I am grateful for a husband who makes me talk.  

That is a hard sentence to write and impossible to say out loud.  Even as I’m typing it, I’m not 100% positive I believe it.  Perhaps if I say it enough times it will make it true.

He has good intentions.  I am an introvert AND I also generally do not enjoy using my words verbally.  I want to write them (and read them from others actually rather than hear them).  My kids often ask what magical powers I would have if I could have one.  It is always to be deaf.

I NEVER want to talk on the phone. 

Sometimes I feel like the Grinch when he hears the town singing: “And that noise.  Oh that noise, noise, noise, noise.”  

I could go a LONG time without speaking and without hearing another person’s voice interrupt my thoughts before I started to miss it.

But I digress.  I am grateful for a husband who makes me talk???

Yes, he means well.  And yes, if he didn’t try to drag things out of me sometimes, hurt feelings would probably get buried deeply and begin to fester.  But, there are definitely times where I don’t actually need to talk about something to let it go.  And sometimes I’m not ready to talk about a given subject.

However, he doesn’t know the difference between those moments: 1. Because I’m not saying anything and 2. Because he’s not a mind reader.

And there are times where he has been thinking about something for a while and will just pop up with a random question that just happens to get me started. Those are probably the moments I’m grateful for. 

He actually asked an interesting question the other morning, out of the blue as per usual.

He asked what makes me anxious.  I paused for a bit to consider where the conversation was headed and why, trying to decide whether he wanted specific life examples, or just the general overarching theme.  He’s an engineer.  He likes to solve problems (even when he hasn’t been asked to fix something), and so I went with the answer that gets to the root of the problem overall: Lack of control.

When I started to explain more specifically that it is lack of control, usually over things that are beyond my control anyway, he found that part intriguing.  My anxiety is triggered (mostly) by external forces, while his is internally driven.  So, he was with me on the “control” part, but when I started to give external examples he realized that our experiences are quite different.  

His experience of anxiety comes when he has so many thoughts and ideas and doesn’t have a way (yet) to organize and compartmentalize them into their proper places.  I’m not saying that isn’t my experience also, however, I will admit that a lot of my anxiety and stress comes from outside of myself.  And yes, I know that’s where my work is.  To pause, take a breath, and remember that I can’t control the volume of my children, or their attitude malfunctions on any given day.  Nor can I control the weather, or unexpected days off from school, or cars breaking down, or meetings popping up, or any other number of disturbances to my carefully laid plans.  

And I do experience what he describes as internally driven anxiety.  And I also think that I cause most of it myself. For instance at times when my brain is having a thousand ideas and I haven’t had time to get them all out and organized and written down, but I’ve now got the kids with me.  I can’t have a coherent thought for longer than 10 seconds at a time when they are around. AND if I persist and keep trying (but failing) I get angry, and frustrated. With myself, and with them.  

I think this goes back to something I mentioned a while ago about how my husband can tune things out more easily than I can.  He isn’t bothered or made anxious by the external forces because he can literally and figuratively tune them out.  Whereas I have to REMIND myself to tune them out.  

In the case of having the children interrupt my brain, I usually need to make a choice.  A conscious decision to stop trying to use my brain and be present with them OR leave the space to sort out whatever it is that I’m pondering or stuck on.  I absolutely can’t do both at the same time.

And so, all of this conversation (which we had out loud, *gasp*)  from a random single sentence question.  Perhaps he just caught me at a good moment (no kids around, brain not already firing a million miles a minute with work to be done), but it sparked a thought provoking conversation and it gave us both insights into each other’s minds.  And it sparked me to think further about my own anxiety and ways to mitigate the disruptions from it.  Ways to keep the calm rather than have to restore it (spoiler alert….my next blog post about self care totally revolves around this!).

And I am grateful to have a husband who instigated it all.