Being a wife and mother sometimes is just plain hard. People don't always tell you that when you're a young gleeful single woman with a dream in her heart and success in her hands. You feel like marriage and a family will answer all of your problems, fulfill all your unmet longings, and give you a whole new passion for life that you've been missing. There might be one kindly genuine person who attempts to hand off a padded comment about, "oh, we have our rough times. But we've worked through them." You brush it off, "I won't have that. Nope, me and my husband are going to be head over heels in love every day until the moment we die, achieving maybe 60 years of glorious matrimony!" Of course there's the divorced individuals. But you have talked with them, and it seems pretty obvious what they did wrong: Married someone they thought they could change; married too young, or too old; were unhealed emotionally at the time of joining their union; had an abusive spouse; claims they fell out of love; had an unloving, uncaring spouse; or their spouse just randomly changed and told them they were done and gone. None of those would apply to you.
And then one day it happens. You realize you've been married for 3 years and gradually things have built up, tears and hurt have occurred numerous times. The pain you've felt in your heart you never knew you could when you're supposed to be so close to the person you love. But that's just the thing, you LOVE him so much! That's why it hurts so much. Why can't he understand? Does he not see?? What happened to all of the fun things we used to do together? What happened to the giddy joy and love of just being together? When did work and money and advancing in the world become so important? Why can't we see eye to eye on parenting, and budgets, and the need for sleep, and activities on leisure, and food, and household upkeep?? And worse of all, why does this hurt so much? Is it me? Am I wrong that all of these things bother me so much? Should I just let them go, brush them aside, and "don't sweat the small stuff"? Why do I feel so unloved, I feel that everything is an insult to my character. That whatever he does say or doesn't say is a disappointment in who I am, in my skills, my ability, my beauty. Am I the one with the inner soul wound that causes me to interpret each look and word and silence as an attack or simply as a lack of love? Or is it him, does he need to have an epiphany of how much he's hurting me without realizing it, of how much I do for him and how little sometimes he does back. When did this get so HARD??!!
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That's on the bad days. On the good days, things are great, you take smiling pictures and everyone beams and says you're such a wonderful family. The young girls all want to be like you. The say you two make them actually want to get married, and even consider children. You both say sorry and forgive and promise to do better. Maybe you even schedule an event, a marriage conference, or a family outing. Everything seems promising again. But will it last?? Was there really a change? What does not kill us makes us stronger, they say. Did we actually get to the root of it? Or is there a root, maybe it's just a daily pursuit. A daily surrender and dying. Forgiving for the seventy times seventh time. Maybe.
I will continue to learn, seek, and grow.
To come, what I am learning I is all part of staying alive and passionate, as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, and as a princess of the King.
