Motherhood & Marriage

Being a mother is hard. Some days taking care of small children is overwhelming.  Daily tasks like laundry, meals and shopping become mundane and we go to bed each night exhausted from taking care of everyone else and leaving little time to ourselves.

I have a friend who is having a hard time adjusting to staying at home after a successful career, one that just quit her job to finally be a stay-at-home mom, and then me who is adjusting to finally having a career and trying to find a balance of working from home while raising kids. We all are in different seasons of motherhood, yet can learn a great deal from each other.

I have also learned that marriage is just as hard.

Last night I was lying in bed and I got a message from a good friend of mine. Her husband is leaving her after 12 years of marriage. I was devastated for her. My heart was breaking for what she was going through, the woman she will have to become and the mother she will have to be to her two girls after years of marriage fall to the side and she is forced to create a new life. I cannot even imagine.

I have friends that from the beginning I thought their marriage was doomed, and I have friends that I cannot imagine them without their husbands for eternity. This was one of those friends. I never imagined her without her husband. It made me contemplate my own marriage, how closed off I can sometimes be and how I let the worry and tasks of daily life with little kids get to me and I forget what brought us together in the first place.

I hate seeing my friends marriages dissolve and I wish I lived closer so I could help them through such a horrible time. I once had a friend of mine tell me that she believed that if her husband left her, then she was not being the "best" wife she could be and in essence, it was her fault. I have never believed this. I think we do the best we can with what we can. My grandmother told me once that marriage was hard work and sometimes you fall out of love with your spouse and you have to find ways to find your way home. My grandma was a wise woman :)

You cannot expect to live with someone for 10+ years and always feel like you did when you first met. Marriage has ebbs and flows, and with children you have to maintain stability-sometimes that means their needs come first. It's hard to imagine walking away from so much history-I think the key point is that as a couple you find something that works for the moment and with each season of marriage you have to change your expectations and rebuild your marriage to fit the new situations.

A long marriage is not going to be full of passion all the time, but rather will have stages as does any relationship. It's sticking with the changing landscape that determines whether a marriage will survive and sometimes one spouse is just not in it for the long haul. Like anything in life, we can put our whole selves into something, all our dreams, hope and faith and regardless, things happen that change our lives forever-death, illness, tragedy and divorce. We do not know what will happen tomorrow or next year, all we can do is live in the moment and move forward with hope that we will endure.

In 12 years of marriage, my husband and I have experienced financial issues, moving five times, a child born with health problems, career changes, college, illness and death. We have had rocky times, passionate times, and struggles-but we always find a way back to each other. I hope when our kids are grown we will be able to look back at all we have created and stand as an example to our children that a marriage can survive despite life's challenges. We've had moments when we fell apart and broke each other's hearts and I'm sure we will have more in the future. No one said it was going to be easy, but you have to decide if it's worth sticking with it until the end. I hope you will all look at your spouse tonight and see all the reasons you fell in love with them in the first place and perhaps hold them a little tighter as you end the night and drift off to sleep.

~S