I have been so excited for this day! I have had it on my calendar for weeks that today Lily and I would sit down, snuggled cozy on the couch and write all our back blogs that we have been too busy to write for the past 2+ months. It’s only 12:30, and we are just getting started, but I’m sure that will consume the rest of our day. Also, Lily is finishing her book, In Sacred Loneliness before she jumps into the blogging, so she will be joining me soon!
While we read and write, the kids are watching TV, and having a cozy day around the house. It is snowing like crazy outside! Here is a picture of Mary and Clarissa in mine and Lily’s (temporary while our bedroom is being constructed) bed:
I also want to briefly mention that as I shoveled snow this morning, my neighbor told me to leave my walks because he would use his snowblower on them. He then disappeared for 20 minutes snow blowing what seemed like half the neighborhood before returning to my sidewalk and snow blowing that too. What a sweet neighbor to have!!
I played in the snow with the kids around 3:30. We had an awesome time. I shoveled snow and delivered it to Lydia who was using it to build a snow fort. Clarissa, Mary and Ammon all attacked me with snow each time I made a trip to deliver snow to Lydia. It was a lot of fun for all. Lydia stayed outside after everyone else went in to keep working on her fort:
Also, here is Clarissa who apparently fell asleep mid stool ascension or descencion around 4:30 after playing in the snow.
The other things I want to report on are some spiritual things that have happened with respect to New Years.
Last year, right before New Years, I felt a spiritual impression tell me, “The most important developments in your life this year will be outside of work.”
Perhaps that is always true actually, but it was an important thing for me to process because work felt extremely consuming at the time. I was struggling in my role as a Team Lead II, which is a an extremely difficult dual role requiring me to manage people and sell my own deals and I was even concerned about keeping my job or having things go reasonably will given the results of the previous year, and given how hard it was to manage all I was trying to juggle without losing my health. I have the late nights working until 2AM or later still burned into my memory and bones.
Amazingly, this year has tuned out to be one of massive success. My team billed about 120% of our annual number, billed 255% of our Q4 number, and landed me a spot on the Bora Bora sales incentive trip. Also, there were many many promotions on my team, including my own promotion to become a Sales Manager, meaning I no longer have to manage a dual role.
Yet, with all that amazing and blessed success, it is amazing to me to report, all of the other much more important things that happened in our lives this year:
- Lily, through her research, integrity and values, decided to leave the LDS church.
- I, through my desire to still have the church in my live and children’s lives decided to stay, but morphed from an orthodox believer to a nuanced believer through the things I learned this year.
- Lily, through her beautiful collaborative spirit and tolerance has been agreeable to me and the children continuing to worship at the LDS church even though she is very opposed to much of what it declares and stands for. To balance out the LDS upbringing for the kids, we attend a different church the first Sunday of every month and have open family discussions so Lily and I have ample opportunity to make sure each of our personal beliefs are transmitted to the children.
- Lily obtained a new beautiful network of friends through the Thrive conference she and I attended.
- We found an eye-doctor therapist for Mary that can help finally heal her cross-eye and depth perception.
- Lydia got into the gifted program at Foothill elementary and started attending there.
- Lily found the home of her dreams, that was also a perfect long-term solution for everyone in the family, and we used my dad as our realtor to purchase the home.
- We had beautiful family trips to the Pacific North West and New Mexico, trips that produced amazing memories and a lot of family bonding.
So, it was an extremely big year. A year that will go down in the books as a very momentous year for our family. To me, the thing I am most grateful for, and most happy about, is that Lily and I have never been in a happier place or more in love even though our approaches to faith are now different. It is deeply meaningful to me that we are modeling to our children that two people who love each other profoundly can stick closely together, actually even closer together, when they have different ways of approaching aspects of life. I want to model that diversity of thought, belief, opinion can be a healthy thing in a marriage, and not a wedge.
This morning I woke up, and I felt another spiritual impression. The impression was, “This will be a year of healing.”
That impression made complete sense to me. All of the new things in our lives this year for me was like giving birth (not that I actually know what that is like, but I can’t think of a better analogy). So many new and beautiful things emerged, but it was not without intense pain, exertion, stress, anxiety, adjustment and discomfort.
Lily’s faith transition started out very rocky with me in the beginning. My own changing faith continues to be excruciatingly difficult as so much that felt certain before now feels to be in question or false. Lily too is searching and questioning in places where she used to find comfort and certainty. Financing and closing on the new home was quite a to-do and certainly the move was a stressful process, especially for Lily who bore the brunt of it. She was moving things over frantically for the week leading up to the move, so it would be reasonably set up the first night we stayed there. She managed that process largely without me because I was so focused on my promotion interview that required a 15 point rubric evaluation that I needed to present a slide deck for and have everything incredibly buttoned up for. All of this was on top of the normal stressed of having 4 kids, dealing with night wakings, normal management, sales and end of quarter stress etc etc etc. I am exhausted.
In fact, I feel broken. I’m still reeling from a panic attack I had after my interview process that resulted from all the stress. I bumped up my next therapist visit to be sooner just to help with this. I feel deeply tired and ragged, but I feel so so so so grateful for the developments in my family this year, for Lily’s collaborative attitude and the way we are working together despite changing attitudes towards the church, and all of the many beautiful things happening in our lives. Being a Team Lead 2 and all of the other things on top of it this year were very hard on my health. I’m truly hoping for, and looking forward to a year of healing in 2020, not just for me, but for everyone in my household. Lily, the kids and Georgia have dealt with a lot of change. I also hope for healing in 2020, for anyone anywhere who needs it. May this be a year of healing.