Fights | Marriage Confessions Fights | Laugh. Fight. Stay Married.

I can’t remember a time when my life has been this orderly. For the past two weeks, I get to work early like always, ready to tackle my to-do list, but I end up sitting there trying to come up with a to-do list. When I come home, I get dinner going and then begin to look around for the chores that always need to be done, and I find there’s just not that much to do. It’s the first time I can ever remember being this caught up both at work and at home. It is really freeing up some of my time. Now at school, instead of busying myself with paperwork, I am able to pay more direct attention to my students and I’m enjoying them more than ever. At home, instead of doing endless tasks, I’m sitting on the floor more playing with the kids. Life’s been pretty good lately.

While I’ve been going through this time of less stress and more free time, Chris has been going through a period of more stress and less free time. Work has been stressful for him these past couple months, and I think he’s bringing that stress home. He’s been picking at things here, complaining about things here, and stressing about things here that just aren’t that important in the grand scheme. I think when real stress hits, it infects all other areas of your life and that is definitely what’s happening with him.

Quite frankly, I’m getting kind of tired of it.

I feel bad saying that because I know how patient Chris always is with me when I’m the one with a stressful load. But the thing is, I HAVE been patient. This has been going on for about a month or more and I’ve been so supportive about it. SO SUPPORTIVE. Everything that he has said stresses him out, I’ve worked to relieve if I can. But nothing has changed. He comes home from work every day barely talking to anyone, and brooding everywhere he goes, no matter how much I try to help make things better.

The other night, he came home from work in that mood again and the minute he walked in the door I wanted to scrape my nails down a chalkboard and scream. I couldn’t handle it anymore. So, I sat on the couch as he moped around and I thought to myself, “I need a new approach.” He continued to complain and mope and pout and point out the chores that weren’t done and the things that we needed to do, blah, blah, blah, and finally I interrupted him.

“IF YOU DON’T LIKE THINGS THE WAY THEY ARE, THEN CHANGE THEM OR SHUT UP!”

And that pretty much began the strangest fight/tense discussion we’ve ever had. Everything I said to Chris was brutally honest, to the point of being harsh, and every argument he shot back at me was piercing, and yet we never raised our voices. We got frustrated and one of us would walk out of the room for a few minutes to cool down and think things over, but then we’d come back and keep on talking.

The thing is, I wasn’t being mean. I was just being honest and leaving the fluffy love stuff out of it. I basically told Chris he had to suck it up. I told him that this was our life right now – laundry piles and dishes and sick babies. It was just the way things were. And, you know, that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Our life was pretty darn great, and I thought that the stress he was feeling at work was making it hard for him to see that. I told him that I was tired of hearing about how hard his days were because, quite frankly, so are mine, but I come home to escape those stresses, not to rehash them or live in them. I said that happiness was not something that came and went randomly, it was a choice we had to make every day and there wasn’t anything that was going to change in our lives to make him any happier. If he wanted to be happy, he was going to have to decide to be happy.

When it was over, we sat next to each other on the couch and watched TV, occasionally talking or point out random things, just like nothing had happened. But the next morning, Chris woke up in a much better mood. And that afternoon, I came home to find him fixing the pool pump (the bane of his homeowner existence). This past weekend when Chris was home with the kids while I was in Atlanta, he spent some good, quality time with the kids. They ran errands together, played together, and did chores together. When I came home, the house was cleaned, the laundry was done, dinner was on the stove, and Chris looked happier than I had seen him in weeks.

I don’t know what sort of nugget of marital insight this has provided me. Maybe that honesty is the best policy? Or that your spouse is your mirror of truth? Or maybe even happiness is a choice? Could I even tie it into my favorite, “Bloom where you are planted” saying? I’m not really sure. Maybe I’ll think about it some more and find some kind of philosophical meaning to this.

But more than likely, I think this is just part of being married. Sometimes in my marriage, Chris and I are soft places to land in the midst of really hard times, and sometimes we’re the very honest pep talk that we need to get up and make a change. Chris has been the one to tell me before that there’s nothing to do but buck up and move forward, and now I’ve had to tell him the same. I think that’s the side of marriage where friendship really becomes crucial because good friends can guide without judging, and a good spouse can, too. Like a good friend, a good spouse can give you a warm, supportive place for you to hide for a while, and they can also be the one to push you a little bit, even when you don’t want to hear it. I’m glad that Chris has been both those things to me in my life, and I’m glad that I can be that for him, too.

17 comments | posted in Communication, Fights, Husbands, Marriage, Marriage Confessions, Operation BWYP, Understanding Chris | tags: Marriage

The two times Chris and I have come the closest to divorce would be the time we registered for our wedding and the time we registered for our first baby. Hands down, they were awful experiences. Come close and let me tell you the tale of how NOT to register for a newborn baby. Learn from my mistakes, people. Trust me.

In both cases, the bottom-line reason that the registry was such a fiasco was because I didn’t include Chris in preparing for the registry. When you register for an event, you usually put a fair amount of research into what you’re going to register for. At least, I do. This was especially true for baby things because a) I didn’t know anything about them and b) I wanted to make sure I had the best and safest choices out there.

But when I was doing the actual research and prep work before the day we went to register, I never really included Chris. I’d search online at work (let’s pause to appreciate the days when I had an office with a door and could occasionally surf the internet…sigh…), I’d chat with girlfriends about what products they used, I’d look up consumer reports at night. But hardly ever did I get Chris involved in this part.

Now, I do have to say that I did TRY at first to get him involved. I’d tell him about a product line or a particular style or brand I liked, but his first question was always “How much is it?” and then he’d shut down after the answer. Which made me mad because he was “putting a price on our baby.” (I think I actually yelled that phrase to him one night when I was pregnant with Bean.) He took all the fun out of preparing, and so I just stopped talking to him about it.

When the day came to register, I’ll never forget the colossal fight we had in Babies R Us, while my parents and sister stood there awkwardly trying not to listen, and I pointed my scanner gun straight at Chris’s man parts. I was in tears, Chris was angry, we were both not yelling as much as possible because we didn’t want to make a scene. But it was clearly a scene. I was eight months pregnant. Everywhere I went I made a scene. The source of the problem? The stroller.

I had done so much research about what kind of stroller I wanted to get, and had finally decided that I really wanted a travel system (the ones with the car seat that snaps into the stroller). I thought it would be easiest with a newborn and for me to operate on my own while I was out on maternity leave and Chris was at work.

But when I went to scan the travel system I wanted, Chris kind of sighed heavily. “What’s wrong?” I asked, fully prepared to compromise. He could choose any color he wanted. “I’m just not sure about the travel system,” he said. “I don’t think we need one.” “You don’t think we need one?” I asked with a tone that might as well have said, “Are you stupid????” “I mean, I just think it’s a little over the top.” “You think it’s over the top?” I asked in a tone that now said, “I cannot believe I married someone who doesn’t want a travel system.” “Well, yeah,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t think we need that much stuff.” “You don’t think we need this much stuff?” I asked in a tone that screamed, “It is a crime to humanity that I am about to procreate with you.”

Then, I think Chris threw in a “Don’t talk to me in that tone” and I threw out a “I can’t believe you’re ruining this for me,” and before we knew it, I was crying in the stroller aisle and Chris was stalking off toward the layette section to cool off.

Looking back, the problem was that I went into the registry experience knowing exactly what I wanted and Chris went into the experience not knowing anything about what he wanted. The result was Chris feeling super frustrated that he wasn’t even able to figure stuff out on his own, and I felt incredibly angry that I’d done months of research only to have it all overruled by someone who didn’t even know what a bassinet was.

Now, I know a lot of couples who never had this problem. The husband was on board and anxious to be involved from the beginning and the wife was excited to have his input. But for me and Chris, it was different. Chris was really nervous and hesitant about having a baby and so he was very standoffish. And instead of helping him feel more comfortable, I just took it as a green light to do whatever I wanted. If I did it all over again, I’d go back to the times when I’d start to talk to Chris about what type of pack ‘n’ play we should get and I’d take him to the baby store to look.

Chris (and men in general) are visual people. Chris likes to see things for himself. He wants to try them out and test things. He doesn’t want to just show up and choose something because someone told him to. When he was buying a lawn mower a couple summers ago, he went to Sears five or six times before he actually made a purchase. He just needs to see things in real life before committing.

Baby gear should have been no different. Even when he was uncomfortable, I should have pushed him a little and exposed him to all our choices in real life, not in some link in an email that he probably didn’t even open.

Another thing I should have done was be more open to his questions. When he asked questions like “How much does that cost?” or “Are you sure we need that?” I took them as a sign that he didn’t want to be involved. Like he was using these questions to prove me wrong or make a statement. But looking back, I really just think he asked those questions because that’s how his mind thinks. He just thinks in logistics. He does that whether we are buying a car or taking a vacation or registering for a baby. His mind functions very pragmatically while mine functions more emotionally.

So, when he asked those questions, they weren’t a personal attack against me or against our baby (as I kept insisting he was doing). They were very real questions that he was having, and that means that I should have stopped to talk through the answers with him. I think that would have made him feel more comfortable instead of feeling like he was always asking the wrong questions and, therefore, always left out of the process before we even began.

Registering for a baby is actually a super sweet, super fun time. Or so I hear. I really wish I had wised up a bit before we went through the process so that I was more prepared to help Chris be part of the process, too. For the record, we still have our travel system, we still love using it, and Chris tells me all the time what a great purchase that was. Not that it matters to me…But I was right. In case anyone cares.

Find more posts from bloggers sharing their experiences of motherhood on the Huggies page on BlogHer.com.

17 comments | posted in Dads, Fights, Flashbacks, holidays, Just for Fun, Marriage, Marriage Confessions, Parenting, Reviews | tags:

I have a really great husband. He’s involved in our home life, prioritizes our family above all else, and, above all, he loves me. A LOT. I am a lucky, lucky girl.

Which is why I hesitate to complain about this one, small, insignificant issue…

On Sunday afternoons, Chris drives me absolutely insane. INSANE, people! It hasn’t always been this way. We used to enjoy Sunday afternoons together. But in the past couple months, those days have gone out the window. Why? Well, it began with a Target RedCard.

I do my grocery shopping at Target, and since I was spending about $100 a week there on groceries, I decided to get a Target RedCard. The RedCard has two different options. One is a credit card, and the other is linked to your debit card. I got the one linked to my debit card. It has no enrollment or annual fees, and costs me nothing to use. What it does is send you a specific debit card to use only at Target. When you use that debit card there, you automatically save 5% on your total purchase. So, basically, I’m saving 5% of my own money at a place where I would be spending it anyway. It’s a huge win-win.

So, I started saving money that way. Then, I started clipping more coupons. I use Coupons.com and the Target website for coupons. Both are pretty awesome. With all of these things, I started saving a pretty good amount on each grocery visit. I could easily take $10 off my bill every week. I was bragging to Chris about this about a month ago, and he went out and surprised me by using a Groupon to get us a weekend subscription to the Orlando Sentinel (at 1/2 price, no less!) so that I could clip even more coupons. It was a really sweet gesture and it really helped with our grocery bill. I was now lowering our bill by $20-$30 a week. It was amazing!

And that’s when Chris decided he wanted to help. (sigh)

Two weekends ago, I was sitting down at our kitchen table on Sunday afternoon, planning our meals for the week and creating my shopping list. As I did this, Chris walked in with the newspaper. I wasn’t really paying attention to what he was doing, until he started asking me questions like, “Do you use Pantene?” and “Are we out of stick butter?”

I turned around to find Chris going through the coupons in the newspaper, clipping out what he thought I might need. Which is really nice, I know. But he was also throwing out coupons before I got the chance to look at them. And since I’m the one who makes our list and does the grocery shopping, I really wanted to see the coupons to make sure that he wasn’t overlooking something I might need. When I mentioned this to him, he got really irritated.

“It’s not rocket science, Kate,” he snapped. And then he stormed out. I dug the coupons out of the trash can and continued on my way.

This weekend, I sat down on Sunday to do my list and couponing, and here came Chris again. Sorting through coupons and throwing stuff out that I might actually have needed. Not wanting to hurt his feelings again, I took a more mature approach. I just ignored him when he tried to talk to me about what coupons to cut. I focused on making my grocery list and let him look through the coupons on his own. When I was ready to start clipping, I dug my coupons out of the trash and went on my merry way.

But then, due to some poor planning on our part, we ended up at Target with the whole family. Chris, both kids, and me. It was my worst nightmare. It’s hard enough to go with the kids, but with Chris it is next to impossible. He puts the most random stuff in the cart, and yet he questions everything I put in there. Drives me crazy.

When we were first married, we used to do all our grocery shopping together. It was so much fun. We’d pause for a kiss in the frozen foods section, stroll through the home decor aisles and decorate our imaginary summer house, and spend most our time in the cookie aisle, arguing over who picked the cookies we got last week. It was what newlyweds were supposed to do. But now, grocery shopping is different. For one thing, I’m shopping for four people now, so I’m trying to make sure I get everybody what they need. But mostly it’s different because we’re on a budget, and using coupons requires a little more thought. I have to check my list for what I need, then see if I have a coupon for that item (before I leave home, I usually put a little star beside each item on my list that I have a coupon for to remind myself to use it). When I find the coupon, I have to check to make sure that I am buying the right brand, size, quantity, or whatever is required to use the coupon. Then, I look at the other products to compare prices to make sure that I’m not paying more, even with a coupon. It isn’t hard, but it does require some concentration.

Now, imagine digging for coupons, searching for products, and doing math on the fly, all while having your husband fire 1,000 questions at you:

“Do you have a coupon for that?”
“Is that the flavor we normally get?”
“Is that other brand cheaper?”
“Do you want me to check the next aisle over?”
“Is that the one I liked?”
“Will Bean eat that?”
“Will I eat that?”
“How much is that coupon?”

It drives me CRAZY. CRAZY.

Today, we were two aisles into the grocery trip and Chris asked me his 200th question of the day so far.

“Hey, see those beans behind you? Don’t we have a coupon for those? I think I saw a coupon for that in the newspaper.”

And that’s when I turned around and snapped at Chris in the middle of Target, “WILL YOU PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE AND LET ME SHOP?!?!?”

And that’s when he snapped, “FINE!” and stormed off, taking the two children with him.

And that’s when I danced a happy jig. Yes, my husband was mad at me, but I was willing to accept that in exchange for a blissful, peaceful grocery shopping trip. He finally reappeared in the snack aisle and decided it was more effective to silently pout beside me for the rest of the trip. Even still, it is much easier to do simple math when someone is silently pouting next to you, as opposed to helping you until you want to punch them in the face.

In the produce section, over a bunch of bananas, Chris said to me, “I just like to do things with you.”

Well, poop.

There he goes again being nice and sweet. And there I go again focusing on checking items off my to-do list and completely missing the little moments of love that fill my day.

Yes, our life is very different now than when we were first married. Much like grocery shopping now, life these days requires a little more attention, a little more concentration, and a little more thought. But shame on me for letting a little more effort replace the importance of things like kissing in the frozen food aisle. Sometimes, I think newlyweds have more insight into marriage than seasoned married couples. They have their priorities right. Love above all. Even in the grocery store.

29 comments | posted in Around the House, Changes, Fights, Husbands, Marriage, Marriage Confessions | tags: coupons, grocery shopping, love, Marriage, Target

Tonight I had a meeting at church after work. Somehow, I agreed to be a co-chair for our church’s vacation Bible school program this summer and planning is in full swing already. As the meeting was coming to a close, my blog actually became the topic of discussion. Apparently, some of the women discovered my blog and so we spent a few minutes talking about it, which is really odd for me because I don’t often talk about my blog in my real life. Actually, very few people who know me in person even know that I write. As I was talking about the blog to them, the subject turned to marriage. I mentioned that Chris and I were coming up on seven years of marriage and about half the group of women let out big groans.

“That’s a doozey of a year,” one of them said, and everyone nodded their heads in agreement.

On the way home, I thought about what they had said. I’ve heard of the Seven Year Itch in marriages, but I really thought that was just a saying. But as I thought over the past year of my own marriage, I started to wonder if maybe there was some truth to that dreaded seventh year.

This year of our marriage has been… not perfect. I guess that’s the best way to say it. It hasn’t been rough, really. LAST year when we were unexpectedly pregnant, moving, struggling for money, and dealing with my depression – now THAT was rough. This year has certainly been an improvement over that. But it hasn’t been smooth sailing by any means.

I think our lowest point was around the holidays. Chris and I really struggled through the this past fall. Nothing more than most couples, I imagine (and I hope!), but enough that it was tense. We were trying to save for Christmas and make plans for visiting family through the holidays, and that required some compromise from both of us. Chris was working more weekends and I was back to work again after having the summer off, so both our schedules were different and we were trying to adjust. And on top of those things, there were the normal happenings of a family with two small kids – Gracie was teething, Bean was potty training, and we were trying to make time for our family in the midst of all our other obligations. Like I said, it’s nothing that many of you have been through.

One night over our Christmas break, Chris and I got into one of the biggest fights we’d ever had. There were a lot of reasons for it, but it came down to pent up frustration with each other. We were both angry. We were both tired. And it all came to a head one night in a fight. At the height of our anger, Chris yelled out, “Our marriage just isn’t a priority for me right now! There’s too much stuff going on!”

Well, that shut me up. My first reaction was complete hurt. If I wasn’t a priority to my husband, who would make me a priority? That hurt quickly turned to anger, as my hurt usually does. I became so angry at Chris. How dare he make a decision like that about our marriage without even talking to me? This wasn’t just his marriage to prioritize. It was mine, too. But after a few days of thinking it over, I came to a startling realization: I felt the same way.

The fact is that there is sometimes truth in anger and honesty in frustration and had Chris and I not fought it out that day, I don’t think either of us would have been bold enough to say what we truly felt. That marriage just wasn’t important right now.

Chris and I worked through the issues we were having last fall during our State of the Union talk around New Years. We spent the dinner really talking about our marriage and why it had slipped down the totem pole of our priorities. While we never pinpointed an exact answer, we did come to the complete consensus that we had to make more of an effort to push it back up that totem pole. Without our marriage as the priority in our lives, nothing else works. We don’t parent well when we’re tense with each other. We’re preoccupied at work and so we start to slip there. Our household responsibilities that we normally share – paying bills, cooking dinner, putting the kids to bed – aren’t fun anymore. They become obligations and the weight of their responsibility weighs on us as individuals, instead of as a couple. That kind of pressure is really hard to carry alone. So, we’ve really committed this year to making our marriage a priority again and we’re doing a pretty good job so far. But, occasionally, I still feel that we’re not quite as united as we used to be.

Tonight, as I was driving home, I started thinking about what the women at church had said about the seventh year of marriage and about my own upcoming seventh year of marriage. Why is that year so damn hard???

(Dear Future Beanie and Gracie – please turn away from the computer right now…)

I honestly think it’s because we have kids now.

Am I allowed to say that? I feel like I’m not allowed to say that. But I’m going to say it anyway.

If Chris and I didn’t have kids, I’m sure we would still have issues to work through in our marriage, but having children for the two of us has made things…well…different in our marriage.

In some ways, it has deepened who we are as a couple. I have learned to love Chris is a way that I didn’t love him before our kids were born. I love him more because there is more OF him to love. Bean and Gracie are extensions of mine and Chris’s love. They are our love in the flesh. So, because I love them, I am able to love Chris more deeply than I did before. Having kids has also taught us about true partnership. We’ve learned how to lean on each other and to turn to each other when we don’t have the answers. We depend on each other more now because we have children that depend on us. We’ve grown up together as parents. He is the only person who has been through every single parenting issue with me. Every single decision I’ve made as a parent – the right decisions and the wrong decisions – I’ve made with Chris, and that bonds you like nothing else.

But there are some ways that becoming parents has made being a married couple harder. For one thing, we can’t drop everything we’re doing anymore to fix problems. We have had to learn how to work through issues with babies on our hips and dinner on the stove. When Chris and I were first married and we would have a big fight or disagreement over something, we would pretty much stop what we were doing to fix the situation. We’d plan a dinner out for the two of us to talk about whatever the issue was we were dealing with. And we could do that because we had no kids. We didn’t need to worry about finding a babysitter or if we could afford a sitter that week. We didn’t have to worry about staying out too late because we had to get up at 6am the next day with the kids. We didn’t have to pick up diapers or baby food or a fruit that begins with the letter C for daycare the next day. We just didn’t have those obligations and so it was much easier to stop everything and fix our marriage.

Parenting has also impacted our marriage because it’s not all about us anymore. Like any good parent, Chris and I live for our kids. If you ask Bean who he is, he’ll say, “Mommy’s whole world!” Because he is! Those two kids are the heartbeat of our family. Neither Chris or I could imagine our lives without either of them. They make us better people. They make our world a better place. They make our family complete. But having our world revolve around our two babies means that Chris and I as a couple often take a backseat to our kids or to our family’s well being. What we’ve had to learn over the past two and a half years that we’ve been parents is how to draw the line and when to make our marriage the center of our universe.

Now, for those who are reading this without kids who hope to one day have a family – don’t panic! I don’t think this period of our marriage is going to last forever. In fact, I can already see us getting slowly past it. The thing about your seventh year of marriage is that you have to learn as your family grows. Chris and I are learning this year that sometimes we have to re-prioritize in our family and sometimes that means putting our marriage before our kids. Sometimes that means asking for more from each other without placing blame. That’s been a tough one for me. I’ve had to learn how to say, “I need more from you,” without saying, “I need more from you because what you’re doing is not enough.” It’s not that what we’re doing is not enough. It’s that the stakes are higher now. There’s more going on. We both have to get better – not because what we’re doing is not good enough, but because it just requires more effort now.

The seventh year is upon us and I feel it in my marriage. This year I’ve had to hear some really hard things from Chris and I’ve had to say some really hard things to Chris. But the hard is what makes things better. The hard is what makes us stronger. And so, yes, sometimes you just throw your hands up in the air and yell, “THIS IS JUST NOT A PRIORITY RIGHT NOW!” But that isn’t the end of anything. That’s just the beginning. It’s what I do after the frustration that determines the success of my marriage.