Sometimes My Husband Still Surprises Me

I have a feeling that my husband is somewhere on the Asperger's scale.  No seriously, but just mildly so.

I have a good friend with a husband who is diagnosed with Asperger's and he and my husband get along famously.  It's like a bog ol' nerdfest when the two of them get together.  And nobody else seems to get this guy better than my husband.  (Asperger's is a form of autism that affects social skills more than anything and a person with Asperger's is likely to be highly intelligent yet very bothered by overstimulation.  Mozart, Einstein and Thomas Jefferson all shared symptoms of Asperger's .) 

What could possibly make me think something like this? 

I'm won't pretend to be an expert on the subject.  These are just my observations:
My husband sometimes misses social cues- big time.  He has to cut the tags out of every piece of clothing he owns and food textures can be quite troublesome.  He's such a freakin' number genius and yet sometimes he panics if you ask him to add up a simple list of things and then he has to double and triple check his answer and explain how he got to it.

I'm not complaining.  Again, just my observations.  It's actually a part of his charm.  And he balances me out quite well.  Besides, I may or may not be known to let his quirks get me out of a bind here or there on occasion, but I'm not admitting to anything...

So yeah, he's just not a real emotional guy.  (But like I said, that keeps my 'fieryness' in check.)  While I appreciate how rational my man is, I must admit that I do sometimes miss out on romantic notions.  Small things like not thinking about the resale value of a gift, or how much it will cost to insure it.  Or sometimes he just doesn't seem to get the emotional intricacies of a given moment.  He can be perceived as pretty cut and dried with an affect that comes off as rather flat.

And yet, at times he is so clever and funny and brings out a childlike joy in just experiencing something.  And he will do literally anything for me, even if it goes against his highly logical side.  These are the times when sharing his life is magical.  So... what a wonderful surprise it has been to see how excited my husband has become about the idea of having a vacation place in the desert.  Imagine how wonderful it has been to hear him almost gush at how good he feels in that heat, how 108 with no humidity feels just right, how being able to get away to a place that is just so different is amazing to him, how he just never dreamed that he could want something so much.  It's just so cool to see him willing to take a chance on something without over thinking it.  Just because he wants to.  He doesn't often verbalize about goals much outside of rational lists and good investments.  So this is just fun.  And I'm happy for him. 

It's good to be able to share a dream and actually have a concrete plan to make it work.  My husband keeps me grounded so my dreams can take flight.
 

Twisted

It's that time of year again.  No, not about the holiday hoopla coming up.  Instead, I mean the time of year when I KNOW that certain people are not doing so well.  This is the beginning of the time when all of those lovely folks in my family that suffer from some type of mental illness or another go on the prowl every year.  Some years are scarier than others.  It is the season in which I am likely to wake up shaking or screaming.  My poor husband has grown used to this.  I have already heard from one friend who has been called several times to see if her husband can fix a computer- a computer that's been dead for years...  Anything to try to connect with those who cannot legally be contacted.  Thank God for restraining orders and felony probation.  Seriously, let's hope this year is a mild one!

I have to admit that even though I get stronger and wiser over time about how kooky my family can be and how normal and peaceful life is now, my subconscious is not always on board.  So with that in mind, I'll share an especially wild dream from the other night.  I feel this one is special because even I didn't know that my mind was quite so creative. 

In the dream, life is beyond wonderful.  Fabulous really.  Things are good beyond imagination.  It is truly sweet in so many ways.  The colors are sun warmed and lovely.  There is a picnic in the park and the food is magazine perfect.  The temperature is perfect.  The view is gorgeous.  I am surrounded by loving family.  People who have been especially cruel to me are there as well, but they are different.  Very different.  My aunt who is is brash and mean is kind and loving.  My grandmother is no longer a drunk.  She makes a point of apologizing for her past actions and promises to be different from here on out.  Many seem to acknowledge in some magical unspoken way that they are sorry for the way they knowingly left my sister and I to suffer in an unhealthy home.  It is all just so much to take in.  I feel loved and protected and content.  Content beyond anything I can ever remember feeling in my whole life, ever.  There is no hiding, no sadness, no ugliness, no drugs, no lies, no manipulation.

I can only guess this must be somewhat like what people who are addicted to drugs might feel.  That euphoria I have heard of...  Because the next thing I know I am awake and it is cold, sharp, dark.  There is a deep emotional pain that is nearly physical in nature.  I am literally terrified.  

And then I realize- this is it.  The beginning of the season of nightmares.  It is right on time.  It always starts in November, when my mother would be in the process of angering the rest of the family to the point that we would not be welcome for the holidays.  And we would be alone, facing her mental illness at its full brutal force. 

I am able to recognize the feelings I am having and rationalize where they come from.  And then I also manage to see the glaring thing that was missing from my dream.  My mother and my sister were not there.  Yes indeed, even in my wildest fantasies, I know that these two are a lost cause.  Ah, progress...  Maybe next time I won't be fooled at all.

Strange Dreams

I like the artist that sings this song, Heart.  They always bring a kind of dreamy quality out in me.  Not just in this song, but in all of their stuff.  I grew up listening to them and hearing stories about what it was like for my mother and aunts who attended high school with the girls from Heart.  This song just seemed perfect for what I woke up to this morning.

For a long time I never remembered any dreams at all.  I mean literally at least 10 years went by when I thought that I must not be able to dream anymore.  Prior to this period of time, I was always a vivid dreamer and much like I am able to utilize a very photographic memory in my conscious life, I had always experienced dreams that were very real.   I suspected that I was still dreaming, just not remembering them for some reason.  I finally came to the conclusion that I had lost my ability to remember my dreams when I was going through a time when I felt that most of my 'dreams' for life seemed dead.  Bingo!  I began remembering my dreams upon waking yet again.  It was as if the floodgates of my mind had opened.  All of this coincided with a very turbulent time of becoming aware of how much of myself I had given up trying to fix or fit in to my very disturbed and mentally ill family.  As soon as I realized that this was not a worthy cause to spend my life energy on, I got my life energy back and with it, my dreams- both in slumber and in real life.

I tend to be an early morning dreamer.  Especially when I wake up in the wee hours and then fall back asleep, I have extraordinarily vivid dreams.  Recently, I woke up replaying a particular episode with my mother when she had broken a restraining order on Christmas day and came knocking at my door.  While I am proud of how I dealt with that situation in real life by just speaking through the door and calling the sheriff immediately so as to minimize the drama, I also like how I dealt with it in my dream.  In the dream, I opened the door right up and faced her and told her that she was no longer welcome here and that she needed to leave my property.  I then actually realized that I was dreaming and said, "besides this is just a dream and you don't really matter in my life anymore."  Boy did I feel satisfied upon waking!

This morning I had a very intriguing dream.  I dreamed that my husband and I were walking down a sidewalk and these 3 young guys came up behind us and kind of invaded our space.  I tried to sort of ignore them and my husband and I gave each other knowing looks.  We were approaching a strip mall area.  One of the guys ended up brushing up against me.  I turned and faced him and brushed him back.  Then for some reason I ended up walking ahead and leaving my husband a little behind with the guys right there and tension clearly in the air.  I remember wanting to get inside one of the stores and get to safety and tell someone what was happening, but I also knew it was really strange for me to leave my husband there with those guys.  He is NOT a physically tough guy.  He is an intellectual who uses wit to get himself out of any trouble and would never fight with anyone. Besides, it is just out of character for either one of us to desert the other for any reason.  Anyway, I end up inside a gift shop and the weird thing is that I then get distracted and totally forget about why I came in!  So I'm there just shopping around for awhile and I suddenly realize that I have forgotten all about how I left my husband outside with these 3 guys.  Immediately upon remembering this, I run outside and I catch the very end of some police action going on.  All I see is the cops putting handcuffs on my husband while he slowly turns his head to face me.  I see a little blood on his neck area and a few scratches.  I notice his glasses are gone.  But overall he doesn't really look that bad for what I imagined could have happened.  I scream, "what did they do to you?!"  But the look on my husbands face says something like resolve or strength or some combination of that.  His blue eyes are so clear in my mind.  The 3 guys are not in the picture.  I have no idea what happened to them and I sense that I don't care. 

I think this dream has something to do with some loose ends that need dealing with when it comes to a near death experience that my husband had back in July of 2009.  I haven't really shared any of that on this blog.  One of my friends who is pretty intuitive stated that she knows that though I have a lot to say, I'm not always saying everything I need to.  So it may be time to share that moment in my life.  It is a turning point for me.  A pivotal moment in time that changed everything for me.  I was on my way to changing, but that experience made me know that there was no going back.

I am confident that I will share this soon.  In the meantime, any insight on my dream would be appreciated.  It seems to me that fellow bloggers are often the best at giving me the knowledge that I haven't quite grasped yet for myself.