Try This Tuesday #39: Nurturing Your Relationships

Welcome to another Try This Tuesday. For details on how to participate, please check out the welcome post. If you'd like to join in but aren't sure what to write about, try the topic suggestion for this week: Nurturing Your Relationships.

How do you make the time to connect with other adults and maintain the important relationships in your life?

The Real Story

I have been thinking about this topic a lot since I put it out there last week. There are so many different ways to approach it, but what it came down to for me is telling you where I am at in my life with the people that are most important to me.

There are many relationships in my life that don't require a high level of intimacy. Friends from church, co-workers, Michael's support team, for example, simply require common decency and an occasional listening ear or offer to help.

I have two really close women friends in my life right now. Sometimes it's hard to keep up with everything that is going on in their lives, and I find I am missing one or both of them. We always find a way to get together and catch up, though, usually staying out way too late talking when we do!

When I am with my son, he demands every ounce of attention and closeness that he can get from me, wanting to be together talking, playing, doing something every minute of the day. (I know I was talking about adults, but this directly impacts the next part of the story, so I needed to include it.)

Please don't get me wrong, I am thrilled by his desire to interact and communicate, and I am honored to know such a wonderful, intelligent, creative person.

But it all adds up, and I am a person who craves solitude and quiet to think and read and write and escape. When I don't get it, I am likely to be easily irritated or depressed and not function very well.

So Then What Happens?

When I have given all I can to all of these relationships and find myself in this state of being overwhelmed and stressed out, I find myself taking for granted the relationship that should be at the top of the list – my marriage.

My husband is extremely understanding and supportive of my need for space and has even taken Michael to his parents' house for the weekend several times over the last few years so I can have a break. And we do try to schedule times for friends to watch Michael or respite to come in so we can go out to dinner and just relax together for a couple of hours. But I am realizing that we need some more consistent times to connect with each other.

One idea that was recently suggested to me was to have a few minutes set aside after dinner when Michael would go and play in his room while we talked. That would give us a chance to connect each day about what is going on and how we are doing, without the interruptions and listening ears of our seven year old. I am thinking that would be a good place to start.

So that's where I'm at right now. I know there are lots of great tips out there for improving your marriage and other relationships, and you can go here and here and here for some of those. I'd also love to hear what ideas have worked for you in this area.

Please join in and share the creative solutions YOU have found to your own challenges, or feel free to post your own challenge for input from others.

Topic Suggestion for Next Week: Supplemental Therapies.

I'm not sure if that's the right word for it, but I'm thinking about therapies outside the ones typically offered in Early Intervention or school settings, i.e. Speech, OT, PT, DT. Things like music therapy, aqua therapy, hippotherapy, listening therapy, psychotherapy, etc, etc. Have you tried any? What have the results been?

As the host of Try This Tuesday, Trish shares some of the solutions she has found to make life easier and invites you to do the same. You can also find her blogging at Another Piece of the Puzzle and Autism Interrupted.