This Saturday morning I find myself really having to resist the injunctions that I have decreed for myself this week:
I have not been productive enough,
Our money is going too run out,
I am going to be dropped from math,
I am going to fail,
I can't do this,
My sobriety programming is lapsing,
It's all her fault.
None of these are true, they are all based on my fear instinct and I can walk through them by trusting and relying on infinite God rather than finite self.

This morning I was beginning to get resentful when my wife didn't wake up early and I had to attend to the kids. But she did get up at a fairly reasonable time and I was able to get started on an essay for the end of the semester assignment. My real problem here (again) was my own feelings not her actions. It was the "B" in the A-B-C's of resentment that was missing, it was my B-lief about the cause, not the true cause. I also got to spend some time catching up on journaling.

I have a simmering anxiety over not being able to do my review journaling again. This is the greatest gap that I have experienced in the past 7 years. I must again look to the ends, not the means, to keep my head up, while at the same time allowing the motivation to drive me to get back on track.

After lunch my wife started yelling at me for giving the kids leftover Halloween candy. She griped at me as she was passing through the living room and I was in the kitchen. I answered her in a regular voice that I was just giving them this for dessert. She went off on a rant yelling at me that they don't need dessert after every meal, it's not a candy free-for-all, they don't just get whatever they want, and several other things. She yelled at me long on hyperbole and short on communication. As I realized that she was not open to reason or calm, I simply backed away from the argument. The last thing I heard her say was that I am always concerned about them not getting fat, the implication being that I am contradicting myself. I thought about how it is reasonable to have dessert, how I never let them overeat or encourage large proportions, how she has always had problems with serving sizes, how my concern is that they get exercise (something she knows nothing about).

Here is one of those examples of how these days she has s very short fuse and a strong resolve for her demands to be met.

Last night I woke up and my wife was holding my hand. I thought today about how we don't share affection right now. I thought about the reasons why. She has always expressed to me that the initiative lies with me, that when i don't express affection to her she feels rejected and inhibited. Sometimes she holds back because she is angry but this rarely lasts and she typically recovers from anger in a way that is completely foreign to me. I on the other hand, do not recover from angry emotions quickly and even when I forgive, I still do not feel enthusiastically affectionate for a while.

In looking at the reasons for my reservation of affection, I think it is because I am shielding myself from coercion. I feel like that she has a mountain of ambitious, intricate and high demands for every aspect of all of our lives and the minute we become affectionate then she employs this to gain what she wants. This can't be good and it wasn't always this way. It seems that she regressed about the time that she started school.

There, now that I wrote about it, I have to resist it and let it go. I mustn't carry this resentment into every new day. I need to approach the moment without the baggage of the past.

Later in the day while updating my journal for Thursday I came across the following teaching about/from the encyclical Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI:
"To the Pope as to all his predecessors, marital relations are much more than a union of two people. They constitute a union of the loving couple with a loving God, in which the two persons create a new person materially, while God completes the creation by adding the soul. For this reason, Paul VI teaches in the first sentence of Humanae Vitae that the transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator."

I no longer felt inadequate for having to work at marriage, not just be happy.
I no longer felt guilty that the main love I feel for my wife is when I see my children in her.

The past few days I've got extremely tired in the afternoon and passed out really hard. I have to admit that this is troubling me. I want to be highly disciplined and energetic. Maybe my body is fighting off a virus, the kids are all sick with one staying home for the past two days. The past 3 days I have been the one to get the kids going in the morning. Come to think of it leading up to that my wife was sick and I had to carry much more of the load than usual.