41 17 330 Distance does matter

January 22, 2011,that was my 6th day as a student at AIM. I woke up when I heard beeping sound of my mobile phone, 5.30 a.m. Still felt sleepy and tried to get used with my new schedule, I went to the wash room and took ‘wudlu’, a moslem’s ablution ritual as I need to have my regular morning pray.

As I finished my praying, I turned on my computer to check incoming mails. Oops, a striking feeling directly hit me when I read one of them, an email from my husband. His email strongly expressed his disappointment to me. According to him, I ignored many things in relation to our relationship. He also noted that I kept providing him with too many reasons which have no logical background, just for the sake of arguing. Moreover he pointed out that I put other people in higher priority rather than our family.

Oh my God .... I was stuck, hardly believed what I read and could not even think what I should do now. Should I directly answer his email while my hands trembling, tears on my eyes?

While digesting his words, I tried to remember our previous emails exchanges during my first week in Manila. I could not retrieve something wrong in the communication, nor that I could indicate that there had a problem happened. I could only remember that his emails were short, a kind of answering towards my questions rather than elaborating what happened with him and our son since I left for this study. Previously I thought it was simply because he did not have time to tell me the story. Apparently something more serious was going on.

I kept re-reading his mail and saying to myself, read beyond the lines... tried to understand what had occurred. Then I came up to a conclusion that this miscommunication happened since there were too much pressure on both of us. Although my husband fully supports my study here, however I must admit that we have not discussed all the detail consequences resulted from my leaving. We did have some conversations regarding this matter, and agreed on certain ways to handle the situation. But we did not take into account several things which we thought would be solved as time flew. Small things, could become bigger when it happened at the wrong time. There are some other things that would make a small problem even worse.

Actually that was happened with the two of us.A simple thing that would not be considered as serious in regular situation, apparently became a problem.

Then I wrote few sentences to apologize and explaining that it was not my purpose to let this miscommunication would happen in the future. He replied, still with an uneasy feeling I guess, however he agreed that such communication problem might happened. I promised to myself that I will not let this thing happened again.

It is still going to be a challenging journey, but I am ready to face it.