I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life adjusting things. Cameras, computers, radios, websites, and occasionally things that were working perfectly well until I decided they needed improvement. I can think of one washing machine that I took apart that needed Melanee’s help to reassemble.
Apparently, I’m pretty comfortable recalibrating equipment.
Myself? That’s been a little more complicated.
Learning to live without Melanee has required me to adjust my needs and wants in ways I never would have imagined. Almost immediately, I found myself struggling with questions I hadn’t needed to ask in a very long time. Who am I? What do I want? What actually makes me happy?
Those sound like relatively simple questions until you realize how much of your life has been spent answering them as part of a couple.
For so long, decisions were made with a “we” in mind. What were we going to do? Where did we want to go? What did we need? Even when I had my own preferences, they existed alongside the needs and wants of someone else.
Then, suddenly, I was making decisions for myself. And I discovered I wasn’t particularly good at it.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t make decisions. I’ve spent much of my adult life solving problems, managing responsibilities, and figuring things out. Give me a complicated project, and I’ll probably find a way to make it work. Ask me what I want to do on a Saturday afternoon, and apparently I need considerably more time to process the question.
There wasn’t a manual for figuring this out. Believe me, if there had been one, I probably would have downloaded it, read half of it, and then started modifying the instructions.
What surprised me was how unfamiliar it felt to consider my own needs without immediately placing someone else’s alongside them.
I’ve had to learn that wanting something for myself doesn’t automatically make me selfish. I can make plans because they interest me. I can decide how I want to spend my time. I can try something new without needing to justify why it matters to me.
And sometimes I can change my mind.
That last one has been particularly interesting.
But I’m not the only person who has had to make adjustments.
My family has also had to recalibrate its expectations of me. For years, we had established ways of interacting, making decisions, and depending on one another. Everyone knew roughly what to expect from Dad.
Now some of those expectations are changing.
I’m still their father. I still love my boys, care about what happens in their lives, and want to be there when they need me. None of that has changed.
What is changing is my understanding that I can have my own needs, interests, plans, and relationships alongside being their dad.
And they’re having to get used to that version of me too.
I imagine there are moments when my decisions surprise them. There are certainly moments when they surprise me.
The challenge is that when one person changes how they approach life, the people around them don’t automatically know what to do with it. Sometimes expectations need to be discussed instead of assumed. Sometimes we need to explain what we’re thinking rather than expect everyone else to figure it out.
I’m learning that recalibrating isn’t something I can do entirely by myself when my choices affect people I love.
My relationship with my girl has brought another kind of adjustment, one I’ve genuinely enjoyed. We’re two people with our own histories, personalities, habits, and ideas about how things should work. We’re learning about each other, discovering what we enjoy together, and figuring out how our individual lives fit into the one we’re building.
I like that we can both bring our own interests and preferences into the relationship. I don’t have to abandon the things that make me who I am, and neither does she. Sometimes that means adjusting our expectations or learning another way of doing something. Sometimes it means discovering that something I hadn’t considered before is actually pretty damn enjoyable.
And occasionally it means recognizing that my way isn’t the only way.
I’m still working on that one.
I used to think of recalibration as something you did when equipment wasn’t working correctly. You made an adjustment, checked the results, and kept going until everything was operating the way it should.
Life isn’t quite that cooperative.
There isn’t a setting I can change that suddenly makes every decision obvious. My needs and wants are still developing, and the people around me are adjusting too. Sometimes I get things right, sometimes I don’t, and occasionally I have to go back and reconsider something I thought I’d already figured out.
But I’m getting more comfortable with the process.
I’m learning what matters to me now, rather than simply relying on what mattered before. I’m making room for experiences I want to have, the people I love, and the relationships I’m continuing to build.
And I’m getting better at recognizing when something needs adjusting without assuming the entire system is broken. Although, knowing me, I’ll probably still spend three hours trying to improve something that was working perfectly well.
Some habits apparently survive recalibration.