Things are just going from bad to worse in our house. Read more
Yasu went back to work today after I spent the weekend healing his leg. I had a really powerful healing for him last night, and was taken into the universal flow, it was so powerful my body was doing figure-8’s from the energy while I was holding his leg. He didn’t know what was happening but he figured it was all good and then this morning he got up and could walk like normal with no pain.
We did have a good weekend together though. We sat around and watched some tv, goofed around, laughed and joked and it was fun. I also went walking which is kind of turning into my love now. I just have this urge to go walking every day, it’s great!
So anyway, today was the day for enrolling in classes down at the community centre, so I walked up there and enrolled in Yoga, Drawing, and Cooking. On the way there I was walking along minding my own business when something hit my head (I was walking across a park), I looked up to see a massive Magpie flying over me and swooping down again. The bloody thing had pecked the back of my head!! God it hurt too!! It tried to swoop on me again and I threw my bag up in the air to try and shoo it off. I was terrified because I’ve heard of those crows attacking and pecking your eyes, but never a magpie. So after I shoo’d it with my bag a couple of times, it stayed away but boy did I hotfoot it across that oval!! haha. It must have looked funny but my head is still really sore and I’m so lucky it didn’t break the skin!
So anyway the courses all start next week. Drawing is on Monday at noon, Yoga is wednesday night, and Cooking is Thursday morning. In between that I have a pretty busy schedule with my weekend Psychic Development courses and I have made a few new friends in the area so I’m going to be doing some meet-ups this week and next week. My life has somehow just taken off!
Tomorrow I’m going to visit my mum, so I’m looking forward to catching up. The best thing I’ve learnt from Abraham in regards to my relationship with my family is that I can still have involvement with them without getting involved in their problems. I can see what they do, but It doesn’t have to affect me, and it’s true. It’s really working for me in that I no longer have any feelings about what they do, because they are doing it to each other, not to me.
So when I catch up with my mum, we have a good day, go out for coffee, walk her dog etc, and I don’t deal with any of the shit that usually happens in their lives because it doesn’t concern me. I’m so much happier for that now. It means I can have a relationship with my mum without any negative feelings.
I found out today that my cousin is 4 months pregnant today. My mum didn’t want to tell me because she thought I would freak out, because her and I started trying at the same time, but actually, I’m happy for her and I don’t feel any hard feelings because I’m really happy in my life and where I’m going. I’m so fulfilled right now. 
Life is great!!
On my walk today I took a photo of these pink and grey cockies on the grass near me, they were so tame, and didn’t move away when I came near.
Most readers of my blog know that I’ve been sick with the flu all week. During the week as Yasu has worked late every day, I’ve struggled through my flu fog to cook dinner for us every night even when I had to push myself just to lift up my feet and arms and do stuff. I’ve had no energy whatsoever, and not being able to sleep at night has added to it. However, I don’t like complaining about it so I just got on and did it.
Well this morning we had to go shopping for groceries which we did, and I got a different kind of cold and flu pills, Codral, which you need a drivers license as ID because they have pseudoephydrine in. (The laws have recently changed making it impossible to buy drugs of this sort without proper photo ID because drug makers were buying these drugs in bulk or raiding chemists at night, robbing pharmacies to get these drugs to make drugs etc).
As I don’t have a licence I got Yasu to buy them for me. They have made a difference in a big way to the way I feel and stopped my nose from running.
Anyway, last night I really wanted Yasu to cook but he came home too late and I had to in the end. So today I asked him if he could cook this weekend so I could have a chance to get over my sickness. He agreed, but had to work this afternoon, promising me he would be home by 5pm.
He didn’t get home until 6pm, and because I’m a nice wife, I had already cooked the rice. I expected him to get started on dinner, but no, he said he had a program on nhk that he wanted to watch. I was pretty hungry by this time so I started to raid the cookie jar.
I must admit I was abit peeved. If Yasu was waiting for me to come home, and when I come home stated that I wanted to do something for an hour while he waited for dinner, he would be pretty pissed off with me. Not to mention the fact that even when he knows I’m going to be late, he never puts the rice on for me ahead of time, he just doesn’t think about it.
I don’t let it bother me about the rice thing because I know the way he is, and I know by now how he thinks or doesn’t think. It didn’t occur to me though that when our roles were reversed how different our expectations of each other would be.
Yasu is still in his work clothes that is why his top is dirty,
not because of the cooking!
Cooking, for him is an extra, not in his job description, something he does which doesn’t count towards his weekly ‘work’. Cooking for me is considered my ‘work’ and goes along with the cleaning and general upkeep of the house. I can see why if I’m not holding up my end of the bargain, getting meals together on time, why he would be pissed off at me.
I think it is easy for us to expect others to do what we want them to do how we would do it. For me, that’s what I expected but because he didn’t do it the way I wanted, I got mad. I didn’t challenge him keeping me waiting, which is something he would do to me, probably in the form of an argument or the silent treatment, if it was me who had kept him waiting. The fact that I didn’t challenge him but went along with it I guess lets him perpetuate that behaviour in the future. I guess I should draw the boundaries properly, but I didn’t feel like arguing about it tonight.
Yasu didn’t want me to take a picture of this because
he said the presentation of the food was awful.
In any case it took him an hour to cook a simple meal of patties and egg. It was tasty but he made the eggs with cream cheese and corn and it was too sweet for me so he had to eat it. Another reason why I don’t often get him to cook is that he makes weird food. He made pork patties tonight with all these different spices in them and corn and onion, okay, not so weird. But the sauce was made with bulldog sauce, tomato sauce and lemon. Then the egg was eggs, sugar, corn, and cream cheese. He always puts things together which I don’t think should go together. Sometimes it works out okay but alot of the times the food tastes weird. Tonight was a night I was prepared to eat weird food and let him do the effort, but after eating, I questioned my choice. Would it have not been easier to get the meal prepared in 30 minutes and got it over and done with? Maybe so. Sometimes doing it yourself is much easier than making someone else do it.
I guess in Yasu’s mind something that is being done as an ‘extra’ is not as important as that which is a regular part of your task. Because of that, unless I work full-time as well and have housework as my ‘extra’, when it comes to making food, we will never be on equal footing. It’s nothing really bad, it’s just something I realised tonight that I never did before. Even If I think our relationship is equal in every way, it never will be because there are certain aspects of our lives that are serving a purpose for each other that only work because we are unequal.
(By the way if any of this doesn’t make sense I blame my head fog).
Okay, for all the women out there in a relationship in blogger land, any kind of relationship. Do you feel that it is equal?
By saying that I mean that, you have equality. That your partner is not higher than you. That you are not higher than him. You don’t boss or get bossed around.
In my relationship with Yasu, I basically set out the boundary when we got married and said, “We are equal. We are not in Japan, so don’t think you’re higher than me, you’re not. We live in Australia where men and women are equal (or I would like to think we are)”.
We are equal in that everything we decide is jointly decided. I find though that there is a natural progression in our relationship whereby at some things we are not equal.
Because Yasu is a non-native speaker of English, I find the burden of dealing with answering the phone, calling banks, paperwork, dealing with servicemen, ordering food, all to be on my side of the scales, where he has none. Although not his fault, it sometimes is really stressful for me as he refuses to take on any of these responsibilities mainly because the people on the other end of the phone or the other side of the counter, can’t understand him because of his strong accent. The constant “sorry?” “what did you say?” “pardon?” has given him such a phobia of dealing with people outside our circle.
I don’t blame him, but on the down side, I feel as if I’m doing what I should be doing, plus his side of things. At times I have resented it because I also suffer with depression and I have days where I can’t face anyone outside our house, and the process of calling someone up means I have to put on a cheery voice and be sociable, when I don’t feel like that. Sometimes I have thought, “why me?”, and hastily retracted it because I felt that it’s not Yasu’s fault that others can’t understand him, it’s just something that happened.
So basically, in your life with your husband/bf/significant other, is there a point in your relationship where you are not equal? And if so, how does this affect you? Or is your relationship equal in every way?
I was reading a post from another blogger and it spurred me into thinking about our finances and the way we handle them. I’ve never really given it a lot of indepth thought before, but I think we are quite different from my friends in Australia, not just the fact that we are a mixed race couple but the fact that I don’t handle the finance in our house, Yasu does.
In Australia it is the norm for the woman to handle the bills, banking, shopping, saving etc. Women are the keeper of children, the holder of the money, the cooker, the cleaner, the organiser basically. And I’m sure it’s the same way in Japan too.
When Yasu and I got married, I did keep our finances, because even though I didn’t want to I felt obliged to. Being Aussie and all, I just felt that I should. I’m not really one to follow in traditional footsteps, though this marriage business was all new to me and I wanted to do it right.
Suffice to say, it only lasted about a year, and then I got sick of it. Personality-wise, I’m a dreamer. Always have been. I’ve got my head in the clouds 24/7. I guess that’s why I was drawn to become a healer. I spend most of my time being creative and dreamy.
Dreaming and money don’t really go together, unless you are dreaming of large amounts of money.
It’s never been my thing. Money has no passion for me. It’s a usefull tool to buy the things I dream about, it helps fund my study, our life, food for us to eat, clothes to wear. The nitty gritty of how to get it, and how to save it though is not in my repetoire.
Yasu however is the direct opposite of me. When I met him he was so “kechi”. Over 7 years of living with me (frustrating I’m sure), he’s gradually loosened his purse strings but not to the point where he throws away money. He’s a champion saver, and he’s always calculating money to be saved, to be earnt, money not to be wasted.
When we first got married, we had alot of arguments about money, because we were thinking so differently about it. Eventually I handed the accounts over to him because he joyfully made the budget and calculated each cent and did the banking, and I just can’t be bothered with it. It is SO boring to me, I lose concentration. I’m happy enough to know that he’s doing a great job with our accounts, I don’t need to know any more.
We have joint accounts in everything, and I have cards for all accounts. We have a credit card, which we pay off in full every month, and we’ve never had interest on it, or had advances from it.
The credit card is basically so the money in our offset accounts build interest over the month while we use the credit card, then we transfer the money over and pay what we owe on the card. So basically we are earning money on what we buy.
Aside from that Yasu has a high paying job, he brings home about $1600+ per week, and he gives me an allowance every week that I can spend or save for whatever I like. I am pretty happy with that set up. It means I have some independence for buying what I want, and I have money for birthday’s and gifts. If I want to buy Yasu a present for example, I don’t have to go into the “what do you want the money for?” scenario.
He also gets an allowance. That is a strange notion in Australia, that we both get an allowance. That doesn’t happen, basically because both people have access to all money and just use it however they want, and sometimes with no communication at all. I don’t think the people I know are very good at budgeting or saving.
However, when I married Yasu, I had just inherited $50,000 from my uncle who had just passed over. I bought us a car, and a trip to Japan for 1 month that cost about $10,000.
I also bought furniture for our house. In doing that, I felt that I had at least covered a little of the costs towards moving in together, that we had evened out. At the time, I was a poor student at university earning about $100/week. Yasu was working full-time and paid for everything.
If I hadn’t had the money to pay for anything though, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have asked me to pay it back later. I personally think that when you move in together as a couple with a view to marriage (we were engaged) that you shouldn’t think of things like “I paid for that, therefore you owe me half”. I think in relationships, things even out.
For example, I don’t work professionally, though I do have my own small travelling healing business and I do work from home. However most of my work is irregular and on a “when i want to do it” basis.
Yasu works full-time but I am on a par with him because I do all the cleaning, and cooking, and so he thinks of my “work” as on a par with his. He needs my work to keep him fed, clothed, and clean, and I need his work to keep me fed, clothed and clean.
I think if somehow things went down the gurgler, and I had to pay for some household things from MY savings, It wouldn’t bother me, and I wouldn’t say “well you owe me, you have to pay me back”. It would even out later, where Yasu would pay for something we needed.
In the past, I HAVE paid for things out of my allowance, and Yasu has given me the money back from our savings, by force I might add.
I think this is an interesting topic, not only because it’s putting a microscope on our finances, but because it’s putting a microscope on relationships and how they work. How do you differ from me? Is your relationship the same? How are you different from your friends and family? Do you and your partner see eye-to-eye when it comes to finance?
If you feel like commenting, please do. I’m interested to hear about your couple finance. I expect there are a few people out there who don’t want to talk about it publicly, if so, that’s your call.
