, so that’s something. Over the last few days, I’ve been less anxious about Daniel’s health, as has Daniel (that’s not a coincidence). Daniel has his annual physical tomorrow and his doctor will test the hell out of him. When he gets his results back I will be extremely tempted to 1) disbelieve Daniel’s report that his doctor says he is in good health; 2) get back up in his business.
I try too hard to get things right. When I was in high school, I was a (slow) hurdler on the track team. The trick to running hurdles is to run as normally as possible — don’t jump over the hurdle, don’t make it a big deal, just get your lead leg up a little higher and snap it right back down, and bring your back leg through strong and fast. “Just run” as my coach said. I could never just run.
I cannot believe that relaxing helps, that trying less hard has benefits. I try very hard to try less hard. I burst into anxious tears when people say, “Just relax.” (When people told me that I needed to relax to get pregnant, I just about turned purple. If that were really the case, infertility treatments would never work, because they are as relaxing as a tax audit.)
But for the last couple of days, perhaps entirely by coincidence, the tone has been a little lighter. Milo did his homework and housework tonight with little prompting or fussing. Daniel has been doting and sweet. He raised a sensitive issue that I’d held my tongue about, without me prompting. I decided to wait and see before I jumped in, and it worked. Trying less hard appears to be working, at least today.
(Is this a boring post? I feel like details of domestic life drag on the screen. Or maybe I find it boring because I’m not crazed with emotion and anxiety. This is probably a good thing — the year started out very intense, and I need a little respite, even if it means some prosaic posts.)
Another Door 
no, not a boring post – actually I thought, ‘oh my gosh, this sounds so familiar!’ I have long followed the tack that a conflict and my husband’s criticism required a corresponding behavioral/mindset change on my part. I am now trying to undo years of self-blame and the judgment that my thinking is flawed, that I am a screw up. Anyway, that’s a tangent – just wanted to tell you again, I appreciate that you’re blogging about this. It makes me feel less alone.
“It makes me feel less alone” — there is no better compliment you could give me about this blog. Thank you. I started this because I wanted to feel less alone myself, and I am so glad that the blog has that effect on other people. For all the “girl talk” fussing about partners who don’t pick up their socks, or vacuum, or whatever, I don’t think people share enough about the weird and difficult emotional currents in marriages, even happy marriages. I so understand that, “Oh, it’s all my fault” feeling, and like you, I’m trying to get away from it. I realize that my husband sometimes just likes to fuss, irrationally. It doesn’t require me to change, just to listen and sit tight till it blows over — which is harder than implementing some big plan!
Not boring. You are never boring. Self-awareness and striving towards consciousness is never boring. The unspoken aspects of domestic life that people rarely speak about is not boring. What is boring are photos of what people bought at the mall this weekend. Okay, even they are not always boring. I am just bored by them today because I am struggling with some issues and I like feeling less alone. I always feel less alone here.
I was struck by this line, “Trying less hard appears to be working, at least today.” I wonder if this relates to letting go of C.A.N.I. Trying hard is different than intending. At least it feels different to me.
When I was trying to evade the real subject, I thought about posting photos from the recent Boden catalog and saying “These are what I want.” That may have been doubly boring (but so much cuteness from Boden lately!). I am glad you feel less alone. That’s the whole point of the exercise — all of us feeling less alone. I agree that intending can, and sometimes does, feel different than trying hard. But the line between them is a strand from a spider’s web. My tendency is to try very hard to intend.
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