Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Allow

Every single one of us has hang ups. We have our idiosyncrasies that can make the people who love us crazy. My seven year old son sees one injustice from a peer and he wants to write that person off. If someone tells him they can see his arms in a tank top, he won't want to wear it again. If someone says his eyelashes are long, he thinks he is being made fun of and thinks that person is mean. My daughter and I were talking to him today and trying to explain that everyone does annoying things. No one is perfect all of the time, and you just have to allow people to have their annoying qualities.

I have my annoying qualities that I am learning to allow myself to accept. For example it is 11:30pm right now, I am leaving on a 7 am flight in the morning and have to be up ridiculously early, so I just finished cleaning the house. I have a very strange sense of timing, but I got a bee in my bonnet that the house needed to be clean before I left for two weeks and there is no way for me to talk that bee out of my head once it starts buzzing. I am happier when I have a clean house when I leave. I am also happier finishing this post than leaving it hanging before I get on a plane.

My daughter just turned eleven and doesn't pick up her room. She keeps papers, knickknacks and every book she has ever read. She seems to have an emotional attachment to any items she accumulated in her eleven years, while my son loves throwing things out, giving them away and keeping order in his room. She forgets to turn out lights when she leaves a room and needs to be reminded to use utensils when eating. She is still an incredible human that I love, and yet it is challenging to allow her space to grow out of these behaviors.

Accepting and allowing differences in spouses is also difficult at times. I love that my husband and I both have such a passion for living and always want to be out and about. We want to try new restaurants, new neighborhoods, new hikes and adventures. Neither one of us is a homebody, but every now and again on a weekend, I just want to hang at home and I don't know if he is able to do that. His cabin fever gets hotter much quicker than the rest of us in the house and if noon comes around and he hasn't left the house yet then he will leave without us.

None of these quirks are hurting anyone else, so there really is no need to change them up anytime soon. I would love to learn to change my inner clock to have a better sense of how long things take, but I seem to think I am so much faster than I am. I was in my twenties when my close friend reminded me that "things take time, leave enough time for things," and here I am in my forties, still not getting that. I allow that part of me to be there, but I do not accept that I can't get better. I am not even half way through my forties, so there is still time. In the meantime, I will try to do a bit less,  maybe sleep a bit more, and let my house get dirty once in a while. Who am I kidding? No I won't.