all the things we've never said.
I close my eyes and try to breathe,
but it's pounding in my head.
Communication in a relationship is critical. My relationship with Pricklypants (the twins' father) doesn't always have a great connection in the communication department.
Communication with the twins, that's even more difficult. Living in a house full of people who have trouble communicating their needs, their frustrations, their wants...it's a challenge, and some days, I just don't feel up to it. Some days, if we're being completely honest here (and isn't that the point?), I do the bare minimum, and I feel guilty about it every. single. time.
But when that's all the energy I have, well, that's all the energy I have. Trying to get that across to Pricklypants is like ramming my head into a brick wall - which is usually what I end up feeling like doing. But the thing is, he feels the same way about talking to me. It must be both of us then, right? We're both dysfunctional in the communication department?
Kind of crazy, since I have a bachelor's degree in writing, minor in communications. I wrote as a newspaper reporter for two and a half years. It must just be that I can't talk to him, maybe because he never hears me. Maybe because what I hear from him, isn't what he's really trying to say.
And the thing is, parenting takes communication. It takes two parties being able to come together to make a better life for the two little beings they created. Pricklypants and I are so far apart on what to do when it comes to the twins, and it gets frustrating. He just doesn't get that these little boys are different than he was, they're different than I was, and there's a better way to do it than our parents did it - no one is calling them failures, Pricklypants and I both vaguely resemble functional, independent adults (myself more than him, obviously) - but we know something's up, and there are ways that have been proven to work for other families that I'd like to try for ours, for the sake of our kids. Every step forward isn't just a fight with the twins, it's a fight with their dad.
It's exhausting. Growing up, reading teen romance novels, I got this idea of what love and marriage would be. This is not it, but let's be realistic, that kind of romance is fiction, it might be based on something tangible, Pricklypants and I are not married, we've procreated, we've been together for nearly 5 years, lived together for 4 and a half years...But let's not forget that Pricklypants and I only dated 3 months before I got pregnant. He hadn't even graduated high school. We didn't build a relationship, we dove headfirst into it without taking a breath; we're not ready to make another lifetime commitment - we've already got the kids.
We don't have a perfect relationship, and most days we probably wouldn't say that we have a good relationship, but it works for now. We're live-in-the-moment kind of people, anyway. But if we expect that this is going to continue to work, we're going to have to work a little harder - communication, passion, parenting. It's been a circulating conversation for years now, we need to find some common interests, some time without the kids. That's the hard part, really.
I'm hoping we'll be able to start doing that. Pricklypants is possibly moving to full-time, so he'll be off two nights a week, and I'm hoping to utilize some respite on those two evenings so that we can do something as a couple. We need to work on us, if we're going to work as a team in this parenting thing...Now to get Pricklypants on board.
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