Dorie Morgan’s Rising Up
Navigating Twenty-Something Suburban Life
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Archive of "choices" Category
At night I dream about term papers
So I’ve been thinking about relationships and education lately.
I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration focusing in Entrepreneurial Studies. I fantasize about graduate school. I take Continuing Education Credits at the local community college whenever money permits so I can continue to expand my skill set. I read at least three books a week.
And then there is Brian. Brian was home schooled (he graduated from “Morgan Academy”). He put in a few years at a local community college but didn’t complete his Associate’s Degree. When the opportunity arose for him to learn a trade, he grabbed a hold of the opportunity. He is now a skilled finish carpenter. In the almost two years that we have been married, I have seen him read one book (“The Shy Little Puppy” which our 6 month old niece loved, FYI).
The gap between our levels of education will continue to grow over time. Brian doesn’t dream about school. (He also doesn’t dream about his marketable job skills but I do). We both know that on our mutual wish lists for the future, more education for me is high on the list.
We aren’t the only couple we know in this situation. We spend a lot of time with couples that have a college educated wife and a high school educated husband. Most of the husbands work in skilled trades, but not all of them do. Most of the husbands have also started a college degree but opted not to finish it.
I wonder what this will mean for us in the future.
Do you and your partner have the same level of education? Who has more? How has that impacted your relationship? Do either of you want to go back to school?
Jumping in without Swimmies
I think I was possessed on Sunday morning. I was chatting with Kathrin Ivanovic at The Well and for some reason, I burst out with “I think I’m ready to come back from my blogging break”.
Really? Really, Dorie? After two and a half weeks of a break, you’re ready to come back?
I must be possessed. Because I’m really not sure that I am ready. But I’m also not sure I’ll ever be completely ready. I still don’t know what the changes in my life mean for me or for my family.
Now the question has become “Is not blogging still helping me figure things out and process this change?” Not so much.
If anything it is just throwing me off.
After my declaration to Kathrin, I panicked. Performance anxiety? Maybe. Maybe I had been secretly hoping for some big, profound return where I would write something that was earth shatteringly brilliant and then I could pat myself on the back for returning. But earth shatteringly brilliant ideas don’t come to me while I am on staycation and watching way too much DIY network.
Earth shatteringly brilliant ideas come when I’m interacting, when I’m communicating, when I live somewhere outside of my own head. Those ideas happen in the midst of community.
I spent a week on staycation and now I’m starting to get back into the swing of things. I’m trying to be a person again. My staycation didn’t quite go as planned. When I scheduled it, my plan was to have a one woman writing boot camp – I was going to flesh out the ideas on my personal post to do list and see where it takes me. I was going to be totally blissed out and learning and growing as a writer.
Instead, I grieved. The extent of my writing was a much needed gratitude list. I took long baths. I listened to Patsy Cline. I baked favorite treats. I hid. I turned off the outside world (okay, I was still on twitter but the burst of 140 characters was not taxing). And while it was very good and very needed to do those things, I missed community by the end of it. I felt disconnected.
It turned into a battle to not blog but when I verbally announced my return, I freaked out. Was I even ready for this? If someone left a negative comment for me, would I be able to take it in stride or would I turn to the comfort of homemade baked goods? If no one left a comment for me, would I take it as a personal rejection? Was I even in a place where I could be vulnerable and open again?
So on Monday, I started looking at all of the blogging I missed. I caught up on a few favorites like a little kid sticking one big toe in the deep end of the pool, fearful but knowing I really wanted to be in the water. On Tuesday, I let my feet dangle in the water by responding to a few emails. On Wednesday and Thursday, I started commenting again, holding on to brief interaction with others like an inner tube. And today, I’m in the water. I’m kicking. I’m keeping my head up. I am not drowning.
It’s a little scary coming back but soon my hair will be green like an over chlorinated kid on the last day of summer.
Zeus is just a dude
Yesterday, Rebecca Thorman and Ryan Healy let out a public announcement about their relationship. In the form of a post on Rebecca’s blog which I thought was fabulous. And really messed up too (but my inner blogger with voyeuristic tendencies can’t resist). After all, if social media is all about transparency, then why aren’t we talking about everything online from the beginning?
But there are such good reasons for not talking about everything online. Holly Hoffman may have blogged openly about her alcoholism but she also waited a year to do so. Milena Thomas is a happy blogger because she has set her boundaries. After all, is it really anyone’s business? Probably not.
And I have my very own, built in appropriate meter. His name is Brian. You may have heard of him, he’s that crazy guy who thought marrying me would be a really great idea. (Side note: it totally was.)
Brian keeps a good portion of my blogging desires off of the internet. I would love write about sex but sex isn’t just about me anymore. It’s really about my husband. And he would rather it if I didn’t tell everyone about his penis. I’d also love to blog about my in-laws. Because on some level, I still identify them as Brian’s family and therefore, I can mentally critique their behavior in a way that I cannot do with my own family. But he is my family and therefore his family is my family and once again, my built in appropriate meter tells me to put the laptop down. I would also blog about some of my more neurotic tendencies but something tells me that Brian would need to be able to show his face in public again and perhaps I should keep my mouth shut.
I’d love to be a totally open book. But I can’t be.
And then I realize how lucky Rebecca and Ryan have been to have the option to keep their romance off of the blogosphere, at least for a little while. They let themselves have time to be quiet and enjoy the newness of what was happening between them.
Brian never had that option. He just had a wife who blogged.
To make up for my own presence in social media, Brian is just not there. He isn’t on twitter. He occasionally comments on Brazen Careerist as his alter-ego but he’ll never have a profile (probably because he knows I would out him fast enough to make his head spin). He finally has a Facebook page, but he only has that because I created it for him, added all of his friends and then informed him that he had to get with the times. (By the way, you should totally add him as a friend and tell him I sent you. He may squirm a little bit but I think it’s good for him and character building).
Brian has been living on the web for through my identity. I tell you about our life together, usually in six hundred words or less. And then you comment while Brian reads. We rarely hear his portion of the experience, just the way I perceive the world happening. His online identity is based largely on how I see him and not as much on how he sees himself.
And for awhile, Ryan was in the same boat. We saw this mysterious “Zeus” character through Rebecca’s eyes. While he probably could have given her a cute little name and blogged about it on Employee Evolution, he didn’t. But since we weren’t reading about him in terms of “Ryan Healy, Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist”, Zeus’s behaviors made sense to us. Will Zeus still make sense to us tomorrow? Or did the assigned alter ego die a public death?
Now that it is all out in the open, will it change the way we perceive Rebecca’s writing? Will we feel more quick to judge now that the whole world knows? Will we find descriptions of interactions more questionable?
Rebecca knows Ryan for who he is at the end of the day and we just have a sense of who he is during the work day. And really what happens between the two of them is none of our business (we’re not investors in their start-ups).
These questions make me happy that B doesn’t have a blog. I’m not sure I could answer any of those questions in my own online life.
Commitment is Liberating
Out of everything Starbucks has printed on the side of a cup of the years, my favorite is The Way I See It #76.
“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is remove your head as the barrier to your life.” – Anne MorrissI’ve loved the quote since the first time I saw it. I read it out loud at my best friend’s wedding as I made my toast (she may have laughed because I had been carrying it in my purse for months or maybe it was because something I loved was related to coffee yet again). Before I moved in with Brian, I had the quote hanging on my dresser mirror to remind myself of its importance each morning as I started my day. I since lost the quote but it still came to me from time to time.
Commitment is deeply liberating. It is a fact that proves itself on a daily basis.
When I committed myself to my marriage, so many other aspects of my life came into place. I had the freedom to take risks in my career because of unconditional love and support. I did not need to worry about the port I would return to at night so the chaos of my career was not overwhelming but manageable.
When I committed myself to my writing after a long period of neglect, I felt a surge in my creativity and in my sense of who I am. The commitment to craft words that could stand for me released the built up tension in my mind. I didn’t need to worry about what I was going to write, what my ideas would be, or how to best articulate my ideas – I just needed to stay committed my writing. I was liberated.
That is why commitment is liberating. It frees you from a question that plagues your mind and consumes your energy. Instead you energy is spent on what you love, what you care about, what is most important in your universe.
My internal critic had a lot of time to practice being a critic. That was also called being a teenager. But the danger with that is as time goes on our inner critic grows stronger, more jaded. The critic sees why this won’t work, why this won’t be a fairytale ending, why you don’t deserve what you want. Commitment scares my internal critic. Commitment reminds my critic that she does not run the show. And there are times when it is appropriate and relevant for my critic to make and appearance but that is most definitely not all day, everyday.
After the turmoil of the critical teenage years, it seems to me that your twenties should be an exercise in learning how to listen carefully to yourself and how to take what the critic says with a grain of salt. It makes me wonder: do the people who learn how to listen to themselves in the twenties enjoy a more peaceful thirties and forties?
I hope so.
My soul needed glasses
For the last couple years, I’ve had a very hard time driving at night. Everything was glaring and horrible. I couldn’t read the street signs and it got so bad that I didn’t go anywhere at night if I hadn’t been there numerous times already. I couldn’t read the street signs before it was too late for me to make the turn I had been looking for.
I knew I couldn’t really see but yet I did nothing to fix it. Except bitch about it. But in the end, bitching didn’t help me see. All bitching really did was get friends to volunteer to drive when we carpooled. Probably due to a fear of dying while I was at the wheel. And while I did not get into any accidents, I did have the opportunity to frequently drive around the suburbs and wonder “Where the hell am I?”
But in December, my dear sweet husband poked me in the eye. Hard. Like bleeding hard. Like I had a headache for a week hard. Like if I thought signs were blurry before I had no idea how bad it could be hard. Like it is impossible to look sexy when one eye is red hard.
After several years of complaining, I finally made it to the eye doctor. I always had a reason why I couldn’t go. I wasn’t paying for vision coverage. My health insurance wouldn’t cover it. I didn’t have enough money. I didn’t have enough time. I made an appointment right after I graduated from college but then the office had a power outage seconds before I was called back and then I never rescheduled my appointment. It would take a poke in the eye.
And of course, Brian had poked me hard enough (by this time I was more prone to use the phrase “brutally stabbed me in the eye with his finger”) that the doctor could not perform an eye exam, he could only make sure my eye wasn’t damaged. Two weeks later, I made it back for my first real eye exam since the nurse’s office in elementary school. And two weeks after that, I had my very first pair of glasses. Which make me look very smart and very sexy, thank you very much.
And then, I could see what was right in front of my face.
It turns out my vision was no where near as bad as I thought it was. I only have a slight astigmatism in both eyes. It can be corrected with glasses. It is not a big deal.
But my frustration and my inability to act until something was really wrong made it a big deal.
Bitching is really just a lot easier than actually getting up and doing. Doing take effort. Doing takes desire. Doing takes a decision.
Bitching just takes your motivation. And who really needed that motivation anyway?
Bitching also robs you of your dreams. When you are too busy complaining about what you don’t have, what you don’t want, what everyone else has, you have no time or energy left to dream and then take the necessary steps to achieve those dreams. The negativity sucks your ability to achieve and leaves you with nothingness.
Glasses for my face somehow turned into glasses for my soul.
Self Knowledge Comes In Waves
Charlotte called me out again last night on my lack of “no” saying abilities in the midst of a rant about people asking me to do inappropriate things. Which sucked because she was completely right – people do ask me to do inappropriate things on a regular basis, probably because there is a good chance that I won’t say yes but I won’t say no and I’ll do what needs to get done anyway because I cannot handle the incompetence that surrounds me.
Once again, I hate it when she is right. Which happens to be all the time. (Or at least enough of the time to know that it is more often than when I am right.)
While I know that its good that I have friends who are smarter than me in some respects, who know themselves and have the confidence to say something to me when I’m doing something dumb, it can be irritating. Maybe I do want to make bad decisions. After all, I’m only 26 and while I’m married, I don’t have any kids. Maybe I should try to do as much dumb decision as humanly possibly before there are children in the hopes that I can get it all out of my system.
And then it hits me like a freight train: this is what living in community really looks like. Having crazy friends who are smarter and wiser and more mature than you are call you out on the things that will ultimately hurt you and hurt your growth.
Along with that freight train comes the knowledge that my desire to make stupid decisions prior to baby making has nothing to do with what I think it is all about. There is no lifetime maximum pay out on stupid decisions. Potentially, I could make stupid decisions all day, every day until the day I leave this earth. My desire to make stupid decisions, however fleeting or dominant that desire may be, has everything to do with me wanting a free pass at life.
I don’t know that wanting a free pass at life is necessarily a bad thing, but I do know that actively pursuing that desire is ultimately destructive in the end. That free pass would strip away the vibrant colors that come with learning how to make good decisions. That free pass does not exist in the ways we hope it would.
This wave of self awareness is overwhelming.
But I have friends like Charlotte who encourage me to be in community but not let myself turn into the community’s bitch. And in order for that community to thrive, the burden of responsibility does not need to fall on a small handful of individuals. The burden of responsibility does not need to fall on me (even if I secretly want it to fall solely on me).
My plan to just say yes to things to the things I love instead of wasting energy on saying no to the things that drain me might just be a failure. And that’s okay. As always, it is finding that balance between extremes, that sweet spot that healthy and sane and rational.
I still have a very long way to go.
Did blogging change anything?
Last week, I was certain that blogging had not changed my life in the least so I didn’t submit an entry in Brazen’s contest. After all, I have been blogging since I was a sophomore in college and the most those blogs ever did for me was anger my boyfriends and that was something I was probably going to do on my own and in person anyway.
But for the last year and a half, I’ve been running Rising Up and its grown into something I am really proud to have my name on. It is my little blog that could and a source of excitement in my day. My blog has been a tool in my growth.
Last week, I still would have told you that blogging has not changed my life. Last week, I would have told you that I would be doing all of the things I am doing now even if I did not have my blog. Last week, I would have told you that the only person whose life has changed as a result of my blogging was my husband – mainly because I write about him and then he reads it on the internet while strangers comment about the way he lives.
I also would have told you that things that have changed my life include my adoption, meeting my husband, joining my sorority and my involvement at The Well.
I don’t have any dramatic stories about saving the world because of blogging. Instead I can tell you about meeting Kathrin Ivanovic through my blog and working on Change Blogger Philadelphia together. I’m not trying to save the universe – I’m just trying to have an ongoing conversation about change in Philadelphia and its suburbs.
I can’t share a romantic story about how a man once commented on my blog and lo and behold we fell in love. Instead I can tell you about meeting my husband at church through his sister and deciding to get married without ever dating. I never meant to find true love on the internet but I’ve been blessed to have a blog that gives my husband and me something to talk about at night.
I wish I could tell you that someone discovered my blog and decided to pay me six figures to sit around and be fabulous all day. Instead I can tell you about learning how to find the time to feel fabulous. I can tell you about the ongoing adventure this lesson can take and how the adventure evolves as I do.
While I would love to think that I’d be doing all of the same things if I was not blogging, the truth of it is I wouldn’t be. Had I not started blogging, I would have never connected with Brazen Careerist. Had I not connected with Brazen Careerist, I would have never connected with Adam Gilbert (and started working on my fitness goals), Connie (and started working on my career goals) or Kathrin (and started working on my change goals). I would still be married. I would still have the job I have now. I would still have my own home. I will still have community.
But I wouldn’t have blogging and the possibilities that it opens up. I would have different possibilities in my daily life that I don’t have now. Because with all of the doors that blogging can open, it closes other doors. That’s not a bad thing – it just means that those opportunities are not presented to you because of the time you have invested elsewhere.
In my world, blogging has been subtly life altering. Nothing so dramatic that it shook me to my core but consistently pushing me towards a life that is consistent with my values and my dreams.
This Unhinged Life
I’ve never been the poster child of a balanced life. I’ve always been a person of extremes. I used to tell people that it was a side effect of my ADD – I couldn’t choose what was going to take my attention but when something did have my attention, it had it completely. For the most part, I was okay with it.
But it does not lead to a balanced life.
As an adult, it leads to a very unbalanced life.
Part of me wants the balanced life because everyone else wants the balanced life. And if everyone else wants it, then I should probably want it too.
But part of me wants the balanced life because I think it would be easier on my husband. While he says he knew what he was getting himself into when he decided he wanted me to be his wife, I’m not always sure he fully comprehended just how unbalanced I can be when I am left to my own devices. I have this idea in my head that part of being a good wife is being a balanced wife (this goes hand in hand with my suburban dreams of vacuuming in pearls and my house making it on the home tour).
So I’ve been trying to measure my success in a balanced life daily. Did I go to the gym today? Did I work a reasonable work day? Did I cook dinner? Did I spend quality time with my family? Did I accomplish all necessary grooming activities? Did I pay the bills for the week?
But I’ve been forgetting about the “me” things. My writing isn’t exactly a group activity. I love to paint but I don’t think I’ve managed to spend time in my studio (a corner of my basement) in at least a month. Reading is a vital to me as breathing air but I find that I have not made a dent in my books to read pile and I’ve stopped writing down titles that I think might interest me.
In my quest for a balanced life, I’ve become unhinged.
Part of this has to do with my buying into the suburban dream that we can have it all. We can have the perfect house with the perfect meal on the perfect table and the perfect job pays for the perfect meal with a perfect family with perfect manners sitting at said perfect table. But life doesn’t work that way.
Part of this has to with the fact I never really established what my own balanced life would look like but I made criteria to judge my progress. I put my cart before my horse. And since I didn’t know what my own personal balanced life would look like, there was no way for me to integrate that with my family’s balanced life. I needed a good, strong definition but all I really had was everyone else’s ideas.
The biggest part of this has to do with me trying judge a balanced life daily. I was staring at the grain of sand and I thought I knew what a desert looked like. I lost my sense of the big picture and with that, I lost my sanity. I was making myself insane with unrealistic ideas of what balanced looked like.
Maybe the solution is to realize I won’t ever be able to judge a balanced life in terms of days or weeks. The overall balance is much more important that what a Monday looked like. Maybe the only time we can truly decide if a life was balanced is after we retire.
For now, I’m trying to abandon my dream of a balanced life. I’m not a balanced person and I want the freedom to be unbalanced without feeling guilty for it or disappointed in myself.
All I really know is that I don’t want an unhinged life.
Thank you President Bush
When I was in 9th grade, our history class took a month to discover our political beliefs under the guidance of Mr. Kennedy (who would not tell us his own beliefs until the very last day of the school year but only with the promise that we would not tell the 8th graders who would follow us). We had debates. We wrote essays. We took political quizzes. All of this was to determine which party we belonged to. Are you a Democrat? Or are you a Republican? There are your options and you must know who you are.
I landed in the Republican side of things. There was only one other kid in class who was farther in than I was but it seemed like his reasons were based more on not liking anyone and not being interested in even helping his own family whereas I ranted like a lunatic about Social Security and what seemed like a crazy system (some things never change).
I stuck to my party ever since.
I voted in the 2000 election for George W. Bush but my little Republican dream was John McCain in the White House.
I voted in the 2004 election for George W. Bush – although for that I argued was a choice between inconsistency and incompetence. At least I voted for the man who was consistently incompetent. At the very least, smart people might be around him. I wasn’t happy but I took the options presented to me.
But I haven’t been happy with Bush for quite some time.
So as I wrote yesterday, I voted proudly for Bob Barr. I made a financial donation to his campaign. And for once, I didn’t feel like I had to sacrifice my beliefs for the options in front of me.
I also changed my Republican status to Libertarian. Next time, I’ll be a registered Libertarian.
It turns out there are third parties. You do have other options.
During the 2000 election, I had no idea third parties existed until I got to college. There I discovered the Green Party but every collegiate Green Party member I met appeared to be a ranting, paranoid whack job. It wasn’t exactly the best advertisement for third parties.
This time, I did my research. I learned. I explored again with the same enthusiasm I had in the 9th grade. I needed to do this.
My dissatisfaction motivated me forward. And for that, I want to thank George W. Bush. I truly believe Bush was the best thing that has happened to the United States of America.
Before you get mad, think about it. Yesterday I stood in a record breaking line at 6 in the morning because people were so dissatisfied that they had to do something. Yesterday morning, for the first time in my life, I stood in line at a polling station that wasn’t just filled with white people. Even people from the Fleetwing section of Bristol (which is known for being worse than Philly neighborhoods and is also an open air drug market) were there to vote. And while some of them scared me slightly, it was important to see that they were there. They never came before.
I wanted to be the first voter at my polling station yesterday morning but there was an African American family ahead of me. They never voted before – it seemed fitting to see them go before me.
As of six o’clock this morning, Barack Obama received over 62 million votes. And they are still counting. That’s more votes than received by any other president in US history.
It seems to me that maybe we all had to get really uncomfortable to be motivated. Bush broke our apathy. And we should thank him for that.
Life with Don
I keep finding posts and articles about Gen Y and moving back home stumble flash across my browser and I think it’s time I say something about it. Mostly in the form of a confession.
Brian and I have spent the first 18 months of our marriage living with my father-in-law, Don. I usually try to avoid saying it flat out but I know I’ve alluded to it in the past in both comments and posts.My name is Dorie, I’m 26 and I’m a boomerang kid.
I moved back home follow graduation. Which was horrible. I am convinced that the only way possible for my mother and me to function as rational people is for us to live in different zip codes. Life post graduation in my childhood bedroom was mind numbingly horrible. We fought constantly, I tried to be drunk for as much of it as humanly possible and I was stuck. It’s a miracle anyone survived.
Then I met Brian, we decided to get married and I moved into his father’s house. Most women fear moving from their father’s house and directly into their husband’s house. Brian and I were flat broke and that wasn’t an option.
We spent the first six months on a futon on the floor of his high school bedroom. For the last year, we’ve actually had a bed to sleep on. It was by no means comfortable living but we did it.
Part of the weirdness comes from the fact that I run my late mother-in-law’s household. It’s her organizational systems that I maintain. I cook in her kitchen. I use her washer and dryer for the household’s laundry. It kind of feels like limbo. Because it is limbo.
So why did we do it?
1. Housing in Lower Bucks County is really expensive. A one bedroom apartment in the bad part of town will set you back at least eight hundred dollars a month. For about four hundred dollars more, we could get a mortgage. Since we were committed to the Philadelphia area, why rent when we could buy?
2. We could not afford to buy a house right away. We did not have enough money for a down payment. It took about a year for us to save enough money for a down payment. Had we been renting, we calculate it would have taken 3 to 4 years to save enough money.
3. We wanted a place we could stay rent free while we renovated a home. Brian is a carpenter. It made sense to get a handyman’s special.
4. Nine months before our wedding, Brian’s mom passed away. Moving was just too painful.
Now that our time in Brian’s childhood home is wrapping up, I catch myself reflecting on the time. There are a lot of pros and a lot of cons too.
Pro: It taught us how to fight. Having someone else in the house to hear it when we were disagreeing helped us to stay kind to each other. Because it’s one thing to have in-laws. It’s a whole different thing to have your spouse’s family hear your disagreements. The upside is that we’re pretty good with disagreeing without yelling.
Con: Sometimes you just want a good fight with no one listening. Sometimes I want to rant and rave like an absolute lunatic and not have my father-in-law listening to my insanity.
Pro: It’s broken down the typical “in-law” issues. Brian’s dad isn’t just “my father-in-law” but Don. He’s a real three dimensional person, not just someone to deal with at family functions. These living arrangements have connected me to Brian’s family in ways our marriage couldn’t do by itself.
Con: It makes it harder to be “Dorie” in terms other than “Brian and Dorie”. Limited living space a couple means that there is also limited space for me to still be home but alone. For the first 6 months, we were literally on top of each other because our “bed” was so small. We now live in two rooms but it can still be a challenge.
Pro: We didn’t have to buy what was available. We were able to be fussy about the house we purchased because we didn’t have to worry about when a lease would be up. We also were able to start our renovations without having live in construction or pay rent. It took a lot of pressure off.
Con: Sometimes it took a little too much pressure off us. To the point of becoming lazy. It becomes easier to say “no, I won’t work on the house today because it is raining” instead of saying “I have to move in a month, I have to get to work”.
Pro: We were able to save a ton of money. We were able to have money for a down payment for our home and still have money left over for renovations. I won’t say we are rolling in cash but we are able to get by today without too much panic.
Con: Sometimes it was really tempting to spend that money. Sometimes we were able to practice self control, other times we just couldn’t do it. While I may have loved coming home some days to random jewelry surprises (“Hello Sapphires, I love the way you look on me too”), it did not help our plan to put money aside.
Overall, living with Brian’s dad has been very good for us but I’m not sure I would recommend it to anyone else. If you do find yourself in a situation where you are married and living at home, set some ground rules first and get those rules in writing. Some questions you should ask:
1. Are we expected to pay rent? How much? What day should I give you money?
2. What household responsibilities are we responsible for?
3. What household errands are we responsible for?
4. What are your responsibilities are you response for as the home owner?
5. How will we handle the holiday seasons?
6. What are restrictions for having guests over?Treat everything like it is a business arrangement. It may sound impersonal but it is a key part of maintaining a functioning family in an awkward situation.
And don’t forget to make an exit plan too!
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