New Life

Well, things have settled down for me, inside my head and in my immediately family life.  (Why do other people always appear so stable?  ...  I guess I appear pretty stable, too, at a glance.  Huh.)  Things are neither new nor old, wonderful nor terrible, easy nor hard.  Things are just as they are.

I have been on an interesting emotional journey since declaring that I was taking a break from the Mormon church.  Things have happened that I did not anticipate (like a complete paradigm shift - that was out of the blue), and many things have happened that I did anticipate, but whether I anticipated them or not, it doesn't change the fact that this road has been challenging.  And I say challenging in the way that a mom would say it about her troubled child who she doesn't want to bag on.  Still, as a person who is fascinated by life, the journey has been interesting.  I've learned a lot about myself and about my loved ones and friends.

I've found that a lot of what I want to address with this topic isn't about religion at all.  It's about surviving life.  It's about loss and dealing with that loss.  Loss of friends, of community, of an identity.  I find myself trying to navigate patience, openness, parenting, marriage, and life with no road maps.  The road maps we've always had were clearly labeled Mormon and now, ... now we're just winging it.  I don't find this scary, but I do find it different and hard to figure out at first.  I've wanted to talk about language and the inadequacy of my Mormon words to explain my new feelings and understandings.  I've wanted to talk about power imbalance in relationships.  I've wanted to talk about finding a healthy path.  Those are the things that have directly impacted my life.

This journey is no triumph.  It's not what I intended or wanted to do.  It's just what happened.  For months Rob said, "This isn't what I wanted," and I would counter with, "It's not what *I* wanted!"

But the months of confusion have largely passed.  Now this is our life.  I'm not sure what tomorrow looks like, and I'm not sure where I'm headed, but I know things are going to turn out pretty good.  Cause that's what me and tomorrow have for each other:  goodness.  

And I have to say, that's not a bad life.

Connections

This year I would like to make some better connections.  I feel like I've spent some time losing connections and then mourning that loss, and what fun is that?  Time for a change, I say.

First off, a note on connections and my age.  It has struck me, now that I'm well into my 30's, that there's a reason why people decide to move closer to family or "move back home."  Over the last year or so it's been really bugging me that my entire family (except for one brother in Dayton!) is thousands of miles away from me.  To top it off, this year two of my siblings that were helping spread our Tungate presence around the country moved to California.  That means the majority of us are now in California.  

And I live in Ohio.

Don't get me wrong, I like it here.  And I don't mind living away from family.  There are some perks.  But I get why people decide that they want to move closer.  Cause living so far away from all my loved ones gets kinda old.

So potentially it's my age that makes me think about connections.  How important they are.  How to better maintain the ones I have.

So this year my goal is to focus on connections.

1 - Connection with myself.  My heart, my mind, my soul.

2 - Connection with Rob.

3 - Connection with my kids.

4 - Connection with my far-away family.

5 - Connection with my tried-and-true friends.

6 - Connection with new friends.

The connections between us all is what makes life awesome.  I'll take more awesome this year, please.

* On a related note, please send me a link to your blog if you've got one.  I've been angry about the lack of good RSS feed readers, so I've ignored everyone's blog for a while, to the point that I'm not even sure what your blogs are!  So if you have one and you'd like me to read it, please comment or send me an e-mail.  And sorry for being so frustrated (seriously - Reader was taken down in mid-2013.  I'm finally over it).