Marriage

For February 2018, Kindred Mom is hosting a series centered around Loving Well as a Wife and Mom. This series is comprised of engaging essays and podcast episodes created with the hope of bringing wisdom and encouragement to moms who want to build strong marriages and cultivate close family connections. 

Subscribe and don’t miss a thing! We’d love to send some encouragement straight to your inbox.

“We’ve got five years, that’s all we‘ve got!”

We had sung those words from David Bowie’s “Five Years” on countless road trips since dating, and with especially celebratory gusto once we hit our five-year anniversary of marriage. On October 16th, 2017, however, our usual road trip soundtrack carried some unmistakably somber tones.

That day was inarguably the most important road trip of our lives, one to mark the end of an era. Our last drive as a family of two, the destination was not exotic, but certainly significant—the hospital where I would be delivering our twin boys via scheduled c-section. What a strange thing, to have an appointment to meet your children! That day would be, without a doubt, the point of no return.

In the months leading up to the birth of my children, my excitement and anticipation had been met with numerous forms of anxiety, one of which involved my marriage. As much as I had longed for children, during those last days of pregnancy, I experienced a sense of grief related to how our life together would inevitably change with the arrival of our sons. We enjoyed five exceptional years of marriage together—not without hardship, for certain, but a period marked by deeply-rooted friendship, spontaneity, and intimacy. We had truly grown up together, cultivating a deep commitment to share whatever life threw at us. As The Day of our planned C-section neared, I cried to my husband, remembering a graph of marital happiness from one of my college psychology courses. The line quantifying marital bliss steadily, naively climbed, only to plummet once children entered the picture. I imagined the drop in my stomach, were we to fall just as hard…twice as hard, perhaps, with twins? It seemed as if the “good days” were nearly behind us.

Gently, unceasingly, my husband  held me and reassured me of the days ahead. Would they be hard? Absolutely. Would there still be romance and happiness? We would fight to ensure it. We wrote new vows to each other, which we read at our last date night before our boys’ birth. We pledged our love and commitment, and spoke of how we would try to reach each other amidst the chaos of raising newborns. I pored over his words and savored those final moments of it just being “us two.” As much as I tried to envision our new life as parents in mental preparation, I knew I wouldn’t understand until we were actually living it.

Sure enough, our boys, Elliott and Asher, entered the world on the appointed day, and my heart ached as it swelled in ways I didn’t know were possible. Our greatest shared adventure had officially begun. Those five days in the hospital were some of the best and hardest moments in my life. After riding the sort of manic bliss following delivery, I crashed hard on our third night in the hospital. Sleep deprivation, breastfeeding challenges, and plummeting hormones caught up with me and brought on tears like I had never experienced. I sobbed in the bathroom at 3 AM, wondering how we could be expected to go home, how we would survive this kind of challenge. He held me and cried, again reassuring me that we would get through this together. In that moment, my eyes, red and swollen, were opened to a new kind of romance.

I was amazed that hospital staff determined we were fit to be discharged after all they had witnessed. You really trust us to take care of these precious babies? We took our first road trip home as a family of four, and were largely silent, weary and embattled by the first few days of parenthood. We were relieved to be returning to our familiar environment, but terrified at the challenges ahead. Oh, the challenges.

It’s a humbling and heartbreaking revelation, to realize parenting does not impose ugliness on you, but rather, exposes the inherent crookedness of your heart. I remembered our vows to fight for each other, as we truly had to fight like never before in those early days of parenting and beyond. Sleep deprivation and stress revealed an edge that hadn’t existed in our marriage before; it seemed especially difficult to be kind and quick to forgive. As one of our boys would cry for the umpteenth time in the middle of the night, I experienced the moral dilemma of whether I would get out of bed or wait for my husband to stir. Each day and night brought new tests of sacrificial love, and as often as I would witness my own failures in this area, I would discover new facets of my husband’s love and commitment.

Prior to a one-night getaway, a friend had suggested my husband and I not discuss our children during the trip, in an effort to focus on ourselves as a couple. I looked at her, confused, and protested. Just as our attraction and friendship grew over common interests, our children have become a shared passion, an inside joke. I smile recounting the times my husband has made me cry from laughter during a late-night feeding—imitating one of our boys or making fun of their antics. Through these moments, domestic and monotonous, romance has blossomed in new ways that will never be advertised on the cover of Cosmopolitan. I am convinced that putting our marriage first does not entail periodically pretending our children do not exist. Rather, it is being intentional about finding each other in our shared, but different experiences as parents. Just as my own body grew to nurture our babies, so our marriage has expanded to provide space for these new beings.

Now, as my boys are a few months old, I no longer view them as an obstacle to be overcome in my marriage. Rather, they are beautiful, tiny manifestations of our love, borne of our one flesh. Their very existence presents us with opportunities to fail, confess, repent, and experience God’s grace as a couple—the lifelong process that continues to knit our hearts together more intimately.

Those five years without children will always be a period of time I cherish with sentimentality. However, they are not the golden years (no pun intended, fellow Bowie fans!) of our relationship. Rather, they served as a sort of launchpad for us, a training ground in which to build the foundation for our future family. For five years, we were able to practice love without the responsibility of raising little humans, and now that practice continues in a more challenging arena. Just as it was before twins, our love is imperfect, and drives us to our Savior in desperation, ready to receive the grace that sustains us both. I know it is this truth about love that will carry us through the years and adventures ahead.

Michelle Gee lives on the Central Coast of California, with her husband, Jon, and sons, Elliott and Asher. She is pursuing a life of devotion and wonder in the midst of early motherhood. When not writing, Michelle enjoys serving at her church, reading, singing and playing guitar, cooking, hiking, and great conversation over a glass of red wine. You can connect with her on Facebook and Instagram.

**Episode 34 of the Kindred Mom Podcast is now available!**

For February 2018, Kindred Mom is hosting a series centered around Loving Well as a Wife and Mom. This series is comprised of engaging essays and podcast episodes created with the hope of bringing wisdom and encouragement to moms who want to build strong marriages and cultivate close family connections. 

Subscribe and don’t miss a thing! We’d love to send some encouragement straight to your inbox.

He lit the candles. In an instant, the bottom falls out of the day filled with feuding preschoolers and a fearless acrobat toddler, and suddenly I am reminded that I am a woman, not just a mom, but a real attractive woman. He sidles up to me as I wash the last of the dinner dishes at the sink, places his hands tenderly on my hips and whispers in my ear that he thinks I’m sexy.

Me. In my apron-strings, top-knot falling out, still not back to my pre-pregnancy weight. Me.

I turn and give a knowing smile as I saunter to the bathroom–trying to remember my training–waffling back and forth like a tightrope walker without the balancing-stick-thing. My Sonicare dispatches plaque from my teeth, while I do battle with monsters in my head shutting out the loud voices of apathy and fear and straining to hear the quiet small voice of love thumping ever onward in my heart.

From the bathroom I can see the candlelight, flickering from our darkened bedroom, dancing faintly in the hallway, kindled of whispered desire. Tension rises in my shoulders as I contemplate letting him down easy per the monsters’ suggestion. Just as quickly, the voice in my heart breaks in to speak truth.

Monsters: I don’t want to tonight.

Heart: That is what you said last night.

Monsters: I just don’t feel like it.

Heart: Why not?

Monsters: I don’t know…It’s just a more comfortable idea to crawl into bed and go to sleep.

Heart: Life is too short you know…to just settle for being unconscious next to THAT man..YOUR man.

Me (the final decider): You’re right. A little less talk and a lot more action. Time to put my game face on. He’ll never know what hit him.

Heart: Go Get Him, Tiger.

Monsters: 0, Me: more wins than may be appropriate to mention in polite company.

**

It hasn’t always been this way. For a portion of my ten-year marriage, I have held my husband at arm’s length, apprehensive to show him the real me. Fear gripped my heart as I worried that if I exposed my most vulnerable self, if my husband really knew me, then he might not like me. I mean, there were many aspects of myself that I felt were substandard, ugly and downright embarrassing. I held a warped perspective of beauty in my mind, gathered as an impressionable girl. It seemed to me women were attractive only if they resembled the ones featured in calendars hanging on toolboxes in a mechanic’s shop. I assumed these sexualized images of women must be the universal desire of all men, my husband included. I couldn’t picture myself as one of those women, scantily-clad, stiletto-wearing, sprawled-over-a-freshly-waxed-muscle-car, and concluded I was not going to be attractive to my husband since my belly was jelly-like and if I were to lay over the hood of a car it would look less like sexy and more like I was being arrested. The worst thing I could imagine was being rejected by the one to whom I was entirely devoted, so to protect myself, I played defense–expertly deflecting affectionate advances, and completely unaware that there could be any other strategy.

I used all the standard excuses: I’m too tired. I don’t feel beautiful. It’s too late tonight, maybe tomorrow.  I sidestepped his advances by changing the focus of conversation from invitations to engage in physical intimacy to safer topics centered around our children. I was hopeful those would put his fire out because it seemed friendlier than directly smashing his heart with one more  “I don’t want to”.

For years, these defensive tactics seemed to be relatively benign. I didn’t think twice about skimping by with occasional time together. My marriage seemed great, and we were happy together. I followed the advice given by the monsters in my head, but I struggled because although my marriage was fine, it was bland. Deep within, I wanted romance and a connection with my spouse that rivaled all love stories ever told. We didn’t have that because I was too afraid to show up as an equal in my marriage. I knew something had to change, because going along this way was not sustainable (nor was it the goal) to remain periodically celibate. Instead of trying to find fault in my husband, I looked at my own issues with intimacy. It became clear I wasn’t going to achieve a deep calibre of connection by playing defense and shutting down romantic advances because I was afraid of being vulnerable. I didn’t want to endanger my marriage by allowing a rift to form between us because of my passive and evasive habits in the bedroom. One afternoon it hit me: my sex life was not what I had envisioned for myself.

What? I have an ideal of what I want my sex life to be?

This realization floored me. All at once clarity spit in my face and my fears seemed so ridiculous. I was done with fear dictating my beliefs about love. I started claiming the truth about my relationship with my husband, and with every true statement, clawed my way to the surface of worthiness.

I am MARRIED to the man I have been entranced by for nearly 17 years. 

My husband is the man that blew all the other men out of the water and won my heart. 

He is my soulmate and I am his. 

He is not at all fickle and has never once made me feel unworthy of his love. 

Every time I have been courageous enough to be vulnerable with him, he has accepted me with love and tenderness.

In order to have the love story I wanted, I had to step out of the shadows and begin writing it myself. I learned to play offense instead of defense. As soon as I recognized things needed to change, I made myself some promises to build a romantic relationship that would satisfy me.

I made a promise to:

• Be a confident woman.
• Act instead of think when it came to engaging in romance.
• Stop listening to the negative voices that held me back.
• Recite one thing for which I was grateful to my body for giving me, instead of scrutinizing every tiny flaw.
• Communicate clearly with my husband about my desire to engage or refrain from physical intimacy, with the goal of saying “yes” more than I say “no”.

As I’ve kept these promises, my life has changed and our love continues to grow into a blazing fire. I have come to enjoy my physical relationship with my husband more than I ever thought possible. I am no longer running from something I really want because I am afraid of being unworthy of love. We have a stronger connection because we trust each other with the most tender places of our souls. I have more confidence in myself because I shame my body less. I have realized that sex is a part of my humanity, and I now allow myself to participate in it with my dearly-loved husband without guilt or shame. I have learned the love I have in my heart is not meant to be saved for a rainy day. It is meant to be given abundantly to my partner knowing that doing so will deeply nourish me as well.

Life is too damn short, ladies, to not have hot sex every chance you get with the man you’ve married. We are all going to blink one day and years will have passed us by. We can’t afford to be complacent in a life-long relationship that is meant to flourish, with deep roots and wide branches. Don’t wait for the planets to align, or until everything is perfect to tend your intimacy. You have permission to cultivate a mutually satisfying romance with your spouse–one in which you take the bull by the horns, choosing action over complacency. Step out of your comfort zone and be courageous. Forge a rock-solid connection with your man. Stop playing defense, shooting down every arrow, and start taking your own shots with Cupid’s bow. Focus your wild passion on that man lying next to you, and see if the unbridled love you give isn’t returned to you tenfold. He’ll never know what hit him.

Jennifer Van Winkle lives in Seattle with her husband and three children (twin boys and a baby girl).  She is a teacher, musician, and currently a stay-at-home mom.  She loves fueling the imaginations of her children with creativity, songs, all things science, good food and lots of play indoors and out.  She blogs at Pepper Sprout Home and you can also find her on Instagram.

**Episode 33 of the Kindred Mom Podcast on Loving Well as a Wife is now available!**

For February 2018, Kindred Mom is hosting a series centered around Loving Well as a Wife and Mom. This series is comprised of engaging essays and podcast episodes created with the hope of bringing wisdom and encouragement to moms who want to build strong marriages and cultivate close family connections. 

Subscribe and don’t miss a thing! We’d love to send some encouragement straight to your inbox.

Over and over again, people said, “Your marriage will be so much stronger, because you’ll only have each other to rely on.” If there are, as Zora Neal Hurston has said, years that answer and years that question, 2015 was a year of questions about my marriage. It was quite a year, to say the least. My husband Evan completed a Ph.D., we moved 1200 miles from our home for his new job, I quit my full-time job, our oldest son entered the terrible twos, and our second son was born.

Months later, in the depths of our first winter in our new home, I cried and wondered what the heck all those people were talking about, because uprooting our lives seemed to have uprooted our marriage as well. Evan threw himself into his new job, working long hours almost seven days a week. I floundered as a stay-at-home mom, feeling lonely and aimless while sinking into postpartum depression. The communication styles that served us well when life was easy did not cut it any more. I grew resentful of all those people who had said our marriage would be stronger.

If there’s a route I know like the back of my hand, it’s the 111 miles along I-75 and the Florida Turnpike, between Gainesville and Orlando. I couldn’t count the number of times I drove that route in the year-and-a-half that Evan and I dated long-distance. Scholarship money not spent on textbooks, tuition, and housing paid for tolls and gas. But even more than the tollbooths and the highways, I remember the music. Whenever it came time for one of us to head back to our respective campuses, I’d hand Evan a mix CD through the open driver-side window.

It feels so antiquated now! Laptops don’t have CD drives anymore, and I hardly use iTunes. When I want to listen to music these days, I plug my phone into my minivan’s auxiliary jack. I donated most of my CD’s years ago, and I kept only the most sentimental mixes. I sometimes tweet about an album I love or text someone with a recommendation, but it’s not the same as handing off a disc and handwritten list of songs and saying, “I made this for you.”

Awhile back, I was sitting in Starbucks for my weekly writing session. In my earbuds, Spotify shuffled through a random playlist when a Ryan Adams song caught my attention. It was a beautiful love song–sweet but melancholy, full of longing, poetic, somehow reminding me of the Civil Wars. I thought, “Oh, I want to send this to Evan.”

In college, I would have downloaded the song from Limewire and added it to an iTunes playlist and eventually clicked “Burn CD.” This time, I hovered over the three little dots beside the song’s title and clicked “New Playlist.” I named it “For Evan” and spent the next several weeks collecting songs: the Coldplay and Death Cab for Cutie songs I loved in college, the Jack Johnson song we danced to at our wedding, and a whole slew of newer songs that remind me of all our marriage has been and all I hope it will be. And one day, I clicked “Share playlist.”

Of course, the circumstances of our move to Michigan could not make our marriage stronger. Only we could do that. We learned to say, “This isn’t quite working for me,” and “This is what I need from you today.”  Then we learned to have that same conversation again as often as necessary, each of us making adjustments along the way.

Frankly, I have probably listened to that playlist more than Evan has, but that’s not entirely the point. It’s about the act of keeping my ears open for a melody I know he’ll enjoy or a lyric that reminds me of all the reasons I fell in love with him. It’s about the accumulation of guitar strums and drum beats that add up to more than the sum of their parts. It’s about the literal soundtrack of a marriage both remembered and transformed. When he plugs in his phone on the drive home from work, he’ll hear these songs and know I chose them for him. He’ll know I choose him, again and again.

When we stood on the red carpeted steps of a church altar in 2010, neither of us anticipated how much we would change over the years. I didn’t know that marriage requires reinvention. With each career change and personal discovery, each child born and cross-country move, what we need from one another changes. Life’s circumstances don’t just change around us, but they lead to transformation within us as well. It stands to reason that our marriage must transform as well.

Along the way, we stop to remember and practice the small things that bound us together in the first place, like the magic of a playlist shared across the miles or across the wi-fi.

 Lindsey is a writer, reader, and mom who is slowly learning to trade perfectionism for freedom. A Florida-to-Michigan transplant, her faith and sense of purpose are shifting as she experiences seasons in the world and in her own life. Lindsey is also the co-founder of The Drafting Desk, a newsletter for anyone trying to pursue grace instead of perfection. You can find her on Instagram @lindseycornett. 

If you missed it, check out the Self-Care for Moms series we featured last month! Also, check out the most recent Kindred Mom Podcast episode with special guest, author Kat Lee.

For February 2018, Kindred Mom is hosting a series centered around Loving Well as a Wife and Mom. This series is comprised of engaging essays and podcast episodes created with the hope of bringing wisdom and encouragement to moms who want to build strong marriages and cultivate close family connections. 

Subscribe and don’t miss a thing! We’d love to send some encouragement straight to your inbox.

I was all kinds of agitated. It was one of those “I hate everything” mornings that I couldn’t shake. My husband helpfully suggested a fix: “Why don’t you head outside with the kids?” Ordinarily, time outside, being present with my kids would be the perfect solution. Today, the idea only served to increase frustration.

“NO. I can’t go outside with the kids. It’s well below zero and I don’t OWN snow pants. Do you know why? Because I outgrew them. I’M TOO FAT TO GO PLAY WITH MY CHILDREN.” I burst into tears.

He responded, both baffled and amused, “…do you want snow pants?”

“NO!” I rage-blubbered. “I don’t want to! Because not only am I too fat to go outside with my kids, I’m not a good enough mother to WANT to! I have crap to DO!”

At that, I ugly-cried into his shoulder as he hugged me and chuckled softly. Eventually, I took a nap (regardless of my “crap to DO!”) and the day sort of reset.

Because sometimes, that’s what marriage is about—being honest about my crazy and letting him love me through it, even when he’s not hiding that he knows it’s crazy.

It hasn’t always been this way. Not very long ago, that morning would have gone very differently. Rather than both of us reacting honestly and with kindness toward each other, I’d have attacked, he’d have patronized, and, in a tiny fraction of the time it takes kindergarteners to get into their snow gear, we’d be having the eleventy-billionth iteration of the same old fight where I feel minimized and he feels like I’m attacking over nothing.

This is better.

The road from there to here isn’t easily tied up in quick action steps, and we certainly don’t have the ideal marriage. But it’s a good one, and better than it used to be.

Anything worth having requires effort and tending. We have tended for a lot of years. We’ve pruned some things, weeded and planted, and watched things grow.

Amidst the chores and logistics, laughter and play are an important part of our marriage, so we nurture this friendship. Our date nights don’t look so snazzy anymore. Tonight after the kids were down, we sat on the futon with our respective wines (dry red for him, nearly juice for me) and I read a chapter from our current fun sci-fi book to him. It doesn’t have to be fancy—connection is the goal.

Last year, I pulled the weed of “the mean husband.” For our whole marriage, I filtered everything he said and did through the lens of my gnarly self-talk. Anything he said could be interpreted, in all sincerity, as “YOU SUCK.” But one evening after the aforementioned stale repeat fight, I realized that the mean husband was a figment of my imagination. He has been banned from all discussion since. Every now and then, I hear him tell me (again) how much I suck at everything, but my actual husband and I have developed a habit of calling him out: “Did you just tell me I suck? Shut up, mean husband.” We both chuckle and exhale and move forward together. It was a big weed. A deep one, but pulling it took so much less effort than working around it for the prior dozen years, and it seems not to be regrowing.

We’ve planted, carefully, little seedlings of vulnerability. This is scary because those are especially fragile, but having provided them with TONS of safety and love and honor, those little things are starting to thrive. They’re turning into some lovely things. He knows I love him and his heart, and has seen—slowly, incrementally—that I won’t turn away when he fails. I have learned to trust his heart for me as well, and am learning (again, slowly) not to be such a chicken about speaking my heart to him.

So on Saturday, when I freaked out about being too fat and crappy at motherhood to play outside with my children, I was able to speak those things aloud—crazy as they were—trusting him to love me still. And he was free to love me honestly, laughing just a little at the crazy, but in the most genuinely affectionate way (which no longer sounds at all like “YOU SUCK”), because laughing together is what we do as friends. (“I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you,” he says. I blubber back, “I’m not laughing right now, but I can see why you would. Maybe I will. Later.”) This change has come through all manner of things: marriage retreats, books, tons of therapy for me, a lot of growing up together, and heaps upon heaps of grace. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes it is—when we’re in our “best friends” space, doing life together can be sweet and simple—but often it takes a lot of conscious effort and intentionality. It’s worth every bit of that as the marriage becomes a calm refuge for us both.

Robin Chapman is a full-time imperfect Jesus lover, wife, and homeschooling mama to four babies, ages one to seven. When she isn’t buried in children or hiding from them, she enjoys reading, photography, and sharing stories on her blog, where she’d love to connect with you! You can also find her on Facebook or Instagram… or perhaps holed up in her bathroom with some coffee. 

If you missed it, check out the Self-Care for Moms series we featured last month! Also, check out the most recent Kindred Mom Podcast episode with special guest, author Kat Lee.