When hubby and I got married, I would always hear how "marriage is hard work." I'm sure you've heard this saying too. The funny thing is that I never understood that phrase. Marriage wasn't hard work for us. I guess we were extremely lucky, because it always just worked really well without the hard part.
Maybe it's because my mom prayed my entire life that I'd meet the exact man God had chosen for me. Maybe it's because we lived together for quite some time before getting hitched. It wasn't like we moved in together for the first time. In fact, my husband was living in London working for a tech company and I was teaching 6th grade in Orlando at the time we got married. We'd lived together, apart, and had survived a lot. I'd just lost my mom to cancer a few months prior and my step-father to cancer 6 months before that. That to me, was HARD. Marriage was not.
We had YEARS of living without much worry; financially, health-wise, emotionally. We moved a lot for his company yes, but outside of that, life was gravy. We went where we wanted, when we wanted, and did things how we wanted.
Then, came the unexpected 3 yr+ journey to parenthood. Never could we have prepared for the bumps in the road. I have seen marriages end a result of embarking on this excruciatingly tough road. Not ours thankfully. However, I think it was the first time in a long time where life (which includes marriage) required work. I know I don't need to explain. You guys GET IT.
So here we stand, arriving at the place we've worked so hard to get to. Our dreams of becoming parents have come true. We have a beautiful, healthy baby boy who lights up both of our worlds the minute he opens his eyes every single day.
Why then, does it feel like I'm sometimes drowning in a mess of emotions still...or maybe again, just in a different way? I find myself floundering to figure out this parenting thing. I'm surprised at how well I'm learning to mother in certain areas, yet feeling completely defeated in others. Am I doing this right??
One of the places I know I can do better is being a better wife. I have caught myself a lot lately being someone I don't want to be...someone who makes sarcastic remarks, or corrects my husband, has to have things "my way", or becomes a smart ass when someone wraps a piece of pizza in tin foil because it's too loud and will wake the baby sleeping in the living room. Yep, that happened. To my defense though, why must tin foil be so loud?
I know without a doubt much of it's due to getting literally only 3 solid hours of sleep each night (usually 9 pm-midnight) until my shift for baby watch begins again from 12-6 am. My body is getting so used to lack of sleep it's even become impossible to nap while P's napping, whether it be day OR night. I won't lie. It's wearing me thin, and it presents itself by highlighting all of my most flawed character traits, bringing those into the forefront. It doesn't help that I am a textbook Gemini. Whoever said life is like a box of chocolates must have missed greek mythology and the story of Pandora.
However, this too shall pass. The life of a first time parent, and especially one of a newborn, is going to present challenges that no one could prepare us for. And for one of the very few times in our lives, marriage may actually require some work. It may require me to hold my tongue more often, to ask myself how what I'm about to say or do affects my spouse and my family, and to be comfortable with not being right. I am working on it though, and am committed to being a more laid back wife who points her finger a little less.
Recently, I started reading a new devotional, The Power of a Praying Wife. I'm only a couple chapters in, but this book couldn't have come at a better time. I am absolutely loving it! I want to share with you the first prayer from the book.
If you take the time to read it, I promise you won't be disappointed. I hope you get as much from it as did I...
Lord, help me to be a good wife. I fully realize that I don't have what it takes to be one without Your help. Take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness, long-suffering, and the willingness to bear all things. Take my old emotional habits, mind-sets, automatic reactions, rude assumptions, and self-protective stance, and make me patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. Take the hardness of my heart and break down the walls with Your battering ram of revelation. Give me a new heart and work in me Your love, peace, and joy (Galatians 5:22-23). I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment. Only You can transform me.
Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with regard to my husband. I confess the times I've been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward him. Help me to put aside any hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way You do-totally and completely, no looking back. Make me a tool of reconciliation, peace, and healing in this marriage. Enable us to communicate well.
Make me my husband's helpmate, companion, champion, friend, and support. Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him to come home to. Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to him. Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul, and spirit. Make the the kind of woman he can be proud to say is his wife.
I lay all my expectations at your cross. I release my husband from the burden of fulfilling me in areas where I should be looking to You. Help me to accept him the way he is and not try to change him. I realize that in some ways he may never change, but at the same time, I release him to change in ways I never thought he could. I leave any changing that needs to be done in Your hands, fully accepting that neither of us is perfect and never will be. Only You, Lord, are perfect, and I look to You to perfect us.
Teach me how to pray for my husband and make my prayers a true language of love. Where love has died, create new love between us. Show me what unconditional love really is and how to communicate it in a way he can clearly perceive. Bring unity between us so that we can be in agreement about everything (Amos 3:3). May the God of patience and comfort grant us to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus (Romans 15:5). Make us a team, not pursuing separate, competitive, or independent lives, but working together, overlooking each others' faults and weaknesses for the greater good of the marriage. Help us to pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another (Romans 14:19). May we be "perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement" (1 Corinthians 1:10).
I pray that our commitment to You and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day. Enable him to be the head of the home as You made him to be, and show me how to support and respect him as he rises to that place of leadership. Help me to understand his dreams and see things from his perspective. Reveal to me what he wants and needs and show me potential problems before they arise. Breathe Your life into this marriage.
Make me a new person, Lord. Give me a fresh perspective, a positive outlook, and a renewed relationship with the man You've given me. Help me see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new compassion, and new acceptance. Give my husband a new wife, and let it be me.
In Jesus' name I pray.
No matter what we're going through in life, I've always known that our marriage needs to come first. Even with Preston now here, my husband still comes first and always will. We are the foundation that this family will be built upon, and as everyone knows, a house that's broken will not stand. I want our house to be solid. I want to be the wife that my husband wants to be around 24/7. I want Preston to feel the unmistakeable love that exist between his mom and dad and to find that same love for himself someday.
Maybe it's because my mom prayed my entire life that I'd meet the exact man God had chosen for me. Maybe it's because we lived together for quite some time before getting hitched. It wasn't like we moved in together for the first time. In fact, my husband was living in London working for a tech company and I was teaching 6th grade in Orlando at the time we got married. We'd lived together, apart, and had survived a lot. I'd just lost my mom to cancer a few months prior and my step-father to cancer 6 months before that. That to me, was HARD. Marriage was not.
We had YEARS of living without much worry; financially, health-wise, emotionally. We moved a lot for his company yes, but outside of that, life was gravy. We went where we wanted, when we wanted, and did things how we wanted.
Then, came the unexpected 3 yr+ journey to parenthood. Never could we have prepared for the bumps in the road. I have seen marriages end a result of embarking on this excruciatingly tough road. Not ours thankfully. However, I think it was the first time in a long time where life (which includes marriage) required work. I know I don't need to explain. You guys GET IT.
So here we stand, arriving at the place we've worked so hard to get to. Our dreams of becoming parents have come true. We have a beautiful, healthy baby boy who lights up both of our worlds the minute he opens his eyes every single day.
Why then, does it feel like I'm sometimes drowning in a mess of emotions still...or maybe again, just in a different way? I find myself floundering to figure out this parenting thing. I'm surprised at how well I'm learning to mother in certain areas, yet feeling completely defeated in others. Am I doing this right??
One of the places I know I can do better is being a better wife. I have caught myself a lot lately being someone I don't want to be...someone who makes sarcastic remarks, or corrects my husband, has to have things "my way", or becomes a smart ass when someone wraps a piece of pizza in tin foil because it's too loud and will wake the baby sleeping in the living room. Yep, that happened. To my defense though, why must tin foil be so loud?
I know without a doubt much of it's due to getting literally only 3 solid hours of sleep each night (usually 9 pm-midnight) until my shift for baby watch begins again from 12-6 am. My body is getting so used to lack of sleep it's even become impossible to nap while P's napping, whether it be day OR night. I won't lie. It's wearing me thin, and it presents itself by highlighting all of my most flawed character traits, bringing those into the forefront. It doesn't help that I am a textbook Gemini. Whoever said life is like a box of chocolates must have missed greek mythology and the story of Pandora.
However, this too shall pass. The life of a first time parent, and especially one of a newborn, is going to present challenges that no one could prepare us for. And for one of the very few times in our lives, marriage may actually require some work. It may require me to hold my tongue more often, to ask myself how what I'm about to say or do affects my spouse and my family, and to be comfortable with not being right. I am working on it though, and am committed to being a more laid back wife who points her finger a little less.
Recently, I started reading a new devotional, The Power of a Praying Wife. I'm only a couple chapters in, but this book couldn't have come at a better time. I am absolutely loving it! I want to share with you the first prayer from the book.
If you take the time to read it, I promise you won't be disappointed. I hope you get as much from it as did I...
Lord, help me to be a good wife. I fully realize that I don't have what it takes to be one without Your help. Take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness, long-suffering, and the willingness to bear all things. Take my old emotional habits, mind-sets, automatic reactions, rude assumptions, and self-protective stance, and make me patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. Take the hardness of my heart and break down the walls with Your battering ram of revelation. Give me a new heart and work in me Your love, peace, and joy (Galatians 5:22-23). I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment. Only You can transform me.
Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with regard to my husband. I confess the times I've been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward him. Help me to put aside any hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way You do-totally and completely, no looking back. Make me a tool of reconciliation, peace, and healing in this marriage. Enable us to communicate well.
Make me my husband's helpmate, companion, champion, friend, and support. Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him to come home to. Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to him. Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul, and spirit. Make the the kind of woman he can be proud to say is his wife.
I lay all my expectations at your cross. I release my husband from the burden of fulfilling me in areas where I should be looking to You. Help me to accept him the way he is and not try to change him. I realize that in some ways he may never change, but at the same time, I release him to change in ways I never thought he could. I leave any changing that needs to be done in Your hands, fully accepting that neither of us is perfect and never will be. Only You, Lord, are perfect, and I look to You to perfect us.
Teach me how to pray for my husband and make my prayers a true language of love. Where love has died, create new love between us. Show me what unconditional love really is and how to communicate it in a way he can clearly perceive. Bring unity between us so that we can be in agreement about everything (Amos 3:3). May the God of patience and comfort grant us to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus (Romans 15:5). Make us a team, not pursuing separate, competitive, or independent lives, but working together, overlooking each others' faults and weaknesses for the greater good of the marriage. Help us to pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another (Romans 14:19). May we be "perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement" (1 Corinthians 1:10).
I pray that our commitment to You and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day. Enable him to be the head of the home as You made him to be, and show me how to support and respect him as he rises to that place of leadership. Help me to understand his dreams and see things from his perspective. Reveal to me what he wants and needs and show me potential problems before they arise. Breathe Your life into this marriage.
Make me a new person, Lord. Give me a fresh perspective, a positive outlook, and a renewed relationship with the man You've given me. Help me see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new compassion, and new acceptance. Give my husband a new wife, and let it be me.
In Jesus' name I pray.
No matter what we're going through in life, I've always known that our marriage needs to come first. Even with Preston now here, my husband still comes first and always will. We are the foundation that this family will be built upon, and as everyone knows, a house that's broken will not stand. I want our house to be solid. I want to be the wife that my husband wants to be around 24/7. I want Preston to feel the unmistakeable love that exist between his mom and dad and to find that same love for himself someday.
 |
| Love this man! |