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Books are one of my greatest pleasures.

My husband and I seem to disagree TOTALLY about books. I love Sci-fi and Fantasy books; he hates them. He likes trendy new novels; I can get through a few, but I don’t usually like them. He reads factual books; I’d rather gnaw my arm off at the elbow. We can both enjoy biographies, but our ideas of a ‘good biography’ seem to be poles apart.

Me? I love a good story. Throw it into an as-yet non-existent world or universe, add some ability or power nobody really has, chuck in some impending doom that isn’t a possibility in this life, and I’m in heaven. Why? Because it sets my imagination free.

I love when a book goes places we can’t go in this world. That’s the excitement of it for me: not knowing where things will go or what might happen. I like that kind of surprise.

I love worlds where people move things with their minds, spaceships go further than we could get in several lifetimes, vampire masters can be defeated by a girl who raises the dead for a living (Ssshhhh! If you know, don’t tell. ), women who always thought they were perfectly normal can suddenly work magic and do extraordinary things. I love this stuff because a part of me would love to live this stuff. No, I don’t really want to live in a world inhabited by vampire masters (If they’re really out there, then don’t tell me!), but I’d love to be a girl who could kick vampire butt and save the day. I’d love to be more than I think I am, do more than I know I can do.

Is that so strange?

Isn’t that why we go to movies? To forget who we are for a little while, to try to walk in another person’s shoes, a person who can and does do things we cannot?

Books are my own personal movie, running in my head. I can see it all on the big screen and in living colour.

That being the case, why wouldn’t I want to read the stories that are larger than life, completely impossible and full of creativity and imagination? I don’t want to read about what’s been done — I want to read about doing what I wish could possibly be. I want to read about all the things that the server technician, wife and mother-of-three will never do, but would love to think that maybe, in another universe, she could.

I really don’t sleep well. I wonder if I ever have. I sleep poorly, suffer from nightmares and, worst of all, from night terrors. The kind that have you out of bed screaming without really knowing what’s happening or being able to get yourself out of it. And the only blessing is that usually I don’t remember it in the morning.

Why? Why don’t I sleep well? Why do I have these issues?

I think it’s because the god of my childhood was a bastard.

You may not think it’s fair to ‘blame god’ for my past fears or my present sleep problems. And I’m not really. I’m blaming the image I have had of god all my life. An image that I am admittedly responsible for creating and perpetuating, but one I haven’t yet been able to escape. An all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful bully, who takes great joy in watching you get screwed over.

Man, that’s sad, powerful stuff, isn’t it? And it all started before I was even five or six years old. As soon as I was old enough to understand it all. And believe me, that was early.

I’ve heard it said that the picture you have of god when you’re a child mirrors the picture you have of your grandfather.

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. My grandfather was a bastard. In fact, both my grandfathers pretty much were, but one more than the other. One definitely hurt me more than the other. And I think he was my cardboard cutout when I was forming my god picture.

Mind you, I had a lot of extra help there. My childhood religion did a LOT to influence that picture. It’s little wonder I’m not religious now. (I’m not sure I could be and remain sane.) But I still can’t really feel safe. Not anywhere. Sometimes I find that terrifying, and other times I just find it unbearably sad.

I grew up in a fundamental Christian family. They were, and are, lovely people, my family. Lovely and loving. However, our religion, THEIR religion, was not.

Take fire and brimstone, add a heap of terror and a child’s understanding of you’re-going-to-hell-if-you-don’t-get-this-exactly-right, tack on the worry that you can’t possibly get it right, mix well with trying extremely hard to get it right and saying the same ’sinner’s prayer’ at least four dozen times (I’m being conservative), being baptized twice (in case it didn’t ‘take’), and finish off with being quite sure it’s still not ‘right‘. My childhood in a bottle, ready to serve.

And the worst part is, being the intelligent, conscientious, precocious child I was, I had to worry about the state of everybody’s else’s soul as well. After all, I was responsible for them knowing ‘the good news‘, too.

And all the while, that super-duper bully was there waiting…just waiting for me to mess up. Put just one foot wrong.

My god, how did I not only survive that, but end up a functional, productive, mostly happy adult?

I have no answer except that I’m a survivor. How else do you make it through? And I always do.

Through a list of average, bad, and VERY BAD men and relationships. Past a number of bosses who seemed bent on emotionally abusing and/or destroying me and my self-esteem. Through a lot of very hard times. But I did. I do. I continue to not only survive, but go beyond that.

I’m married to a good man, a good father, a man I love, a man I have amazing chemistry with and a good friendship with as well. I have three amazing, intelligent and beautiful children. I have a difficult, responsible job that challenges and excites me.

And yet, when I close my eyes, it’s not safe. All the scary things are still there.

I’ve dealt with so much in so many ways. Yes, I’ll raise my hand and say I’ve been through therapy, with a number of different therapists. And it’s better. I don’t sleep with my fists clenched anymore. I don’t wake up with my shoulders aching anymore. But I still don’t sleep well.

I’ve met and comforted my inner child. I’ve faced the things that happened in my childhood. I’ve confronted those that hurt me. I’ve distanced myself from, and reconciled myself to, my family. I’ve left the church. I’ve journalled, talked, done the twelve steps, tried self-hypnosis, used every sleep aid on the market, read every related book I could find, google’d every website. I still don’t sleep well.

I’ve been on this earth quite a number of years, and really past the age of four, I’ve never slept well. I’m coming to the place where I believe I just maybe never will.

And that, is a very lonely, depressing and frightening place. But there is worse. A lot worse. And I know that. So I am grateful for what I have, and I carry on.

I’ve decided relationships are not about what people say. They’re not even about what people do. They’re about what people want.

My husband and I have been together a long time now — 13 years in August! And yet, I just realised, TODAY even, that I don’t really understand what he wants.

I thought I did. I thought I knew what it meant to please him, make him happy, be supportive. I don’t. And in return, he doesn’t seem to know what I want either.

The reality is, we each do what we think the other person wants, and that translates into doing what we each want individually from the other person. In other words, I’m doing what I want him to do for me and vice versa. Not exactly a recipe for success that, is it.

Bummer.

What do I want? I want him to talk and I want him to talk in a way that shows he cares about me. I want him to ask about my day and really want to hear the answer. I want him to chat with me on car journeys. (I am a driver married to a non-driver. That means I drive everywhere, and somewhere along the way the thrill of driving ceased to be a thrill. TALK TO ME! Driving is boring now — talking is not.) I want him to tell me I’m important to him.

I also want him to do things I want done. I want him to put pots away when he’s cleaning up in the kitchen. (Everybody has their ‘thing’. Pots left out on the stove is mine. I hate that.) When he’s washing up, I want him to wash the backs of the dishes, not just the fronts/insides. (Why do men not do this? I don’t think I’ll ever understand that.) I want him to change the sheets on the bed instead of waiting for me to do it — I want to come home one day and there are clean sheets on the bed. Surprise! (Yay!!)

So what do I do?

I ask him, every day, how his day went. (Or in this case, night – he’s been working nights for nearly a year now. We both hate it.) I try to chat with him on car journeys. I try to tell him in words, phone texts, emails, that he is important to me. I am trying to make him happy by saying what I want him to say to me.

I get it a bit more right with the doing — I know a lot of his ‘dos and don’ts’. I try to be tidy because I know he hates it when I’m not and when the house is not. I try to wear clothes I know he likes on me when we go out, because I know he thinks his taste is good and mine sucks. I try (VERY HARD) not to ask questions with obvious, or given, answers because I know he hates that.

And I also put the pots away on the stove, wash dishes inside and out, and change the bed sheets unexpectedly. Trying to please him by doing things that would please me.

And you know what? I could be wrong, but I honestly think he does the same thing in reverse. I know I hear him say, “I thought that’s what you wanted” often enough, and yet the ‘wanted’ thing is usually, very surprisingly to me, far outside my scope of even thinking about.

How can we get it so wrong? And how, after all this time, can we still think the other person wants what we ourselves want? And can we ever get it right?

I suspect getting it right would involve those taboos of “asking for what you need“, where ‘mind-reading’ is SO much more romantic, and “communicating honestly and openly” about what works and doesn’t work for you in a relationship, where guessing and basing your reactions on your own wishes is SO much more natural.

No wonder people say relationships are hard work. It seems to me it’s not the other person who’s hard work — it’s dealing with ourselves: our own preconceptions, misconceptions, interpretations, explanations. I have always believed, and still do, that the benefits are so worth it, but I gotta tell you, the work (which mostly seems to involve working on myself) is sometimes very hard.

My name is Leanne, and I’m an asthmatic.

Until 3 weeks ago, I didn’t know I had asthma. At least, not really.

I mean, I knew I had ‘exercise induced asthma’, but we’re talking a slight cough if I had to run for a bus. Nothing serious, nothing that needed an inhaler. Just something that bothered me now and then when I was at the gym, but basically disappeared on its own.

Cut to 4 weeks ago. People kept saying to me, “Do you have asthma?” “NO!”, I would answer. I had a ‘phlegm problem’ (which I still have — anybody know how to REALLY get rid of catarrh???), I was a bit breathless after those stairs/that hill/that walk, whatever. But no, I DON’T have asthma.

And then, I had lunch with a friend. A very caring, concerned friend, whom I hadn’t seen for about 6 months, by the way. All through lunch and afterwards, she mostly seemed to be saying, “I think there’s something wrong with you…” And finally, after several hours, she pointed out that I couldn’t get through a sentence without having to gasp for breath. (Okay, yeah, I’m a bit thick about medical stuff when it’s happening to me. I’m GREAT with anybody else’s crisis — just give me a call!) “Please go get yourself checked out,” she said. “Call your doctor, or better yet, go to the hospital.”

I waved off her objections, of course (this is ME we’re talking about) and then….

I ended up in A&E (the Emergency Room) the next day. For five hours. While the doctors tried to prove I had a chest infection, and yet couldn’t. And then diagnosed me….with asthma. *sigh*

And then, as a follow-up, my own doctor signed me off work for 2 weeks. “You are a very sick girl,” she told me. “You need to take this very seriously.”

It has been a debilitating experience. I never knew such little things could wear me out as they have. And, believe me, when you can’t breathe, you can’t do anything else either. But, after steroids and antibiotics (in case there was an infection they couldn’t find) and inhalers, I am better. Finally. And unbelievably, I’m an asthmatic.

Who knew? And who would have believed it?

Certainly not me.

Yet here I am. I am an asthmatic. And I must go forth with that always in mind. Talk about a trip.