I also feel old because my friends are suddenly going through that stage of getting married and having kids. I’m married but kids are a few years off for me, or at least I think so. There are other things I want and need to do before I can effectively dedicate my time to a tiny human being. A part of me though is aware that if I want to have children this is probably the best time for it. If I wait too long I will simply be too old.

It’s ridiculous I know, but there is no denying the feeling is there. I look back on some of the choices I have made in my life and wish I had taken a different path. Then there is that voice that reminds me that if I hadn’t made those choices I wouldn’t have done some wonderful things, like met and married Ben.

Then there is Hazel. She is a 70 something year old who just graduated from university. I wonder if she felt silly or old when she was studying alongside these young kids. I’m sure that in her eyes I too would come under that classification.

Maybe I’m just making excuses to try to get out of actually doing something I want to be doing. My brain does some incredibly stupid things to me some days.

In the meantime I need to just focus on Hazel and realise that just like her age isn’t a barrier if this is really want I want to do, and if I ask myself honestly I know that this is what I want to do.

Over the last few weeks I have had to make another decision and that was whether to continue in my studies.  The course I am currently enrolled in finishes at the end of this year. If I want to continue I would have to audition for the Bachelor of Music course. Last week I made the decision and sent off my application pack, so far so good…or so I thought.

I have been surrounded by babies lately. Two friends have new borns, my sister has just announced she is pregnant again, another two friends are pregnant and then I worked at the baby expo where every second person was pregnant. It is overloading my small circuitry! I really really really want to have a baby but I have made this commitment to study. Some days it is just harder than other to convince myself that I have made the right decision.

Add on top of that this constant feeling that I have left the whole university thing too late. The average age for people in the course is 19 / 20. I am 27. Now I know that isn’t old but when you think it in terms of most people would be finishing their masters by my age and going out there to get their first big job, I am well behind the 8 ball. I also have trouble keeping up in my theory classes due mostly to the fact that I haven’t been studying music since I was a kid. It is a bit much some days.

To try to combat this a little I have been over commiting myself to work also. I spent the majority of the past week working and have had very little time to spend with Ben. On one hand I think I need the money to get by but really I don’t and spending time with Ben is much more important. I just feel slightly responsible for getting myself back in the black financially after all it was my idea to go to Europe.

So there it is. Blah! My thought patterns on a page at the moment. I guess I need to lay off Ben for a little while. Accept my decisions and learn to live with them because I honestly believe I have made the right choice and the future is going to be brilliant!

It is production week this week for both shows, they both had their preview tonight and they both open on Friday. As you can imagine there have been a lot of last minute rehearsals happening in a desperate attempt to get things ‘perfect’. This week alone we have been to one rehearsal or the other (or in the case of Sunday both) every day. It has gotten to the point now though when we need to stop. The exhaustion has set in. It is time for a break.

I think the worse thing in all this is that Ben and I don’t seem to be spending as much time together as we usually do. We have also taken to sleeping in separate beds because we seem to get better sleep when there isn’t another body in the bed, and with sleep eluding us we will take what we can get. It isn’t ideal but it works.

I miss waking up and having our slow sleepy mornings together, sharing breakfast together and talking about the day.

I miss coming home at night and spending time unwinding, listening to music, going to the movies or watching a video.

Most of all I miss Ben. We don’t haven’t seen each other much the last two weeks. Hopefully once the shows open we can get back to being awesome together. Because we are pretty damn awesome.

You can’t have a good day, you need to make it a good day.

Sometimes, when it seems like everything is going wrong, it takes a little more energy to notice the good things. I have learned that, with practise, it get’s easier and easier to do. The trick is to get started early, when things aren’t going “wrong”.

When you realise you are having a good day, practise making it better. Notice that you are doing so; notice your self into a good habit. Then, when a day isn’t working out so well, you have the tools to make it better.

Do so.

The first thing that has crept into my mind with each announcement has been something negative. With the arrival of Ella last week I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that could go wrong now that she is here. Again today at the arrival of Tate, all I could do was pray that he is okay and will make his parents so happy. When I heard about the pregnancy, running through my head was all the events that unfolded in our twelfth week, and a prayer that they don’t experience the same thing.

Why?

Why am I doing this?

Why are these thoughts overtaking me?

Why aren’t I or can’t I do anything to stop them?

The worst thing is that I am honestly happy for these new parents but am finding the sincerity from me lacking. Looking at the baby photos, reading about what they are going through and seeing the looks on their faces all I want to do is be 100% happy but I am finding it so difficult.

When will the hurt go away? Will it ever go away?

I feel ridiculous being unhappy after so many months, like I am unjustified somehow in feeling this way. Part of me feels like I should have let go already while another part almost knows I will never completely let go.

Image by Luke Edmonds of his first baby boy Tate

Yesterday Perth was hit with sort of a mini Noah’s flood of sorts. Below is a photo of an actual street in Atwell.

Image by Jarrad Lawrence (facebook)

The storm hit at around 4:00pm, a time when I would normally be coming home, except for yesterday. I had an appointment with the doctor at 2:00pm so had left school early and then gone to my parents place at around 3:00pm because they wanted to talk to me about wedding plans. If I had done my usual routine I would have been caught right in the middle of the storm, my car would now be damaged and I would have been seriously risking my safety by driving home. As chance would have it I was safe in my parent’s house and my car only got one dent in it as opposed to my parents car which looks a lot like the one below, cellulite anyone?

Image by Cali Graham (facebook)

Anyway, so while alone at my parent’s place things started going a little crazy. The house started flooding. First it came through the front door, then it starting coming in through the windows and eventually the roof. At one point I emptied the buckets collecting water under one window to find myself pouring twenty litres down the drain, and that was only after ten minutes of collecting. I even had to rescue my mums dog from attempting to hang himself on the fence when the hail, thunder and lightning got too much for him and he tried a very bold escape plan, jumping the fence, despite him being several kilograms overweight and not at all athletic beyond a light trot.

I learnt later from Ben that our house had suffered a similar fate. We now have a smashed roof, flooded downstairs room and water damage to belongings.

What came out of this event though was the realisation that through everything, despite how much water was coming in, or how much damage we were sure to find in the morning, the one thing that mattered the most was that our loved ones were safe.

Ben and I called each other to make sure we were okay and to keep each other updated, because I was further north than him I could tell him if the storm was letting up or getting worse before he attempted to go anywhere. Mum and Dad called to check that my niece and nephew, who live with them, had got home safely from school and tried to contact my sister, who was stranded at UWA (see below that is hail you can see, not snow) to make sure she was safe. Even after the storm Mum called all my brothers and sisters to see if they were okay.

UWA James Oval

Image by Ben Corry (Flickr)

No one rang to find out if their computer was okay, or if the television had been saved, it was just genuine concern for the truly important things in life, because at the end of the day; a car, a television, even a house, can be replaced but a loved one can’t be.

This event also sparked a turning point for me. Noah’s flood was an opportunity for the people of Earth to see what they were doing with their lives and start to make a change, to focus on the important things and not the things that we ‘think’ are important. I’m going to try giving this a go.

I’m going to make more time for loved ones, for collecting memories instead of possessions and to do the things that are important to me, like getting out of bed in the morning and going for my run no matter how tired or cranky I am or how windswept and debris filled the streets are. It is time to take this new beginning and use it to make something worthwhile.

Emma has made arrangements to catch public transport to work. This is great! A 45 minute air-conditioned pre-work siesta with a book. Sounds delicious, no? So off she trots, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (v. nice tail, actually) and I return to my breakfast delights.

Five minutes later the front door reefs open and bangs close. My little grey fox is mumble grumbling something and I get the idea that something has gone wrong. The bus is right there! The bus stop is right out the front of our house, so I am a little surprised that she missed it (or was in the process of missing it).

The stupid bus broke down!

The stupid bus broke down and look where it broke down! Right outside the house, so I can’t even drive to work.

I offer to let her take my car to work (it’s parked out back) and that kind of works, but it’s not until she comes upstairs that I can see her face.

How can I compete when the world is throwing things like THAT at me? I mean, how do you even arrange for the a bus to break down in your driveway for exactly enough time for you to walk back up the drive, turn around to point out the broken bus AS.. IT… DRIVES AWAY!!

The bus had recovered and was pulling away as she was saying this to me. The look of total disbelief on her face was priceless.

I’m sorry, baby, I just had to share this one. You did a great job of recovering and getting to work, but it was SO funny at the time. Okay, It was funny to me.

Image by JonasPhoto (Flickr).

In The Conscious Relationships Seminar you’ll learn how to:

- Take responsibility for the judgments you tell yourself about your partner. The empowering insight is that it is much less important to try to change someone else than it is to stop the mental whirlwind of your own stories about the other that make you unhappy.

- Recognize that your partner is truly “other.” No one out there is you and expecting them to think or feel or behave as you do is simply narcissism. Instead of being polarized by your differences, you begin to marvel at them and learn to respect the uniqueness of each other. Gradually, no longer fighting against perceived differences you will often find yourselves spontaneously surprised by a deeper love that is unconditional.

- See that our partners are not in our lives to fulfill us or protect us from threatening feelings. A consecrated relationship is one in which we commit ourselves to mature psychologically and spiritually by learning to hold whatever vulnerable or dark feelings are aroused in us through the course of the relationship. Nearly 50% of marriages end in divorce, and while some are because of actual incompatibility, many and maybe most are because the feelings aroused in these relationships are too overwhelming for many people to bear, and the tendency is to blame the other.

- Re-Enliven your Relationship. Love is not something you give or take. It is something that claims you and re-enlivens your relationship when you meet each other fully in the present without defenses. In this sense relationship can become a transcending path whose limits no one knows.

Serendipity or Irony?

The universe is a funny funny place!

Initially it wasn’t about anything much but it quickly bloomed into yelling and storming out. I’m still confused as to why it sparked over and went nova. I keep thinking that, “It wasn’t me”, but actually I think it was. I yelled rather than explained and had I made that little extra effort, the outcome would have been different.

What have I learned from this?

• Being tired increases the chance of making silly mistakes.
• Not everything is the way I see it.
• Sometimes the answer isn’t the answer.

So now I want to patch things up, but in retrospect it would have been simpler to not have made the break in the first place. I knew that already, but it didn’t make a difference this time. Next time I will try to remember that and make a change (for the better).

It also occurs to me that, on our finite time schedule, we’d both better work on this aspect of our relationship as it’s going to be vital to our sanity once the baby is born.

I do hope that this post doesn’t make things worse, I’m pretty sure it will make things initially more difficult, but then I think it will be good for our communication later on. I’m about to find out now, though, so here goes!

I will let Emma have a little more sleep first though. It really does make a difference to both of us.

24 hours per day. ~30 days per month. 9 months in total.

And I’ve already lost about a month because we didn’t know the countdown had started!

So I have started to use my phone’s countdown timer to help me divide my time to tasks I want to complete. It helps me prioritise the tasks I am going to do as well – I have to decide how much, in total, I am willing to give over to a particular task.

So:

• Reading a new book – 1 hour
• Investigating travel insurance claim – 1 hour
• Getting some extra work done while taking the day off – 30 minutes
• Blog post – 35 minutes
• Get dinner ready – what ever is left over before Emma comes home.

Obviously I will be revising the system as I go, but today it has worked well.

I also realise there are people out there that already do this all the time. I was not one of them.