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I'm learning some new skills, although perhaps not as quickly as I'd like. I feel it's a confession to admit here, with some people who know me in my real life listening, to say that I'm also talking to my professional about my marriage and issues that we have there. I feel that's a real confession, perhaps a slightly guilty one. If I'm honest though, it's more because I find it hard to admit that we need help, so that flows through to it being hard having others know that we need help.

There's no secret to our situation, to where we find ourselves, it's just that somewhere along the way we lost each other and couldn't find our way back without help. It's not a case of a lack of love, quite the opposite, we just both let life, our responsibilities as parents, commitments to employers and everyone else, get in the way of our responsibilities and commitments to each other.

So now we both talk to someone, different people, about the things going on in our lives. We're making changes, slowly. I am an eager person, keen to commit to things and get decisions moving, so I find the process challenging. I can feel personal changes and commit to trying to be different, but it takes time to unlearn bad habits, and I find that extremely frustrating. I just want us to be back where we were for all those years, now! Geoff's person described me as a green banana, in terms of that frustration with the process. I'm not sure I've evolved enough to appreciate that just yet.

Part of what we've relearned, for we used to have this skill, is to slow down, to relax. Our weekends were a constant whirl of feeling we had to do this and must finish doing that, and I've already learned that those are negative messages to send to oneself. We would get ourselves and the girls wound up with all the tension, the rushing, the pressure that we only put on ourselves, to get stuff done and honestly, it was just STUFF.

We are now slowing down. Last weekend was wonderful and this weekend is measuring up to be the same. Slow starts in bed, girls chatting under the covers about all sorts of things. Daddy going for a run, the girls and I making a picnic breakfast to have outside which we didn't eat until 10am. Pottering in the garden, the girls building lego, playing fairies in the bushes, everything just happening slowly and in such a relaxed manner. We even managed to read the papers without interuption!

This afternoon we're going to have some fun, we're rembering how to do that, and I'm loving every minute of it.