Today marks the twenty third day of my blog challenge, and it is time for the second guest blog! Today's guest blogger is Stacey, a wonderful woman with a great mind and a positive attitude. The topic is "Making Time for Spouses", and she seems to handle it with grace and style. Here it is for your reading pleasure!
Next April my husband and I will celebrate 18 years of marriage. We've lived several lives in that amount of time - we were college students, apartment managers, mothers of infants, toddlers, and now teens, working sometimes two jobs apiece to make ends meet. We've lived in 13 homes and made one huge cross-country move. We've served in who knows how many different church callings in our different congregations and picked up countless hobbies and obsessions along the way. Life has been FULL.
But never too full for each other.
When I was in school full-time, pregnant with our second daughter, and my husband was a student and cleaning office buildings on the grave shift, we'd meet at the dining room table at 5:30am for what we called our "donut dates." When the days were extraordinarily long and we wouldn't see each other at all, we'd concoct ways to say "I remember you;" my favorite was the chess set we put up with a card that would rotate to say "Robb's Move" or "Stacey's Move." (by the way, I *never* won!)
My husband read a church article long ago that stressed the importance of married couples "connecting at the crossroads" of their day. Because of that, these many years later we still ALWAYS kiss each other hello and goodbye, accompanied with an "I love you." Sometimes one of us is half awake during the exchange, sometimes we even miss our mark with a quick peck as we're running out the door. But we have established that we will always recognize each other as we meet or part.
We've had to make some internal decisions, too, about how to put each other first despite the hectic schedule we keep. We've both learned that we MUST ask for what we need. Neither of us can read minds, and we've learned to stop playing the "I wish she/he just knew" game. We've also both had to adjust our expectations. This has probably been my biggest challenge as a wife, because somehow it feels too much like giving up or giving in. What it really is, though, is understanding and accepting the man I married. And what I've found is that in adjusting my expectations of him, it gives me the freedom to adjust my expectations of myself. We do what we can, how we can, the best we can. Letting love and faith (and honesty, time and patience) fill in the rest has helped us keep our relationship strong.
I can guarantee that it hasn't been a piping hot meal on the table every night or a spotless home or any huge martyred wife sacrifices I've had to make that has communicated to my husband that I care for him. It's the small things, the daily connections, the recognition that "Hello, there you are, I see you," and the shift in perspectives that has helped me as a wife to put him first. And I'm sure in the many lives we live over the next 18 (and more, many more!) years, they'll continue to do the same.
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