Sometimes, I take his boots off....

So, this past week there have been two blog posts that have sparked my interest. The first was by a man who's bloggy title claimed my wife divorced me because I left dishes by the sink. The second was by a woman from a drastically different point of view and can be viewed here. The second article implored women not to be a "butt hole" wife and to stop nagging their husbands about the little things. The former blog was written by a man and implored other men to pay attention to their wives needs. For instance, if it is important to your wife for you to put your dish in the dishwasher, the author implores you to do that lest you lose her. In contrast the "butt hole wife" has lost her husband to untimely death and in hindsight she implores other women NOT to fuss and nag about the simple things like clothes left in the floor or dishes left by the sink. Both authors of both blog-posts have valid points that are exaggerated by their individual situations of divorce and widowhood.

I happen to agree with both of the authors. This may be why I took his boots off tonight.

You see, I have been married for the majority of my adult life. The first marriage was forced and hard and young and it didn't last long despite my best efforts. I decided that whenever I married again I was going to be a better wife.

Being a better wife doesn't sacrifice my feminism. It doesn't make me "less"... in fact, i believe it makes me better. I know all the feminists are gonna roll their eyes at that one and that's ok. I take great joy in making my husband happy. I take pride in making his day better when he walks into the door. I don't bombard him with complaints about what is going wrong in my world. I greet him with a smile and ask him how his day has been. Because i'm there to listen to him he doesn't care if supper isn't ready yet. He doesn't care if the house isn't in perfect order. He sees me being there for him and because of that he is there for me. He understands my struggles as a stay at home mom and I understand his struggles as the sole provider for a family of five. We have each others back. We are a team. We work at this partnership together.

So, back to the original purpose of this post....

Occasionally he leaves clothes on the floor and occasionally he leaves a dish by the sink. He's  not perfect. Sometimes I fuss about these things. But mostly I pick up the clothes and i put the dishes in the dish washer and I keep my mouth shut. This may enrage some of you, but I would like to remind you that you are not in my marriage and you do not live my life. For me, I clean up because he does all the work. I stay at home and i keep the house while he works  sometimes 16 hour days and pays the bills. My situation and the situation of those blog authors are probably completely utterly different.

That is why it is so important not to let a blog post decide where you should be in your own marriage.

Marriage is a unique process shared between only you and your spouse and God. Nothing that you are going through should ever be subject to criticism from anyone besides yourself, your spouse and our God Almighty. If your spouse is nagging you excessively or making you feel inferior for not completing a specific task my best advice is to first off be upfront with your spouse. So many times do we bottle things up and grumble over the dishes or the clothes on the floor and never let our mates know until it bubbles over into an argument. Be honest with each other. If that doesn't help, seek the advice of a Christian Counselor. Do not give up on a marriage before you diligently seek God's help in the matter. 

But before any of that happens.... take his boots off. He fell asleep in the recliner as you were getting the kids to bed and you tried to wake him up. He wouldn't wake up so you could storm off to bed, mad as heck, and leave him there to fend for himself. OR... you could take off his boots... cover him up with a warm blanket, kiss him on the cheek and tell him goodnight.

If leaving the dishes by the sink or leaving your clothes in the floor bothers her, make an  effort to show her that you understand that it matters to her and do not do it anymore.

My whole rebuttal to both of those viral blog posts is that all you need to do is respect your spouse. God calls us to be submissive unto each other. Love for each other requires us to be permissible of each other. Our faults are to be accepted or lovingly corrected by our spouse. We should never nag or demean the other party into bowing into our will.

"Wives, submit yourselves unto your husband, as is fitting in the Lord. Husband's love your wives and do not be harsh with them." Colossians3:18-19

"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which He is the Saviour.Now as the church submits to Christ so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything." Ephesians 5:21-24

But WAIT there's more!




"Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all no one ever hated their own body but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does for the Church." Ephesians 5:25-29

My point is that I care for my husband because God compels me to care for him. He cares for me because God compels him to care for me. I pick up his clothes if he happens to leave them on the floor without harsh words because that's what God wants me to do. He deals with my inefficiencies whatever they may be (and there are quite a few I assure you) with out harsh words because that's the husband God commands him to be. This works in our marriage. It keeps us strong when times are rough and it keeps us happy when times are sad.

I take his boots off because he is tired and because I love him. He'd take my boots off if the position was reversed. That's what makes a marriage happy. 

The Princess and the Splinter

We're having fun tonight. The kids are in the pool. The parents and grandparents are watching from the porch. The kids are planning on spending the night with said grandparents, giving the parents a much needed night on their own. Everything was going perfectly..... until.... Emily got a splinter. (DUM DUM DOOOOMMMMM) 

Let me start at the beginning.....Emily got up at 7:30 this morning and she had to clean her room. After she cleaned her room she had to help empty the dishwasher, after she emptied the dishwasher she ate lunch; after lunch she went swimming; after swimming for 3 hours she stayed at Gran's and played with her cousins. After playing with her cousins for 3 hours she ate supper. After eating she decided to swim again. After swimming for another 2 hours she.........got..........a.........splinter.

This was no simple splinter. It was the worst splinter of every splinter ever imaginable. This splinter couldn't have entered her delicate foot at a more inopportune time. See? Princess Emily was EXHAUSTED! It had been a most harrowing day for a six-year-old girl. There was no caffeine and there was no nap. There was only a long day and a  ginormous (not really) splinter.

She lost it. I don't blame her. She begged for a grown up to remove the splinter but it was SOOO ENORMOUS that whenever we got a good look at it, it just disappeared. Grownups couldn't ever catch it. It was a really sneaky splinter. 

So now she sits... in her daddy's recliner. She couldn't stay at Gran's. The pain was too much to bear. She's watching Frozen and waiting to fall asleep. She has the affected limb propped up to minimize pain/swelling. She's agreed to let me catch the sneaky splinter when she snoozes. She's super cute about it all. Even if I do wish that she would have spent the night at her grandmother's house. Basically, a teeny, microscopic, piece of wood or glass just ruined my sassy girl's day.

This splinter got me to thinking. How many days have I, or my husband, made it through a hard day at work or taking care of kids only to stumble on a splinter? How many days to I let a dirty dish left on the table (when the sink is a mere six feet further) or something, become my splinter? How many days is my better half just happy to walk into his loving home only to find a big ole splinter waiting for him (me)? I don't want to be his splinter. I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to be mine either. 

I know there are some days that we're not going to be able to control getting on each others nerves. It happens in every family. But I'm going to think about little miss priss and the splinter that stopped the world next time I am fuming about some little thing that really doesn't matter. I'm going to try not to let life's splinters ruin my day. 

The Big Stuff

Over the course of our marriage, which has been admittedly short, Jason and I have learned that it is best not to bring up certain politically charged topics. The reason for this is that we don't agree about everything. What???? you may ask. How can two people commit to each other when they don't agree completely on every political agenda?!? I'm gonna tell you... we agree to disagree. Yes... We AGREE to DISAGREE. You probably find it easy to scoff at that, but it's the truth. This doesn't mean we don't occasionally (or as often as the news cycles roll) argue about certain topics. We watch the news together frequently. The nightly news segment often ends with one or both of us saying "Time Out!". At that point we change the subject.... no questions asked.... we just change the subject to something else that we can agree on.

Now don't get me wrong. Jason and I are not political opposites by any means. We are both Conservative Christians. We agree on all the big big party defining stuff that conservatives pride themselves on. We both believe in the Bible first and foremost and above all else. Besides that, I label myself a Libertarian and he labels himself a Republican. On the majority of issues we tend to fall on the same side. If he would only agree with me, we would agree on ALL of the issues and be the perfect couple. But alas, he is too stubborn (aka wrong) to agree with me and i have to concede that, although I love him with all my heart, he just can't be right ALL of the time (ha!ha!).

We agree to disagree on these "big" issues in order to preserve our marriage. We step back from our arguments, we calm down, and we decide to love each other anyway (despite our stance on gun control or the death penalty). It took a LONG time and a WHOLE lot of prayer for us to get to this point. We used to stay up all night long and argue about this stuff. We finally realized, through prayer and meditation, that the big stuff didn't really matter. Now, before you close the webpage and dismiss my ideas, I ask you give me a minute to explain myself. I promise it won't take too much longer.

The big stuff doesn't matter. (exhale) What do we think is the big stuff??? All the stuff that makes national headlines outside of our personal relation ship is the BIG STUFF. It's the stuff that philosophers have debated for centuries. It's the stuff that you hear every time you tune into Fox News or CNN. In my opinion it's the stuff that doesn't affect my marriage at all.

So tonight, after only a little fussing about the Big Stuff, I got to thinking about the Little Stuff. I got to thinking about how he always leaves his shoes and pants next to his chair in the living room. I got to thinking about how he puts his wet towel on the floor next to his dresser instead of in the hamper. I also got to thinking about all the times he has had a smart comment about me leaving every cabinet door open in the kitchen, or me not putting the ketchup back in the fridge. He has just as many little things to get mad about as I do. And when we get mad about the big stuff those little things have a way of bubbling out too. That's what makes us really mad. That's the stuff that we throw in the argument that really hits under the belt. It's personal stuff. It's stuff that festers and lingers and turns into big stuff over time. We can be arguing for hours about whether or not guns should have longer waiting periods but the moment it gets personal, the moment he insults my housekeeping, or the moment I insult his work ethic, then it gets serious.

We talked about this with each other over the weekend. It actually came up because we were laughing over a facebook post that we saw that started out trivial but quickly got personal. How easy is it to get in arguments with people we haven't seen in four or five years? It's so easy to tell them what we think and either forget about it and move on, or cut them our of our lives (via internet) altogether. Jason and I have been discussing this a lot lately. How easy the "little things" get to us when we don't have to confront our 'friends' face to face, but how we let them slide when it's a friend that we do interact with.

We've been working on it in our own marriage as well.  We've realized that we have gotten so good at looking over the big stuff that we have forgotten to overlook the little stuff. See, I believe that the little stuff is the stuff that destroys relationships. Irreconcilable differences are common. It takes irrevocable commitments to overcome those differences. The commitment to love one another, no matter what the other says or does, is the most holy and the most coveted commitment. Satan wants to make thos little things become big things. That's his job. He puts those little things under your pillow so that you think about them after your partner is asleep. Those little things destroy our marriages. Not many marriages have failed because of a debate on which political candidate to back. Marriages fail because of one spouse not emptying the dishwasher and because of another not calling to explain why he was late. It's the little stuff that destroys our marriages. I'm working on not letting the little stuff destroy my relationship. I'm trying to deploy our big stuff tactic on the little stuff... I'm gonna take a deep breath, love him, and move on... little stuff or big stuff. There's a million reasons I love him. Those reasons are way more important than those few things that get on my nerves.  Little or Big, He's mine and I am his. We love each other first. And that's the really Big Stuff.

"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers a multitude of sins." 1 Peter 4:8