Band-Aids and Lumpy Orientals

They aren't cool. Lumpy Orientals, that is - they're just not cool (Band-aids totally are cool, btw... especially if they have pictures of Strawberry Shortcake or Scooby Doo on them).

You can't put a band-aid on your issues. It's the kind of "sore" that you have to rip open to let the infection out. If you don't, it may look like it's healed, but it's really just festerring inside and slowly making you very very sick.

McStudly and I had a conversation last night. It was VERY much needed and very beneficial. Did it make everything "all better"? Well... in a way, yes. But it took some "rippin open" first. And then we came to this (not directly quoted):

Mcstudly: "I don't think either of us realized that marriage would be this much work all the time."

Me: "I don't think it's supposed to be this much work every day. It seems to me that it's like cleaning. If you do a little maintenance every day... if you clean the dirty dishes every day, it doesn't pile up. But if you leave it for even a day or two, you're kicking yourself because now - what would've taken only a minimal amount of work - takes a LOT of work. I think that relationships are supposed to be worked at a little bit everyday. And I think if you put that off, or get lazy for even a day or two, it takes a lot of time and energy - more than normal - to get it back to where it was. Back to where it can just be kept up."

We agreed.

When your room was a mess, and your mother/father/guardian would tell (more like order in my house) to clean it up, it usually got a WHOLE lot messier before it started to look even remotely cleaner than it was when you started. And even though Momma Bear was the one that coined the "it gets messier before it gets cleaner" concept (she did in my book, anyways. Don't ruin it for me!), she'd STILL come in about 10 minutes after I've started and say something like "I said CLEAN the mess, Sarah, not fung shui the mess. Now get it done!"

So instead of shifting stuff around like those picture puzzles you play online - you know... the ones where can only move one block at a time - you have to take some of the puzzle pieces out and take a few steps back before you can take any steps forward.

You can't just stick a band-aid on the hard stuff. You've gotta clean out the bad stuff, first, and then put in a bit of medicine (can you tell I'm somewhat slightly addicted to metaphors? My bad... my bad folks), first... i.e. the band-aid = patience, the bad stuff = issues/arguments/trouble/disagreements/sin/yelling/anger/discontent, medicine = prayer and LOTS of it. Does that help, any?

So you gotta work through things. Not just sweep it under the rug and try to forget about it. Or you'll end up like I was a few blogs ago... with a lot of frustration, and a really lumpy rug.

... and nobody likes a lumpy oriental.