Well, It’s midnight twelve and I can’t sleep. Considering the amount of meds I’m on since having a minor ‘intervention’ on my neck yesterday, I’m quite surprised I’m awake, though I guess the fact that I’ve done nothing but lie around all day means I’m not actually tired from doing anything. So here I am, in hopes that if I empty my head maybe I’ll be able to rest my mind and body.

What’s it like to feel invisible in your own home? I have felt this way a lot in the past year, feeling not heard or listened to by my husband or kids. A nagging mom, a broken record of a wife, evidently, as I’ve been told, complaining about absolutely everything. The horrible ironic thing is, I think he’s felt, well he’s told me as much, that he’s invisible in a way, too. He’s said that there is no space for him in this house, not one room, not one place that is just his. So I’ve tried to make more space for him. Tried to be nicer, complain less. Tried to let him know that I wasn’t saying it was his fault that I didn’t like the things I didn’t like. I’ve also developed a great sense of gratitude in the past year, which has helped me tremendously. I remind myself often that everything I now have was once a wish, a dream, and a prayer. I’ve also learned to separate my feelings in order to identify them and understand them. Gratefulness and anxiety can exist at the same time, as can sadness, stress, and sensitivity. I’ve been learning to understand myself more, to give myself grace, to break through these old patterns of being that have guided me, and not too well if I’m being honest, for seemingly my whole life.

I feel like I had most things figured out when I was a very small child. I had a good sense of myself, what I liked, how the world worked, or at least how it should do. I guess that could be described as a strong moral compass. I was sensitive to the world around me and felt it all very deeply – beauty, joy, and even sadness from such a young age. I felt my place in the world, both physically and spiritually. I was happy, content. What happens to us as we grow up that ruins this perfect harmony that we experience as children? I think for me it was when I had to interact with other people. I grew up in the country, the first child in my family. It was just me and my parents, a cat and a dog, mostly my mom with me all the time, and weekends and summers at Gramma’s. When I was 4, I believe, we moved to a house on a dairy farm, so we were surrounded by animals. I loved it. There were always big fields to play in, long roads to drive on in our big yellow truck, and kittens and calves in the barn. There were a few dogs, one of which we took with us when we left to live on the land that my dad bought. Once in a while a cow would get out and wander onto our lawn, which was funny. There was a horse or two, one had to be put down when he got tangled up for too long in the electric fence. I remember farmer Don was sad. I was too.

I never quite have understood my peers. I remember playing at a friend’s house. Her name was Treasure. I remember thinking why in the world would anyone name a child Treasure? That’s a thing, not a person. So I think I played there once, with all her pretty, girly things that weren’t of much interest to me.

Now here I am, still trying to figure out how to interact with my peers. Only now, my best peer is my long-suffering husband of 12 years, who is sick of living with me but wanting to stay with me, for the good of the family and through much convincing on my part. And here I am, trying to come to terms with myself in a loving way and accept that I may, in fact, be a terribly difficult person to live with. I’m not beating myself up for this, quite the opposite in fact. I am trying to learn to accept myself for exactly who I am, to love myself unconditionally, as I am. Only then can I not judge myself for being difficult, and once I’m freed from my own judgement, I can actually work to improve my behaviour. I can feel the separation, in a healthy way, between me and my husband. I am here and he is there. We are not the unified entity that I thought we were supposed to be, not one fused identity but two people, trying to not be broken, living together in a family with three offspring that we have biologically and environmentally created. This family is a living breathing network of people, emotions, psyches, behaviours, memories, habits, and histories. So many histories, wounds, traumas big and small, misunderstandings, and pain. I see this in myself and in my husband, and today I do so with more empathy than I did yesterday or last week.

Today I can see it too with his mother visiting us. Over the years, many things that have happened in my presence, which I took as something against me personally, I now realise had nothing to do with me at all. I naively thought, thirteen years ago or so, that I had stumbled across a perfect family, in meeting his, with excellent manners and a certain way of doing things. But now I understand that like attracts like because this is what we know, this is what feels familiar. When we have learned to pretend it’s ok, we find others that have learned to do this too. Even if it appears different on the surface, our bodies feel it, our unconscious knows, and we find those that have similar patterns, whether they are good for us or not.

So tonight in my kitchen things looked different to me. I could see her busy nervousness in a way I hadn’t before. It had nothing to do with me. It was just another pattern, a comfortable, familiar pattern that likely doesn’t even feel good to her but she just doesn’t know how to just be or do differently. This piqued a new sense of empathy for her, so I was able to speak to her a bit about me, ask questions a bit about her, and not feel like her strangeness was even strange, but just a nervous habit. Perhaps her behaviour patterns, her nervous business, her inability to really listen to what is being said, perhaps this all comes from her having felt invisible for so long in her own life, her own marriage and family, for now I know from speaking with my husband, that he felt this way as a child at home, too. She was who he learned it from, most likely because she felt this way herself.

So for this holiday season, I will continue to be immensely grateful, for I have now just what I wanted last year, a husband at home and learning to relax in his own space, a house filled with family, and a Christmas of just us five. I hope that in being more of myself, I might show others around me that they can be more of themselves, too.