I've lost that lovin' feelin'

Today has been a much better day. I knew it would be. I have banished all sadness from my house.

There are just certain days that aren't good. Yesterday was one of them.

You all were so kind in your comments. Thank you for that. I am constantly in awe of the amazing support of complete strangers that I have found on the internet. Seriously.

Changing topics here.

My husband and I have been married a long time. 15 years and 8 months.

In my experience, marriages have their ups and their downs.

Sometimes things are very, very good. Other times they are very, very difficult. Sometimes they are just so-so.

Right now my husband and I have been going through a rough patch. It is lasting a long time this time. Longer than I ever remember a rough patch lasting before.

It has been hard.

Recently the situation came to the point where we both realized we might not be able to get out of this patch on our own.

We knew that there were people out there trained to help people like us get through a rough patch. Let's call them facilitators.

We decided we should make an appointment to go see one of these facilitators.

Soon.

So on Wednesday that's what we did. We went to see a facilitator.

Since it was our first visit, and there is a lot of explaining to do and paperwork to fill out, we signed up for a two hour visit. We were told the paperwork would fill up most of the first hour.

Well apparently my husband and I are paperwork wizards of some sort, because we had that paperwork filled out in 20 minutes flat(Perhaps it has something to do with the mounds of paperwork we had to fill out for the adoption? Possibly).

After the 20 minutes of paperwork filling out, there was about ten minutes of thumb twiddling while we waited for the facilitator to come back into the room.

That still leaves 90 minutes of time for the facilitator to do the, well, facilitating.

90 minutes is a long time. That's an hour and a half. For facilitating.

During this 90 minutes there was talking. Lots of talking. And yelling(Me). And crying(also me), and accusations flung(again, mostly me, but some of him too).

And the facilitator spoke in a gentle, calming voice and tried to figure out what our most pressing issues were. Because apparently there are a lot of them. Issues, I mean.

During the course of the 90 minutes my husband told the facilitator that he felt like I didn't love him anymore.

I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. All of the air left that windowless room and suddenly I couldn't breathe.

It wasn't until the facilitator asked me a direct question that I realized I had been holding my breath.

I felt physically ill. Sure, we were going through a rough patch. Yes, there had been lots of fighting. (Lots. of. fighting.)

But how could he doubt my love for him?

The facilitator asked him why he felt this way. My husband rattled off a half a dozen things I had said or done in the last three months.

Angry things. Mean things. Awful things.

Suddenly I felt like the worst person in the whole wide world. And I could totally see why he thought I didn't love him anymore.

My actions certainly haven't been indicative of a person who loves someone else.

There has been a lot of anger in our house lately. Unresolved anger that led to actions that I am not proud of.

I am not the only one to blame. There have been actions(and inactions) on his part that led to the anger. If you knew what some of those things were, you would be angry too. Trust me.

But I never thought I could ever do anything that would make him think that I didn't love him anymore.

Because I do. Love him. Very very much. He is my life. I don't know how I could ever live without him. I hate that I did or said things to make him feel so cut off from my love. But I did.

So the facilitator is going to be helping us work through the anger, and help us both make some necessary changes to get us back on track.

Because a child deserves two parents who are secure in their love for each other, so that she(he?) may feel secure in their love for her(him?).

This facilitating stuff? It's hard. And exhausting. And I get to do it once a week on my day off, for what could be a long(ish) time. Awesome.

But if that's what it is going to take for us to be a better husband, and wife, and parents, then that's what we'll do.

Because Sophie deserves that. We deserve that.