Sometimes I sit and look at where my life is at, where it has been and where it appears to be going and I realize that I often am on the outside looking in the window and that my view is actually what I often refer to as my view from the porch. That is what I call it when I seem to be looking in at my life and though I am there it sometimes seems that I am on the outside looking in.
I first noticed this two and a half years ago when my husband and I were dating. I discovered then that there was an invisible divison between his life and mine and though somewhere in the middle we joined, that divison was none the less there, keeping our life divided into three parts, ours, his, and mine. Somehow through all that we worked on that common ground we found and we continued dating and eventually marrying. And somewhere in the midst of our life, there are still so many parts of it where I find myself still getting my view from the porch.
At times it is like we live three lives that is somehow entwined into one. We have the our life, the my life, and the his life. Since I am the one who still has younger kids living at home he is included more into my part of the three lives than I am into his, which became again transparently clear today. It is seen in the simplest things, and yet those are the very things that remind me of my place on the porch.
In our blended life today we celebrated the Baptism of two of my children, his "step" children, and we also were celebrating the birthday of my teenage daughters boyfriend as well. As my husband was cutting the cake to be handed out I wanted to take a picture, and I once again got a picture with sunglasses and no smile, after he had already done his usual hide from the camera stunt. This is not an uncommon event when I want to capture a moment in time via the camera and though three years ago it was just as common, it didn't seem to irrittate me as much. Perhaps that was before I realized, he does actually take off his sunglasses and does actually give a genuine smile for the camera, just not for me, but to the part of our life that is his.
When he is with his own blood related family he will actually look at the camera, give a heartfelt genuine smile,and guess what he actually shows off the fact that he has eyes underneath sunglasses. I find these pictures without knowledge because we have facebooks and he gets tagged by his "real" children on it so that he too has the pictures. Silly thing to bug someone you are most likely thinking and I actually tend to agree to a point. However, these visits are never shared verbally or any other way until they are happy family photo shots online. As I sit on the porch looking in at the part of life that is behind that invisible divider I often wonder why that is. That in itself is mystifying to me, but then when we have an event to take a good photo shot at, that my children or I are involved in we get the goofy photos instead of the nice ones.
As we move forward through the days of our lives, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that there will forever be the relsih dish effect in our lives. There will always be three sections and no matter how much I want to include him in all aspects of my life, there are always going to be parts he doesn't really want to be involved in where my children or my side of the family label is concerned, and there also will be parts of his life that I will never be fully included in as well.
This is all part of blending two completely different families together.
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