Monday May 14 turned out to be one of the most significant days for me of my entire life. Comically, there is a slight chance I’m mixing things up and the important things happened on Tuesday….but I really do think Monday was when they most likely happened.
Weather has been unbelievably good the past few weeks. I think May is my new favorite month. I love being outside when the weather is good. Again we spent time outside after I got home from work, and I got these cute shots of Ammon.
Even though the weather was nice, I was feeling very sad and troubled, and Lily could tell. Lily started feeling very sad because she felt like she did something wrong to make me feel bad. We put the kids down and we started to talk. As we started to talk, I started to blame Lily for why I was feeling sad and troubled. I won’t go into my accusations. They were relatively minor, but still hurtful enough. Obviously hearing me make accusations upset Lily so she went downstairs to work on cleaning up dinner. I sat in my room and prayed and cried. I then went downstairs to be with Lily, having no idea what I was going to say to her.
I then just collapsed onto her and burst into tears and apologized for my behavior. We went downstairs in the basement where we could be alone and I sat on the futon weeping and confessing the fact that I had been feeling jealous of all of the attention and praise she was getting because of her mother’s day talk. I felt so pathetic. Jealousy is something I feel frequently, probably daily and it is one of my biggest Achilles heels. I apologized profusely and tearfully about not being able to celebrate her successes better with her, I apologized for being threatened by her successes, and I just let everything out and allowed myself to be more vulnerable than I had ever allowed myself to be. In that moment, Lily sat right on top of me and stroked my hair, just saying over and over that I was beautiful, that I was so self-aware and vulnerable, and that she forgave me, and that it wasn’t my fault. She told me later that she felt promptings from the Spirit in that moment that helped her to understand why I was struggling the way I was and it helped her to have deep compassion on me. I felt so pathetic, and yet this amazing woman was stroking my hair and calling me beautiful. I’m sorry for how personal this segment is…..but I need to capture this moment for my posterity. That moment to me was the most loved I have ever felt in my entire life. It was a moment in my most pathetic wretchedness, feeling lower than the dust of the earth for the way I failed Lily, and yet, I was received, accepted, loved, forgiven……even beautiful to her. That moment is seared into my memory. It was a major turning point to some of the strain Lily and I had been facing and we have been on a major high ever since. True love is so powerful.