High maintenance doll

It has been a particularly busy few months with my husband barely at home these days and my trip away imminent. With only one adult at home, many tasks inevitably fell to me, many of which I hate to do because they are of a technical nature and I am finding it a bit like learning a foreign language. I have to keep learning the jargon to understand what people are saying to me and take my ‘best guess’ as to what sort of response I should give them.

The situation has dynamically changed because whereas my husband wanted to make these choices and decisions in the past and I would need to confer with him, now he pushes me to just get things done the best way I can.

This situation is not conducive to the dolli state of mind and I find myself going through a transition period where I am riling against being given this latitude. Suddenly, *I* have to deal with the techno heads, or the car repair people getting quotes for a silly person that banged into the back of my car, or for getting international roaming on my phone (I still don’t know if that actually went through since another sim card was declined) and it became impossible for me to hold my temper with the young man in the store and the woman on the phone who more or less just wished me luck with the situation, unable to figure what, if anything, went wrong with the long process.

As I stood in line at American Express waiting my turn to buy some English pounds, I tried my yoga deep breathing and asked myself, “Why are you so darn worked up about doing these chores yourself?”

I read a book a few months ago that spoke to the notion that we think of love in various ways. Some of us see being given things as love and others of us like me see service and time spent together as their preferred way of receiving love. When I send an email to my husband explaining that something needs to be done and he shoots back an email to me to just attend to it myself, I see that (and I know this is very irrational) as not loving me.

One email after another, one phone call after another, telling me to attend to things myself and just to go ahead without consultation with him is proving to be painful because it feels like rejection/lack of love.

At the time of reading the book, ‘The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman, I told my husband about the results in my case and he laughed and said that it made sense now – how much I get out of him doing a task for me and spending quality time with just me.

Both of those things are sorely lacking in my life at this time. Honestly, I don’t think he has the time to do anything about it right now, even if he remembered how this sort of thing effects me – not only doing the tasks he usually does himself or that I used to do with his consultation, but going to big events at school on my own, to dinner parties on my own, to bed on my own...

Now, I am about to travel on my own. I am thrilled at the opportunity to do so of course but I also look forward to some quality time with my husband too when we can just relax and luxuriate in each other with our phones turned off and nothing that we need to do for a few days or so. We are very overdue for that. I guess I am just at that moment in time when I wonder if all the work to get away is worth the effort.

But, it is of course very much worth the effort and especially so when I fix eyes on my darling daughter who will be waiting at Heathrow Airport to fetch me. What a ball we shall have with all of London to ourselves!

I am slightly disturbed to realize that the ‘bimbo’ tag really does apply to me in so many ways. I want an “owner” in more ways than one. Perhaps it is not meant to be so, but this dolli is ‘high maintenance’. Hmmmm. Oh well, you get what you pay for, right? If you want a very nice doll, that doesn’t come for free! (Yes, I did giggle when I wrote that.) I may be able to drop in here whilst away. Aeroplane trips do that to me. Be well. Stay safe.