Accentuate the Positive

I’m trying. Heaven knows, I’m trying to think about the good stuff and let the negative stuff wash away. A long time ago, my mom advised me to never point out my faults. She said that most people probably don’t even notice them until I point them out. She’s so smart, my mom.

Alas, I haven’t ever learned to take her advice, instead I’m famous for putting a negative spin on something as it applies to me but putting a positive spin on it when applying it to someone else. Okay, famous in my own mind. But whatever.

Take last weekend. My step dad was driving to Toledo to pick up a part for his boat. My mom had plans for the day to continue working at her sister’s house and so was unavailable to go with him. Well, after her left, her plans changed and so she called him and said if he wasn’t too far along in his trip, he could come back and get her.

He was already an hour away but he turned around and went back. They then turned back around and began the trip again, which took them to the far side of Toledo, a good two hours from their home. Over four hours later, my mom was seriously annoyed by the time this trip took.

My positive spin on that? He likes her so much he really, really wants to spend as much time as he can with her.

The negative way to take this is that he wanted to drain her time as much as he could so that when they got back, she wouldn’t have nearly as much time to give her sister.

Because I can make every single thing in this world about me if I put my mind to it, I immediately thought that there is no flipping way Tom would have turned around and come back for me.

Heck, we rarely go anywhere together.

Now, because this is about me, my first instinct is to be negative. I think, “Yeah, he just doesn’t want to spend time with me at all, which is why he wouldn’t come back for me. Heck, he wouldn’t have bothered to ask me to go along in the first place.”

It doesn’t even matter that I wouldn’t have wanted to ride along. That’s not the point. The point, my brain says, is that he wouldn’t have wanted me along. And that makes me sad. The brain thinking that way and the fact that he might not have wanted me to go.

But I’m accentuating the positive these days so instead of thinking the way my brain wants to think, I’m making it think something like, “Tom knows how valuable my time is. He knows I wouldn’t want to spend four hours in the car no matter how much we enjoy each other’s company and so he wouldn’t ask me because he wouldn’t want to put me on the spot.”

And he doesn’t care how I spend my time when we’re not together. Wait, I mean that as a positive thing. It means he’s not jealous of my time. He doesn’t monitor where I go, when I come back, how much fun I have when we’re not together.

I know husbands who do this. I won’t name names in an effort to protect the jealous but they worry every single minute that their wife is having fun without them, not even in an adulterous sort of way, just in the fun way, such as with their siblings or their kids, or even by themselves.

Tom wants me to get away sometimes, he wants me to have fun because he knows it makes me more pleasant to be around when I do come home.

We’re independent people. We go our own way and then come home to the joys and wonders of our sweet little family.

See? I can accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Now, to figure out how to hold on to the affirmative and not mess with Mr. In Between.