To recap from my last post: I got deep clarity about my need for nature during my two days away at the Sea of Galilee; then I came home and wanted to share my newly awakened awareness with my husband.

I prefaced my comments by telling him that I wasn’t suggesting in any way that we take action of any sort, but I just wanted to be heard regarding something important to me.

He listened to me attentively as I then shared all that I shared with you in my last post, but in more detail. When I finished, he looked at me and said, “I really hear what you’re saying and that’s a real concern. So what do we do now?”

That was completely not what I was expecting.

Let me explain. Over the last few months, I’ve been uncharacteristically restless and have conceived various ideas with the hope that we find somewhere else in RBS where we could have either: more garden space/more indoor space/quieter neighborhood/somewhere with a view.

Every time I shared one of these ideas with my husband, he would shake his head and say, “We’re not going to move just to have a view of some trees.” Or, “I think we have enough space and we don’t need any more.”

I assumed that hearing yet more about my restlessness wasn’t going to be something he’d be very receptive to, despite his willingness to listen to each of my schemes. And so I was very taken aback by his response.

I rushed to once again reassure him that we didn’t need to do anything. But he was already thinking aloud about what possibilities there were.

My response? Complete stonewalling. Because as far as I was concerned, there were no possibilities that existed for us.

“We can’t move. We can’t leave here. Our kids are happy, it’s convenient for our married kids to visit, we can’t start over again.”

We can’t, we can’t, we can’t.

This is a place that I got mentally stuck for quite some time. I wanted something more but simply couldn’t see how it was possible. It felt selfish of me to move our family for my preferences and I couldn’t get past that.

It wasn’t until I began to consider the potential benefits to our children that I was able to slowly change gears. I started to think, ‘If living somewhere more expansive was good for me, maybe for similar reasons it would also be good for my children.” Hmm.

Hmm.

I slowly released the story I was telling myself about how unhappy everyone would be if we moved and started considering something different:

• my married kids (they would visit less often but perhaps they would stay longer if we had a more comfortable space to host them);
• my middle kids, ages 20, 18 and 17 (they all have one foot out the door into the adult world so it would affect them less);
• my next three boys (they would love the increased outdoor time),
• and for my youngest two, I really didn’t have any significant concerns (other than legal ramifications of moving with Rafael to a different district regarding foster care).

Changing my ideas about what I can have, what I am worthy of, believing it’s possible…this was hard.

What was incredibly striking to me after I was able to move into possibility thinking was how much the limitations in my  life were created…by me. It was my belief that I couldn’t have more that shut the door on thinking about how to create something better.

Avivah