They say you’re supposed to ask for what you need when it comes to your partner. I like the word partner better than spouse which I have explained at least once before I remember several years ago. It can feel kind of degrading wondering why I still am even having to ask. But here goes nothing so I just went for it in the morning when I was out for a walk and thinking about who knows what all else. “Can you be mindful of my emotional needs as things shift again? My heart needs to be fed.”

It’s against the better wisdom to try to communicate deeper or harder things over text, which is hard for me because it helps to write it. But anyway that all went well and by 9:15 I was out the door. I’ve been feeling really emotional since everything at conference, or maybe the emotional things lined up with the races. I had four couples today plus two individual sessions. I keep wanting to narrow things down more and more, to have a takeaway I can say and say and they can remember.

“Present and kind”, that is the goal. Through the discomfort, through the discussions, and practicing that again and again until it starts to feel better. Today with the couples we did a lot of practicing and using what was coming up in real time. I think this is the kind of emotional processing that I wasn’t quite getting to in my internship videos. To be fair it does seem easier to get there with two people where you know that the emotions and internal experience is so much of what is going on.

I have to say when I envisioned doing couples I was picturing Christian couples who were married. That would be about half of them. The other ones are non-Christian, some not even married and are still pretty young. Some of these things are just universal like the woman wanting to feel like she is loved and a priority. And the man saying something like, “empathy is hard for me”. But the amazing thing is is that they do open up. And sometimes very rarely there’s a departure from the patterns.

I emailed the boys and texted Ethan about conference and texted Josh on my lunch break to see how the day was. I usually do that because I’m missing them both. They had lunch for the staff today so that was nice because I didn’t have to pack anything. I miss the homeschooling and am feeling that continued growing and separation but he’s still doing well and our thing right now is playing chess. I’m still learning. My rooks keep getting sniped by bishops from all the way across the board.