Proactive Action Needed

     He stopped seeing the psychologist, and I needed to do something to help both of us.    It was time for me to be proactive.

    I urged him to write, and he responded. 

  “I have nothing I want to write about.”  

    I knew Gordon could write if he had the desire because he had written many reports during his twenty-five years in government service.   I suggested he could write about the places we had lived, and what we, as a family, had achieved and vacations we had taken.  Nothing stirred him to action.

    I finally made the decision to write about my life as the wife of a federal agent and how his job had changed the dynamics of family life.  When I finished my first article, I asked him to read it and was overjoyed when he showed an interest in what I had written and even made suggestions. 
  

 I finally saw a chink in his resistance.    

    To get help with my own writing, I joined a writers group at the Senior Citizen’s Center and hoped that Gordon would also become interested, as he was following me everywhere.  As I continued to write, we talked about how he had been selected for Foreign Service and what he and the family had experienced in Paraguay. 

     The lights came on! And what an idea!  It could be workable; it was confined to a short time-period, there was travel to a foreign land, and experiences with new people and many unusual cultures.  We would never run out of things to write about. 

      I made an outline of things that happened in Paraguay, actually two, - one on family life and one on his work as a DEA agent.  In the beginning, I was the only one writing, but I continued in hopes he would become interested in the project.  

   

     The writers group was not the easiest thing for me. What I wrote was critiqued and often torn apart.  At least that is how it seemed to me.  I would share all of this with Gordon, and we both worked on my rewrites.  I did not push him to go with me as I knew he would probably blow up at the criticism and storm out of the building.  After six months, he did start on his own outline, and he allowed me to read his work to the group, but it was another four months before he finally went with me and read his own story.

     Slowly he became comfortable with the group and quietly accepted criticism.  To my surprise, he became very good at critiquing the other writers and looked forward to the Tuesday afternoon meetings.

   Eventually, with the help of the group, the memoir, Foreign Service Family Style, was completed and published in 2014.  Life at home was a little better, but there was a long way to go.  

 We still had not discussed what had put him into this funk.

 

 www.rayneradventures.com                  Foreign Service Family Style