(Are you having flashbacks to that awesome ’80’s song now?! haha. Sorry about that. (I’m not sorry.))
Lately James and I have been battling a lot. The busier we get with work – the more we forget to stop and focus on each other as husband/wife, and not just as business partners. (Maybe more so my fault than his.)
I started keeping score. (I shot this many sessions this week, and I’m tired, and I walked Chloe yesterday morning – can’t you do it today?! Please!! What have you done?! In reality – he had done A LOT.) I started saying hurtful things without thinking about what I was really putting out into the world first and how it would make James feel. I was exhausted, irritable, and all around not a whole lot of fun to hang out with – if I’m being real. (Well, I take that back – to everyone else I was fine… just not towards James. Which is super fair, right? The person I love most gets the brunt of my exhaustion. Makes sense. Or not.)
And when I get like that – James battles back because nobody wants to sit back and take that junk. I can’t really blame him.
I hate when we get like this, and I want it to stop – but I’m so focused on work and serving our clients well at this time of year that I usually just push on through – keep working, and keep on being a punk to James. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I want things to be different.
So yesterday when I woke up exhausted and crabby and took it out on James (again), I realized I needed to nip this right in the butt. I got out of bed, got what work I could get done, and then decided to take the rest of the day off. An impromptu afternoon/night just for the two of us. We needed to get back on track and this was just what the doctor ordered.
No work. No business talk. No anxiety about bookings, or rambling on about this or that. No feeling guilty about what I had sitting in the office waiting for me. Just focusing on getting my marriage back and track, and letting James know how much I do appreciate him and love him, even if I’m not the best at showing it all the time.
First things first – we got out of the house. Work takes place in our house and it is starting to feel like it is taking over our mental space when we’re there as well. So we took Chloe for a walk to the post office, afterwards James headed to the basketball courts at the park by our house while I went for a short run with Chloe, and then we joined him at the courts where I played some really terrible 1 on 1 basketball with him. (Seriously, I’m BAD.)
We headed home to rehydrate, eat some lunch, and took a snooze before heading downtown for a drink, and another round of ballroom dance lessons with Charles at Arthur Murray (LOVE IT!).
Then we closed out the night with a little NBA Finals action, my grandma’s homemade spaghetti, and relaxing on the couch.
I can’t tell you how amazing it all was. All in all it was probably 9 hours together… which is normal for us – I mean, we’re together 24/7. But the difference is that yesterday we were husband & wife. We focused on our love, not our business. And that made all the difference.
