Moving Right Along

I got a fantastic quote this morning from a wonderful talk.  "For everything you have missed, you have gained something else." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson    All things considered, that really hit me this morning.  There is so much that I am trying to figure out, piece together, and reevaluate in my life right now, and there are days where it is next to impossible for me to understand that my Heavenly Father really does love me. 

We don't always get to make the choices that we want to make.  Free agency is a wonderful thing, but it can be hard to embrace and revel in that gift (or even remember that it is a gift) when you don't like the choices that are handed to you.  I always tend to get really down on myself when life isn't going well (or as I had hoped, I should say), and I was wondering this week if my lack of happiness was a lack of embracing my agency and utilizing it to its full extent.  There are times when it is hard to choose to be happy.  I am the type that functions well in emergencies, but easily gets bogged down by the day-to-day.  Right now, I have a really hard time choosing to be happy when Ande throws her fourth major meltdown in two hours of doing laundry.  The first time I'm patient, and loving and kind.  The second time, I'm sympathetic, and sit down with her to help explain the situation.  The third time, I try helping her to rationally see that beating her brother into submission isn't the best way to help her be happy.  By the fourth time though, wow. I really kind of have to restrain myself, because honestly, sometimes I just want to hit her.  So when she blew up as I was talking with our realtor on the phone about renting out our house in Colorado, and my predictably huge apprehension over letting other people into our house, I had a really hard time trying to be as patient and loving as I want to be, and as I know I should be with her.  I know Ande needs me, but yikes!  So free agency is a double-edged sword if ever I've seen one.

Hubby and I are trying to learn how to regroup in the aftermath of all of our recent events.  I think we're finding out that we aren't nearly as close-knit as we want or need to be.  And since neither of us feel like we grew up with wonderful husband-wife relationships to model our own marriage after, we feel like we're creating ours from scratch, and are generally completely lost on how to go about it.  I'm not sure that either of us even knows what a genuinely happy marriage really looks like, let alone how to get there ourselves.  I know that we're growing, because I have the growing pains to prove it. ; )