What's your "why"

I know it's popular on social media to post your why for working out, selling a product, etc. This is my PSA to regularly re-visit your why. Dominic and I have settled habits and routines that work well for us. He mainly handles getting bills paid each month but we've got a budget that we both understand.  It works really well from day to day. Until it doesn't. We haven't re-visited the budget in a long time and unintentionally found ourselves in a dynamic where we weren't regularly discussing things as they changed. Life is hectic and obviously it's not that exciting. As childcare expenses changed, things got paid off, or expenses added I'd do the math in my head and know where we were. But I didn't look at Dominic's spreadsheet to see what adjustments actually got made to various debts and interest payoffs that he calculates.

That key piece of information makes is really hard to jointly make the BIG decisions like whether or not to buy a house or what kind of cars to get. Those are decisions we've got to be on the same page on and while I trust Dominic's judgement, when we were coming from really different places I suddenly felt like the decision was ALL his to make. And when we're talking about a house or car, that's something we've BOTH really got to be comfortable with. Even if we didn't end up where I originally wanted to be, it's not a healthy place for either partner to think their desires were completely ignored or not important.

Dominic and I really don't fight. But by the time we hashed through all of the big stuff of where to live, I was feeling murderous. Yes, health conversations led us to decide who would handle the bills. But we didn't continue those healthy conversations so we both understood what was going on. While I defer to him on a lot of things, we've never ever had a dynamic where he would make those decisions without discussing things with me. My lack of interest in the bills unintentionally made him think I didn't want to hear about it and little by little, things would happen that I had no awareness of. He certainly didn't intend to do things without talking to me -- he thought he was doing what I wanted.  Dominic was stunned by my anger because, to his credit, he was working very hard to figure out how to make the things I thought were best for our family work for us.  But I never intended for him to figure it out alone.

Somehow the areas we each handle became our own little universes. Because we weren't talking about any of them. We've been in survival mode for so long, those conversations seemed like luxuries.   They really aren't though... the boring conversations become explosive hurtful conversations.

PSA: talk about the boring stuff. Even when you'd rather stab yourself in the eye than look at spreadsheets.