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It has been a hard year

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  • August 11, 2017 at 8:45 am #163444
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Dorothy:

    Reads to me that you are primarily a woman-of-roles: a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sibling. The individual part of you suffers as you juggle these roles, having given up graduate school and “many things in life that I derived pleasure”.

    As a wife, you took a supportive role: “other than being supportive and helpful with our daughter, there was little much I could do to affect the outcome” and “when it comes to our financial future he is completely in the driver’s seat (a spot I initially yielded)” but are unhappy with your husband financial decisions/ strategy and future in the workplace.

    As a mother, you “feel burned out and tired many days, but also restless for change”- yet you continue IVF treatment.

    My suggestions:

    Re-consider the IVF. I understand having a second child has been a dream. Some dreams need to be re-evaluated and sometimes abandoned. You are already burned out and tired having one child, helpless and hopeless, in the passenger (not the driving) seat of your marriage. These may not be circumstances congruent with having another pregnancy and another child.

    Reconsider your support role in your marriage and take a co-driver seat in it. Sit with your husband and through talks, over time, face reality as is, make choices as co-drivers/ equal partners in this marriage. If your graduate degree is likely to lead to a much better financial future, consider it. Your helpless and hopeless feelings will improve as you… help yourself and the marriage as an equal, active partner.

    anita

     

    August 11, 2017 at 10:46 am #163468
    Peter
    Participant

    You certainly have had a hard year. I can’t address the issues you have experienced however would like to say something about the concept of hope.

    If I mourn my hope that all will improve due to simple luck, will this allow me to move on and redefine my own goals and aspirations?

    I think it depends on how you understand and exercise this thing we call hope.

    Though some will disagree with me I believe that Hope is a skill.  Most people I have observed assume they “know” what concepts such as hope, forgiveness, love
 without ever questioning their expectations, of those ideals, and so hope unskillfully.

    We can hope with eyes closed (Passive) or with eyes open (Active). The danger with passive hope is that is often not hope but wishful or magical thinking.  Active hope is more intentional even when the hope is for something that is beyond our control.

    Hope with eyes open is hope that is not attached to the outcome of what’s hoped but open to a something not yet visible.  It is a kind of hope that is a doing by not doing.  You might hope for your parent’s well-being to improve and work towards that goal, acknowledging as it says in the serenity prayer, changing what you can and accepting what you can’t, unattached to how that well-being might look. In this way, you create space for what is hoped to emerge in ways you might not have thought of.

    There is a difference between fantasy, a dream, a goal, and an intention, and before we hope it might be helpful to become conscious of what our hope is pointed to. Is the hope pointed to a fantasy, a dream, a goal or an intention?  Once that is identified we might better know what we are really hoping for and if its worth holding on to.

    For example, I might hope to win the lottery, but never buy a ticket. Such hope would be hope with eyes shut and unskillful. When I examine that hope I see its a fantasy hoping that luck will lead to Financial Security. The reality I’m really hoping for financial security. If I let go of the hope to win the lotto and instead hope for financial security, working towards that goal, while remaining unattached to how that Financial security must look like and be experienced I suspect I might discover that perhaps such security might not have anything to do with money at all.

    We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. -Seneca

    “the most painful state of being is remembering a future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” – Kierkegaard

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