After my lovely wife read my blog post, she came to find me to see how I was doing. She loves me and wanted to fix it. She asked if next time she should keep things to herself since she didn’t want to hurt me. I felt a ball of feelings burst out of me at that statement. In a sort of whisper yell, I said “You don’t get that kind of power”. As important as she is to me, she doesn’t get to take responsibility for my emotions. They are mine. I knew she meant well. I knew she wanted to protect me. But I didn’t want to be protected. I knew that my feelings of jealousy from early didn’t really have anything to do with her, it was about me. It was about me not taking time for myself. It was about me choosing sacrifice over self care and how that was hurting me. It was a wake up call. It was information that I wanted to know. I don’t want to be protected from that. I want to know.

On Saturday, I got up with the kids. We baked soft pretzels. I boxed up the extra pretzels and some cookies from the other day. After loading up the kids and the baked goods in the bike trailer, we biked the 1 mile to our new friends house. We hung out there for some time in their front yard talking and social distancing. Then we biked to another friends house to drop of the 2nd box of baked goods and chatted a bit more. It felt good to connect. I needed that. And my family needed me to do that for myself.