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There are a whole lot of things I can’t control, but I don’t want to be one of them. I want to be in charge of how I react to whatever’s  happening. I don’t want my responses to be dictated by some past experience that welled-up unnoticed and handled a situation it had no business being anywhere near. I don’t want my fears to dictate where I go or circumscribe what I do. I can’t have the specter of this morning’s problems haunt my afternoon. A sister is busy. I need to have the presence of mind to let my mind handle my present.

I don’t want the least of me to command the rest of me. While I’m not ashamed of my odd,  I’m not enamored of it either. While some of my weird is helpful other parts are not.  So I make sure that the latter doesn’t mess up the good things the former does.

I have to be in command of me even if I can’t command the situation so at the very least I don’t fool around and make matters worse.  To do that I have to, in my mother’s words, “Get my Mind Right.” “Getting Your Mind Right” is a decision to actively address how you feel. This is how my mother explained it to me as my impatience showed up and was about to show out one day at the DMV.

“Get your mind right, ” she said.  “This process is what it is and there isn’t anything you can do about it.  You should have been prepared when you came here to feel a little annoyed and you should know enough not to pass that along. That woman up there didn’t think up this mess and she has a job to do. All day long she deals with impatient people like you who are angry with her for something that is not her fault.  If you want this thing to go a little smoother, go up there and be especially nice.  Sympathize with the problems she has and she’ll be more likely to go out of her way for you. Either way this process is what it is. How you feel when you leave here is completely up to you.”

I now live my entire life with that last line in mind. I don’t act on how I feel until I figured out whether it will help me get what I need to get done, even if it’s just maintaining my personal peace during a situation I can’t control.

I work my emotions like a job. I think everybody should.

My Mother’s Rules: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Emotional Genius p. 37

Marriage has been around for thousands of years. It has bent and shook and shifted to meet the necessities of place and time. The problem is the world has changed so rapidly of late that marriage hasn’t had time to catch up. Our society no longer changes in the slow, plodding manner of the past. We now engage in the universal exchange of information and ideas at lightning speed. Legal, social and moral absolutes have shifted, been lifted and some have simply disappeared. Women, legally liberated and economically able, have choices they never had before. There are now have an endless array of options.

Compared to the way we used to work and live just a hundred years ago, we have copious amounts of free time and unparalleled access to things that give us immediate gratification. We now have the time and social permission to ponder what we want, ruminate on how we feel and ask ourselves, “Am I happy?”

Despite these sweeping changes, we haven’t rethought marriage in any significant way. Once an institution of obligation, it is now one of choice. No longer arraigned, mandated or simply the only game in town, today marriage is something we do simply because we have fallen in love. Formerly a legal fortress difficult to escape, these days it’s something we can walk away from any time we please. Having changed the reasons we get into it and obliterated most of the obstacles to out, the institution may look and sound the same but it’s completely new.   But we haven’t changed how we approach it. We keep reaching back for old school solutions to modern day problems because we liked the old school divorce rate. That’s like trying to fix a Prius with parts from a Model T Ford.

As contradictory as this might seem, I believe we can get closer to living the marriage fantasy of “Happily Ever After” by accepting the fact that the fairytale does not exist. We are not rudderless ships in the rising tide of a failing institution. In order to make this old institution work in this new day and age we need to take the best of what was, acknowledge the challenges that are, and create a something new. Once we removed all the stuff that used to cement marriages together, it ceased to be a state of being and became a process that we engaged in. We need to accept that and decide to accommodate the changes in social circumstances, absorb the aftershocks of unparalleled technological advances, and create a marriage scenario that functions well — not for everyone, but for the two of you.

We can replace the glue that used to keep marriages together with a greater understanding of how we work. We can revel in the joy of romantic love, but still be practical in its application. In modern-day marriage, love is king. But, as in all of life, practicality is queen. And I believe it is time to show Her Highness some respect.

Rule Number 1: Decide to be consciously married.

Think of marriage as a 2-year-old who we want to let go outside. Fifty years ago we had legal, social and moral fences that kept that kid in the back yard. Over time we took the fences down, one by one. Yet we still have the nerve to be shocked when we look up and find the child has left the grounds. Of course he’s gone. All the things we relied on to rein him in have been removed and we haven’t made any deliberate effort to replace them with anything else.

Now that containment is no longer the answer, we need to engage in active parenting. You have to keep that 2-year-old engaged and appropriately directed. You cannot take your eyes off of him and let him wander too far away from you. That means you have to start working on your marriage the very second after you say I do.

With those fences down you have to put procedures into place to feed what we know about the biological realities of love and the social realities of how we currently live. We have to actively pursue a passion that keeps our attention while we are out back. We need to spend more time being hand in hand so we don’t drift apart.

In other words, you have to be consciously married. It is no longer a state of being, something you can just enter into and let it rest where it is. It is that toddler who needs constant attention designed to keep him happy and occupied.

from Making Marriage Work

Sometimes it’s hard to understand how your spouse, someone who lives with you, loves you and knows you better than anyone else has a hard time understanding you.

“What fresh hell is this?” I’ve often muttered to myself. “How in the world can he know me this long and not understand what I just said.”

“What is wrong with this woman?” I’m sure my husband has wondered, “That’s not what I said at all.”

I’ll tell you what the problem is.  Men are weird and women are odd and that’s what’s just what that it is. The best way I can describe the difference between how my husband and I conduct business, is that he thinks like a laser beam and I think in photon bursts. Consequently, I contend he has tunnel vision and he believes I’m a ping pong ball.

I see how everything I do effects everyone in the house. I pay attention to the  emotional and physical well being of everyone around me. To me, this whole ball of wax we call a family is inextricably interconnected.  I think it’s weird that he can’t pick up on disparate clues from different places and figure out how someone feels. If I didn’t manage this all male household no one would have the faintest clue when they needed to go to the doctor.

On the other hand, my husband thinks I am odd because I talk so much about extraneous stuff. My desire to manage everyone’s emotions is a hindrance to him. I clutter up his time and mind with emotional details that don’t really affect what we need to do at the time. “What are you asking him for?” he says to me when I am talking to my son. “Tell him what to do and tell him to do it now.” He wants to establish authority. He knows how important that is. I want to have a conversation, one they have no interest in at all. I have to say I stood back and let him take that one on whole when any one of the boys turned 15. Those people would have had me for lunch had I not listened to him.

The beauty of this joint bewilderment is that we are both right. He is weird and I am odd. Moreover, that’s the way it is supposed to be and neither one of us is wrong. Between us we have it all covered. I may not understand why he thinks something or other but I do have enough sense to know when his way of doing business makes more sense.  Likewise Big Man has figured out when my point of view is the best way to go.

I’m not going to lie, it took us a while to get to here and it’s still not all smooth sailing. It still drives me crazy when he’s riding around the parking lot looking for just the right spot. And his eyes still glaze over a few minutes into 1/3 of the conversations we have. But I bite my tongue even on the third trip around parking garage and he hangs in there for the fourth story.

Love doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry. You have to say it all the time. Sometimes it’s just knowing when to suck something up or leave something else alone.

for more see Making Marriage Work Chapter 6.