Life doesn’t settle.
I keep waiting for the season to normalize before I do the next thing. Our son heads back to school this week. My mother-in-law is in assisted living now, the acute phase behind us, the routines around her care no longer require us every day. Our daughter is beginning her senior year of college.
The summer, with everything it asked, is over.
And yet.
The relationship took a hit this summer. Not a crisis in the dramatic sense. No blowup, no rupture, nothing that would look like trouble from the outside. Just the slow accumulation of a season that demanded everything from both of us and left less and less for each other. It was the caretaking and the emotional weight, then the lull that settled in once the acute intensity lifted.
I’ve been absorbing it in the name of being steady. Which was the right move, mostly. Except somewhere along the way absorbing became piling on. Pam would vent about her mom, and instead of holding the space I’d add to it. My own frustrations layered on top of hers, the vent session turning into a mutual spiral instead of a release valve.
That’s not support. That’s two people sinking into the trench together.
This weekend we had my sister-in-law over to sit by the pool. One rule: no mom talk.
That’s it. That was the whole intervention. A Saturday afternoon with someone we enjoy, a standing agreement to leave the weight at the gate for a few hours, and the specific relief of being Corey and Pam again instead of the primary caregivers of someone else’s hard season.
It worked.
The problems didn’t go away but we stopped feeding them for an afternoon and remembered what we’re like when we’re not organized around a crisis.
That’s what I mean by claiming it. Not waiting for the circumstances to create the space. Making the space inside the circumstances.
The date nights will be claimed again: dinners where the only agenda is us, walks where the conversation goes back to the fall trips we want to take, the winter plans, the things we’d been looking forward to before the summer reorganized everything around someone else’s need.
The walks have always been there. That’s been the consistent thread through all of it. But the walks were carrying too much MIL weight. So the new rule on some of the daily walks is simple: everything but that. Her situation still matters. But so do we, and the relationship has been running on fumes while we poured everything into the emergency.
You can’t sustain that. Nobody can.
Here’s what I know about leading out of a relational lull.
You don’t wait for your spouse to move first. You don’t wait for the season to settle or the circumstances to improve or the conditions to get easier.
Name it to claim it.
The conversation started this weekend. Not a big production. Just honest. Here’s what I noticed. Here’s my part in it. And what I want to do differently. That’s the whole script. It doesn’t require perfect conditions or the right moment or a weekend away with nothing else going on.
It requires someone to go first.
That’s been the argument of this series all summer. The boring work. The base building, the accumulation nobody sees, the discipline that shifts from physical to mental. All of it pointing at the same thing: the next step is always available, and the only question is whether you take it or wait for something to make it easier.
Nothing makes it easier. You just go.
The summer built something. In my legs. In my character. Even in the marriage, in the places it took a hit.
My next half marathon race is still coming. So is the fall. So are the dinners and the walks and the slow reclaiming of the relationship that got pushed aside in the name of surviving a season neither of us chose.
Life doesn’t settle.
You have to claim it anyway.
