Week 12

This week was harder than usual.

Stress got to me more than I'd like to admit. I lost my patience too easily. I felt scattered, unable to focus properly. And worst of all, I felt absent. Even when I was here, I wasn't fully here.

At some point I watched one of those short animated videos—a life drawn in thousands of frames and played in a few seconds, birth to death. The message was simple and brutal: life passes much faster than we live it, and we waste so much of it on things that do not matter.

It made me think again about what is actually important. Time together. Time with you. Time with our daughter. Time spent doing things that feel alive and real, instead of being trapped in pressure, noise, and mental clutter. But it also brought me back to a question I don't know how to solve: how does a man balance being present with the need to build, provide, and push forward? How do you chase money, security, or a future without sacrificing the very life you are supposedly building all that for?

Sometimes I feel like most people are born into this trap. Not rich enough to be free, not poor enough to stop dreaming, just stuck in the middle, fighting hard for brief moments of peace and joy. If I had more money than I could ever need, I don't think I would spend my life trying to prove anything. I would just live. Quietly. Fully. Day by day. Because if life has no built-in meaning, then maybe the only thing that matters is how honestly we live it and with whom.

That led me to something else I came across this week—about the stages love goes through when two people build a life together. The early illusion. The slow confrontation with who the other person really is. The resentments, the arguments, the disappointment that breaks many couples. And then, for those who survive all that, something quieter: adjustment, honesty, a deeper kind of knowing.

I think we are somewhere in that quiet place now. Not perfect, not finished, and not without work left to do. But real. Past the illusions, past the worst of the fighting, into something that feels stable and earned. Moving, slowly, toward something even deeper.

What I want for us is simple, even if it is not easy. I want us to keep growing into a love without fear, without unnecessary doubt. A love where being together is already enough to make life feel meaningful. Where the ordinary moments are not overlooked, because we understand that ordinary moments are the whole thing.

We still have work to do. Maybe especially me. But when I think about us, this is what I see, and this is the direction I want to keep walking in. With you.

— Hubby