Not Ideal

My husband and I often go to bed at separate times. He is more of a night owl than I am usually, so I am often asleep well before him.  Tonight, after a rather overwhelming day (which I will blog about tomorrow), I invited him to bed to "talk".  He quickly discarded his laptop, aka his first love, and promptly came to bed.  Much to his chagrin and disappointment, he discovered that I really meant that I wanted to talk.

I started off by saying, "I have printed off a few things that I want to discuss, so that my thoughts will be more organized." Staring at the papers I thrust into his hand, he was shaking his head, "You seriously brought printouts to bed?"  In my defense, it was only one official printout, the rest were notes that I made that were inspired by the printout. Based on his unenthusiastic reaction to the paperwork, I should have just stopped the conversation right there, but I plodded along, trying to explain how overwhelmed I have been feeling lately. The printout he held was by a blogger that wrote about needing "margin" in his life, and he sketched out his IDEAL week.  I was inspired.  I needed to consider what my ideal week looked like. Mistake number one, was handing my husband the papers to peruse before I started talking.  He heard nothing I said, and was studying this guy's ideal week.  Mistake number two, was giving him a copy of the blogger's ideal week, because he thought it was MY ideal week. My husband was really impressed by by my ambition, and somewhat disappointed when he learned it belonged to the blogger,  thus making my proposed ideal week appear a lot more dull by comparison.

But the real problem that I encountered had nothing to do with my husband.  It was my attempt at creating the ideal week for myself.  My obligations are so convoluted and time-consuming, that I can't really decide what my ideal week would look like. For example, is part of my ideal week, taxiing my children  twenty different places?  Which places do I like going with them?  Which places are just fluff? I used to really enjoy taking them to their activities until we had so many places to go that I never had a night at home. Now, it seems all my time has been claimed with various activities, and I don't know how to re-claim it. Additionally, I don't have any idea how to fit in the vague term, "me-time" that I wrote down. And what exactly would I do with "me-time" if I actually had it?  I have NO idea.  This is a fairly disturbing place to find myself.  And this is what I wanted to discuss with my husband.  Page 3 was my list of "stressors" that I created.  It was a rather lengthy list. His eyes however, seemed to be glazing at this point, and I took my cue that he had no ability to reason through my stressors and ideals, when he answered with "Mhmmm" or "Yeah". No real input just tacit acknowledgement that I was speaking and he sees my mouth moving.

I am not giving up. Not yet. I just don't know how to really start.