I've been married for 20 years this May. Nate and I have been through waiting for a year to be sealed in the temple for 1 year without breaking the law of chastity. We've been through 1 miscarriage, 1 ectopic pregnancy, another miscarriage of a twin while pregnant with my 3rd. Undergrad. Medschool. Living with his parents and 3 sisters for a year during an externship where we only saw each other on the weekends. Residency. Buying a medical practice. Owning an airplane and having it almost kill my husband. Partnerships and associateships and all other trials that come with owning your own business. 4 children. My nice little list of medical problems - major car accident, 2 jaw surgeries, toe surgery, hip surgery and misc. Building a house where the contractor went bankrupt. Everything we own breaking down all the time. The list goes on and on.
Through our many lean years of abject poverty we devised something to help me cope. I can't tell you how many nights I spent crying over things we couldn't afford and things I would never have. How having the smallest of wish lists seemed so insurmountable. I also have a funny way of forgetting how things always work out and I usually end up getting what I want in the end. In an effort to help prioritize into level of importance and to be able to see the progress we were making towards my wishes, my husband came up with the white board. For many years we had a huge one hanging on our bedroom wall that we could stare at each night while we were in bed. Sometimes making the list would get me even more overwhelmed because you could see just how much you thought would never happen.
The lists have varied throughout the years. But they have always been temporal and monetary in nature. Slowly but surely things would begin to get erased from the board. Often times when it didn't seem finically possible that we could ever achieve erasing even 1 thing from the list, but somehow we did. Eventually the board would get the last thing erased and we would start again. The last one I used was when we were building this house. We haven't used it as much lately, but there were 4 things left written on this little board that I erased to make my current list. It had pay off the car and something else I can't remember that we accomplished and the 2 that we hadn't were pay off the house and something else I can't remember right now, probably something about retirement.
I'm taking it as a sign that I am starting to feel better because I looked around the house and saw all kinds of things I wanted to change. I've been in survival mode when it comes to my house and not really caring very much. I knew the only thing I could do. Start making my wish list - or let's be real- demand list. ;0)
In case my pic isn't readable. Because it certainly couldn't be my unreadable handwriting! It says:
1. move ping pong table to the back garage
2. move LR couch up to loft
3. move awful trash pit coffee table out of MB
4. move random end table in loft down to LR
5. get low cabinet for MB and my crap
6. see if we can make LR chairs work in MB
7. New furniture for LR
8. Bench/couch for MB if chairs don't work
9. new bench for piano
10. new cushions for outdoor furniture
Then I placed it where my husband would be sure to see it - above the fireplace in our bedroom. I made the list on Thursday. By Saturday at 10 pm, it looked like this:
See, I told you. It's magical. 5 things are already done! I have a practically empty living room right now, but I don't care. It can stay like that for awhile because I'm not sure what I want to do with it and I'm not really in the mood to spend any money on it - and my husband never is in the mood to spend money. I should really move the piano out of there because it has 3 exterior walls and a piano really shouldn't be on an exterior wall, but I don't know what else to do. Actually, my house has very few interior walls.
For our date on saturday Nate humored me and helped me look for a container for my crap. I did get a reminder about our other goals for the year and furniture wasn't one of them. I think he hated looking at my crap as much as I did so he was an easy sell when I found something really cheap that would do the trick. Jared and I put it together and then Nate got called in when attaching the doors was giving us grief. You can see the boxes of crap waiting to be put away and out of sight and nothing is allowed to be stacked on top…at least that's the goal! The other reminder I got was a video he made of me last year. He likes to document my gloom and doom declarations. While he was outside making sure there were no problems with the rv before we take a road trip with it, he found a little gem he had on his phone. I was being academy award winning dramatic about how we shouldn't be allowed to own an rv, a pool, a house, a anything because it always breaks! lol. He was amused and so was I. These award winning performances was precisely how the white board came into existence so long ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment