We’ve been fighting about time a lot. Or rather, we’ve been fighting about the choices Catharine has been making about time, because she has a habit of believing that she’s lazy, that she needs to prove her worth by working, and then overdoing it. And, of course, when you have chronic illnesses crossed with random acute things, “overdoing it” is always a moving target. The ADD makes her thinking really black-and-white sometimes, so she’ll hang on to “I work 20–25 hours a week” even if, say, she’s had hives for three months that limit her capacity, making 20–25 hours maybe a touch on the high side, or a trip to the east coast means she needs a big long stretch of recovery. (And that doesn’t explain why one week came out at 36 hours. I’m not even joking about that one.)

And then, of course, the overdoing it has real consequences. She ends up having to cancel things she’s committed to, because she can’t pull them off. She’s used up all her energy on work and has nothing left for me or the household, so I’m pissy and cranky with her, and she falls into a shame spiral about disappointing me. Her mood gets a little wobbly, and she’s prone to falling headfirst into emotional maelstroms, which of course exhaust her further. We fight a lot. We both feel alone.

We had a couple of breakthroughs late last week, though. One was me pointing out that she seems to engage time and energy the way she used to engage money — as though it were mysterious and magical and would just show up because she wanted it to. After much struggle, money has become real, and money is finite. That made sense to her. It pisses her off that energy isn’t infinite, because we know people who can act as if energy is infinite, but we are not those people. Energy, for both of us, is most definitely finite. And the struggles we have around time are really struggles around energy. So now there’s a sign on the wall, where she can see it from her couch, that says ENERGY IS FINITE. It’s going to take time to sink in, but the concept matters.

The other one was that a persistent sticking point with us has been my wanting her to exercise some reasonable emotional regulation (i.e., try not to hit the kind of upset that takes over the world), while she experienced that as me telling her not to have emotions. I finally turned it around with an analogy, because a family member has worked long and hard on his anger, which used to not infrequently hit the point of him breaking things. It wasn’t telling him not to be angry to also say it wasn’t okay that he got SO angry that he lost control; similarly, it’s not telling her not to be upset to say it’s not okay when she gets SO upset that it makes her oblivious to everyone around her. And that made sense to her, and then we could talk about how to notice if she was getting really upset and how to calm herself back down.

This is the thing — if I just keep talking, if I just keep arguing, then eventually something breaks through. Maybe the timing is right, maybe I find an analogy that works, maybe it’s some weird combination of the two. It’s just exhausting to keep arguing, but I can’t just let it go, because I refuse to be in a marriage in which my wife is oblivious to me and my needs because she’s either overworked or immersed in something else.

And after all of that, we had a really lovely weekend. We both needed rest, deep rest, so after ordering groceries and going through the budget, we spent Saturday watching a Say Yes to the Dress marathon and Sunday reading (I read three and a half books). I’m finally reading Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed (not one of the weekend books), which talks about the cult of busyness and how much I value being able to spend the weekend that way. I mean, my own chronic illness means I have to set up my life that way, but I also think it’s just good to do — temporarily shutting out the horrors of world, reading mysteries and looking at pretty dresses, eating cookies with my love, and trusting that everything on the to-do list will still be there on Monday.