I want to feel in love again!

I remember just being so in love with my hubby when we first met and then got married!

 Building a life together was so exciting and so much fun!

After 19 years of marriage and many ups and downs on the roller coaster of life... I dream of the above photo!  I have learned that material things and all the things we built together truly don't matter... We adore and love our children and feel so blessed. But....I just want my hubby to adore me and make me feel super special like he did when we first met!  Is this too much to ask?  Today, I am thinking of how I can make an effort to get back to this... he did agree and say he would go on a weekend wine tasting trip w/ me, when I asked him last night.  I told him I miss being romantic and feeling like real love birds.  A long marriage can feel very content.  This is not bad.  But I long for some passion.  I'm only 41 for pete's sake!

Middle Age Crisis For Women or Just me!

I'm tired.  Counting my blessings, but tired.  Dreaming of a home of my own separate from my husband.  Is that so wrong?  We've been married for 19 years.  I long for my independence.  Want to see what life would be like if I got to be in charge all the time of my every decision.  Want to have a home set up and decorated the way I like.  Want to have foods in the kitchen that I like to eat - not just what he likes to eat.  I've openly discussed this with him and of coarse he thinks I'm crazy.  I just want to discover who I really am.  I have been married to him since I was 23 and dated him since 22.  Sometimes I feel like my identity is missing.  Who am I, what do I like? Is that so selfish?  I want to feel free and do things MY WAY not go along w/ his way.  I'm 41 now, but am trying to find meaning in my life.  I work each and every day.  I do the M-F hamster wheel grind.  Is there something so wrong w/ wanting to feel like the Captain of the Ship?  He makes me feel like there is and when I tell him my feelings, he just laughs.  What will I do.  All actions have serious consequences and especially when children are a part of the situation.  I love my children - I love my husband, but sometimes feel like we are more friends than anything else.  I never want to hurt him.  Yet I find myself in misery, day dreaming about what my life / home would look like if I could be me.  Anyone relate to this?

Self Forgiveness

I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.

-- Maya Angelou