My first response when I viewed this card was that I need to spend a bit more time focusing on my hubby. That the focus of my energies today should be on connecting with him because he is working an odd shift so we aren’t getting to spend as much time together. We did get to spend some time with each other but not as much as I would have liked.

But I think another aspect of this card is to reconnect with myself. It is very easy for me to become disconnected. In fact I think that is one of the reasons I have some of the weight issues I have – I have no connection to when I’m actually full. I think I’ve become so good at numbing myself on a physical level that I keep eating well past the point of satiety. In order to try to end this behavior I started reading Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet. It’s a fairly simple but profound concept – that people use food to numb emotional issues. I’ve always known this is a tendency of mine but have not taken any actual steps to fix the issue. Now I’m going to use Cameron’s Morning Pages concept to see if it helps.

I also spent some time connecting with my mom-in-law. She is so lonely right now, it breaks my heart. That doesn’t mean she won’t get on my nerves but I need to try to be more sympathetic. She has almost no one left – just Edward (my brother-in-law who is deaf and retarded), my hubby and me. Her other son hasn’t called in over a year. The two grandsons she helped raise for a year and a half after their parents separated rarely visit or call. Her husband of 50+ years died in 2003 and her sister, with whom she was very close, sold her house in Greenwood Lake without telling her and moved back to NYC with her daughter in 2006. Then she died six months later. My MIL sometimes walks to the local deli to get her papers and we try to encourage her to sit for a while and have coffee and a piece of cake or something. But she is always so concerned about leaving Edward unsupervised that she really doesn’t do it. But anyway I spent the night over her house to keep her company. It was nice. We chatted for a while and sat on the porch in the dark listening to music from a concert at one of the local marinas. I know it upset her schedule (it got comical when she asked me for the 13th time if I was cold and wanted to turn off the air conditioning).

So I guess my focus today was on spending some one on one time with individuals in my life – my hubby, my mother-in-law and myself.