Experience has shown me that marriage gets harder as the babies add up.
You start out as two fully functioning adults with puppy dog eyes for each other, making really big vows about serving each other through all of the wonderful, but also the difficult times. I won’t say that marriage is ever easy, but I see in hindsight that serving someone who could serve me back was something close to easy. In those early years before our babies showed up, it was natural to go the extra mile for one another. Two adults bound together in a loving covenant are a helpful and productive force to be reckoned with.
And I suppose that is why the Lord gives someone so helpless and needy as a baby to something so strong as a marriage.
We are seven months out from welcoming our third baby boy. He brings us a world of joy, but with him added to the mix, we are stretched thin. We are realizing more and more that this high calling of parenthood is work. There isn’t a luxury of rest or “me time” or indulgent entertainment every day, and it’s hard to come off of expecting it. A lot is asked of us and we have to press on through all of it as team mates. This is a laborious season, but seasons never last forever or at least that’s what everyone keeps telling me. The sacrifices we make now will bear fruit in eternity–we know this–it’s our mantra through all of parenthood.
But goodness is it hard to remember that truth in the morning.
When I’ve been up with the baby a few times throughout the night (yes, still–if you want to feel better about your baby’s sleep habits, ask me about mine!) When I couldn’t get back to sleep in between two of those feedings. When the baby soaked through his pajamas down to his sheet. When he spit up all over me and I had to change my own clothes.
Sleep is a battlefield and mornings are carnage.
As sunlight starts to brighten up our room and our toddler comes pitter pattering to my bedside asking for chocolate milk, I think to myself, “David is going to get up with him. He has to know how hard of a night I’ve had. I deserve another hour of sleep.” I wait and I wait, and I hear the snoring from the other side of the bed until I finally just get up myself–starting the day frustrated with my husband before he even opens his eyes.
Sometimes he does get up on his own, other times, I’ll ask him to and he usually obliges. But all too often, we were starting our day on the really wrong foot. It was draining our marriage until all that was left was two disappointed and very tired people.
I realized that sometimes he had hard nights of sleep too, for varying reasons, but the difference was always that he had to go onto a full work day without hope of a nap or a walk in the sunshine or morning of cartoons on the couch with the kids.
We are both legitimately tired and we tend to think very selfishly in our most tired states.
Until we came up with a solution:
I realized that it was mostly me and my unmet expectations embittering me toward David and his ignorance to my expectations. I wasn’t communicating and he wasn’t reading my mind. Silly husband.
So, I proposed to him that we each get three days of the week to wake up with the early birds. Get up with them as quickly as possible, and lock the door on the way out of the bedroom so they couldn’t go back in and wake up the still sleeping parent. Three days a week every week. You know what they are so you can be sure to get to bed at a decent time the night before. Or not, but that’s on you.
And if, out of absolute love for the other person, one of us wants to give the gift of taking the other’s morning, we have the freedom to do that. Otherwise, we stick to our days without feeling any guilt.
What a world of difference.
I find that we each do our best to serve the other when it’s our morning to be up. We protect the other one’s sleep. We do a little extra most of the time. Usually that means cooking breakfast, but sometimes it means unloading the dishwasher or folding a basket of laundry too.
And while it seems so simple, I find that we’re starting our mornings on a peaceful note again. And that’s a needed thing when we only see each other briefly in the morning and then it’s off to our separate corners of the world to do our separate work for the day.
So, I don’t know if you’re in a sleepless season or if you can relate at all, but I just wanted to share what has been such an unexpected help to our marriage as we carry on, raising our [demanding] little souls with some newfound joy and peace.
Hugs to you, tired parents! I pray you find your rest in the Lord.
<3 Kate
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