How do I feel? I feel like not talking.

I have never been really good at expressing myself.
Talking about 'feelings' was just something I never did growing up. It was a family tradition to keep your emotions bottled up because my parents, especially my dad, never talked about his feelings and emotions.
If he did not want to talk about something, he didn't. It was a simple as that.
Then I married my wife and was introduced to the very different side of the coin. While my family never talks about anything, her family never stops talking.
They talk about their feelings, emotions, thoughts and whatever else they can come up with – for hours on end.
They talk and talk and talk. And then they talk some more.
This was incredibly foreign to me. And the way my family dealt with things was equally foreign to my wife who would be baffled and often frustrated at the lack of communication of my kin.
But it was not just my parents, it has been going on for generations.
My grandpa came to Canada directly from Germany about two years before the Second World War started.
He could see what Hitler was doing in the country and as he was studying to become a Lutheran minister, he could not sit by and watch what the Nazi party was doing to the church, so he set out for the new country.
My grandma came from Romania and was a hard woman raised in a hard land. Neither were really in tune with their emotions and neither were really the touchy feely types so they passed that down to my father who passed it down to me.
I then ran smack into a wall of chatter when I met my wife and soon learned her family lineage took a much different and much more vocal approach to dealing with the issues of life.
They are not shy about diving into emotional oceans of any type and can't seem to let a matter rest until it has been talked to death.
This has taken many years to get used to as the Missus expected me to participate in the emotional love ins and express my deepest feelings.
Um, no. I don't want to – was always the wrong answer.
At first I was supposed to just 'share' and tell her how I was feeling, and how this made me feel and how that made me feel.
She expected all these sentiments and heart-felt thoughts to flow like water down a river.
She soon learned there was a drought in the Land of Handschuh and it took a lot of years before the rain began fall and the water started to flow.
She was determined to make me one of them – you know, the talkers.
To some degree she has succeeded. I am much more open to discussing things now that I used to be, but I am still a long way from the eloquent vocalization of her kin.
Oh well, we have only been married for 25 years. You can't rush these things.

copyright 2014, Darren Handschuh