I haven’t done one of these in a while. The idea is to use this day of the week to look back into the past and see where I was on another day of the blog. I like looking back months and especially years. Today I’m looking back at 1876. This was the first iteration of the blog many many years ago. I was still watching Banshee on Cinemax… There was still a Cinemax (isn’t it gone?). I wrote about the balance of relationships and posited, “I fear many relationships are torn apart by a failure to communicate and if we could all just reiterate what we want and need–without getting angry or defensive about the need to reiterate–a lot more relationships would be happy ones.”
Years later I haven’t figured this out even a little. I am a fairly poor communicator in my own union. I’d argue I am bad to the point that it hasn’t blossomed into a marriage because of the mistakes in communication that I’ve made. I write women far better than I understand them in RL. I don’t write women particularly well. This was seven long years ago. I hold on to the idea that we become completely new people over the course of seven years. Yet I see that I have not drifted very far from the anchor of this old post. I try more and more to teach the boys how to act and be men, as I suggested I ought to do back then. I’ve done fairly well with two of the 3 of my blood and 1 of the 2 not of my blood. I’m told I’ve impacted the thinking of one of those two in a positive way at times. The other appears immune to my charms.
I continue to work on balance. I continue to work on being a partner and a lover and a father and a man and all of it demands a lot of me. I’ve shed roles along the way, but the ones I list are the ones I intend to keep and learn to be better at.