Hiking through Eagle Creek Park with my wife
Pentax K10D, 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 SMC Pentax-DA AL
2018
When you are single for as long as Margaret and I were, you get used to living your own life. She was a full-time single mom, her time given to taking care of her four children and working to support everyone. I was a single dad who saw his kids two nights a week and every other weekend and filled the rest of his life with career, a non-profit, and church.
When we met, our lives were already full. Overfull, really. It was going to be a joy and a challenge to weave our lives together. We were going to have to approach it thoughtfully and deliberately.
Unfortunately, we didn’t do that. Serious challenges came at us so fast and so frequently that we went into survival mode. We’d both survived difficult times before, as single people. That’s how we knew to do it.
By this summer we found ourselves living our lives in parallel because it was most efficient to do it that way. We didn’t see for a long time that it was hurting us.
Thankfully, we saw it before it hurt us too much. We’ve made some strong changes that have us jointly planning our time, saying no to too much time apart, and making much more time to do simple things together. Like walk through Eagle Creek Park.
