{grow with love} day eleven

I’m so happy to bring with you our first Grow With Love post and prompt of Week Three.  If you’re just now finding us, welcome welcome!  Please feel free to dive in whenever and where ever you feel comfortable.

The backstory:  Crystal and I have had it on our hearts for a long time to collaborate on a project that was something more than “just” templates.  But also a project of journaling prompts so that anyone who wanted to delve into a special kind of storytelling could join have place to start.  We were inspired by our own real life musings and reflections into our loves and relationships and so Grow With Love: Marriage Edition was born.  It is a series of 20 templates and 20 journaling prompts that we hope will inspire you to scrap about and improve your own loves and relationships.  You can snag the templates and prompts here or here.

To recap:  We are spending 4 weeks or 20 days exploring the journaling prompts together.  Each day (Monday – Friday) we hop back and forth between my blog and Crystal’s blog, exploring a fresh prompt.  Anyone is welcome to join us any time.  You can tackle all the prompts with us, or just the ones that touch you most.  This is a self-paced project.  And you are welcome to scrap with both the templates and prompts or just the prompts, whatever inspires you most. Though if you’d like to be eligible for the prizes (including a fabulous photo book of your very own Grow With Love project!) you will want to check out the Day One post for details.  You’ll probably want to check that out anyway to learn more about the project.  lol.

And so here we are.  We are starting Week Three.  Woot!  We’ve been loving everyone’s pages so far and we’re so happy to see you joining us on this adventure!  So far we’ve gotten nostalgic, we’ve exlplored our notions of love and relationships, we’ve shared our own love “history”, we’ve given thanks, and we’ve started to consider how we look at our loved ones and at ourselves in the good times and in the bad times.  All of this has been gradually building the foundation for some of the meatier prompts.

And that’s where we land today.  Day Eleven builds on some of the reflective prompts we’ve explored.  And it asks us to recount, in a kind of specific way, a moment of conflict (goodness knows we all have those, right?).  Let’s take a closer look:

This one is tricky.  It was for me.  I suppose that’s because reflecting on these less than sunny moments can be uncomfortable.  Also it can be difficult to really get down to the “he said she said” or it may be difficult to even recall these moments well.  I just knew that I thought and thought and thought about this one for days.  And then I sat and sat and fiddled and fiddled with my page for hours.  In the end I was left with a page that has me “confessing” in a way, my own hand in where things went awry.

It’s easy to remember a conflict in a way where you are the protagonist and all the blame lies at your spouse’s feet.  But when you start to think of it and scrap it for all of posterity and for your family to see one day it becomes more difficult to just stick to “one side of the story”.  And so I scrapped what has become “legend” in my own relationship.  It’s one of those conflicts that we can look back and laugh at now, some 10 years later, and of course we both remember the key snippets of obnoxious behavior and all the details are muddied.  And since my husband is sure to make sure I’ll never forget my own hand in the ridiculousness forevermore (and I his), I figured I may as well memorialize it on paper.  LOL!

Today it all seems so silly, but generally speaking this epic fight was definitely a live and learn moment.  We didn’t fight fair here.  We both behaved badly.  And we can look back and see that both “he” and “she” had a hand in things going so wrongly.  And we can look back and see where we’ve grown as a couple and what we’ve done better since then.

This prompt can really be a powerful one if you let it.  Even if you scrap something a little on the silly side, as I have done.  But you are welcome to just scrap as you feel led..go really deep and reflect on something serious, or something less so.

Remember too, that journaling is often really personal, especially for scrapping moments like these.  So it’s not necessary to share everything when you post unless you are comfortable.

We hope that when you finish this prompt, you feel a sense of letting go or a sense of better understanding.  Just try to have fun with it and pour yourself onto the page and I know you’ll be proud of where you end up.

Don’t forget to hop over to Crystal’s blog tomorrow for Day Twelve.

Until then, enjoy planting your story…