There is a myth about marriages and parenthood that has come to my attention since I became a wife several years ago and a mother in 2010. It's a dangerous myth, I think, and although I would have wholeheartedly supported it when I was single as gospel truth, now I know it for what it is: a lie.
Tell me if you've heard this one.
You need to get out frequently and spend time with your husband (and alone or with friends) because it will 'help your marriage' and 'strengthen your relationship'. You 'need a break' from your child/work/life/home/routine. Not only is it 'healthy', but 'you're worth it'! Actually, you 'deserve it'. It's a necessity, not a treat, and you've worked hard. You have to 'take care of yourself'. If you don't, you'll wear out and be a terrible parent/wife/etc.
It's the worst kind of lie, because it's coated in a thin layer of truth, but if you scratch that truth, underneath you'll find something very different from what you'd expect. Let me elaborate by taking those phrases apart.
1. "You need to get out frequently and spend time with your husband (and alone or with friends) because it will 'help your marriage' and 'strengthen your relationship'."
This is a time-worn sentence and I can't think of anything more dangerous to family stability and values than taking this phrase to heart. Let's translate it down to plain English.
Time away from your responsibilities will help and strengthen your marriage.
What are your responsibilites? Don't list them, just think about them in terms of what they encompass in your life. They should be those aspects of your existance upon which you place the most value and in which you are yoked in tandem with your spouse. If you want to train a team of horses to pull a full wagon, do you take them out of their traces and let them wander around a field? No, of course not. You harness them together and have them pull the wagon. And then pull it some more. Teams work best when working as a team, and the longer and harder you work as a team, the better a team you are!
Someone will be asking themselves at this point "well, yes, but what about giving those poor horses a rest? They don't always have to work and neither do we!" To that I have two responses. Firstly, when you take time to rest, the greatest rest is to be found with the person you are teamed with, your partner. Time away from that person is not ultimately restful. Have you ever been away from your spouse for a period of time? Do you spend most of that time thinking "Oh! I have to remember to tell him that!" or "Oh! The children would have thought that was SO funny, what a shame they didn't see it!" and then spending a whole lot of time once you get home describing in detail what you did when you were apart?
There's a reason for that! For one thing, when you marry, the Bible tells us that you are joined as 'one flesh'. Sometimes my husband will joke that only one of us gets the brain that day, but sometimes that almost seems true! Two people joined together as one, but trying to function as separate entities, is a pointless exercise, rather like two people, each with one arm and one leg, refusing to work together to accomplish greater things.
Secondly, that sentence also states that we need time away WITH our spouse. And my question is this: what for? What, specifically, are you hoping for with repeated, consistant time away from home and family? I think that ultimately, if you were to look beyond layers and layers of answers to that question, you'd find that the ultimate reason is control. We want to feel as though our lives have not changed from what they once were. Now we are parents, and wives. Then we weren't. So, if we go out without our children (and even without our husbands) we can pretend in the back of our minds that we are again members of our old lives, and not living as we currently are. It's make-believe, pretend, and somewhat dangerous. You get all dressed up, try and look 'sexy', however that equates into a look for you, and go somewhere, often 'fancy' and 'grown up'. You go out as a single person. You look and act like a single person. Your spouse looks and acts like a single person. It's all okay, of course, because you're both doing it and it's fun and obviously you're only looking at each other, right? Right?
Now for the grain of truth. Spouses need time alone to talk and laugh and discuss issues and just be with each other. There is a place for that. That place shouldn't be at a date night restaurant every week, but it should exist constantly, in five minutes before breakfast, in an hour-long chat before bed, in a cuddly movie on the couch night, in a talk on the porch on a nice summer's night. It should be always. Sometime we go to bed early just to read together and talk about whatever. When Samuel is older, no doubt we'll slip into the backyard to have a last cup of hot chocolate together after he's asleep.
You 'need a break' from your child/work/life/home/routine.
What we're really saying is :
Life is drudgery and stress and you need to escape it whenever you can.
It's lies like this one that make people so unhappy in their existance. Lies like this break up marriages, because surely there is someone 'more exciting' out there. Lies like this make children unhappy, and employees unhappy, and single people unhappy. Lies like this can take a stranglehold on your life and, before you know it, turn what you thought was carefree ambition into misery.
There certainly are repetitive tasks in life, ask anyone who bottle feeds a baby what the wash-rinse-sterilize-fill-empty cycle feels like at the sixth month...sheer toil, I bet. Or what a med student feels like on their seventh consecutive year of post-secondary education, or what a clerk feels like counting the same till twice day, every day, for thirty years. Life has repetitive tasks, of course it does. Do you wear socks? Have you worn socks pretty much every day since you were very little? Do you wake up in the morning thinking "Oooooohhhh...I have to put socks on AGAIN?" Probably not, because putting on socks is something you do. It ultimately serves a purpose, you feel better once it's done, you're going to train your children how to do it and it improves your quality of life in a small way. So, you put on socks without thinking.
Notice how your mindset was changed as soon as you stopped thinking of putting on your socks as some sort of horrific trial you faced daily. Socks were 'one of those things' that you did. End of story. So can dishes be 'one of those things', and making beds, and going to work, and grocery shopping. How you think of the task is what makes it drudgery or not, not the task itself.
"Not only is it 'healthy', but 'you're worth it'! Actually, you 'deserve it'. It's a necessity, not a treat, and you've worked hard."
How about we say it like it is and not sugar-coat this one?
The luxuries in life are not luxuries anymore. You are so special that nothing is too good for you.
Slap the 'healthy' label on something and someone will buy it. Diets made entirely of sandwiches? Someone's done it. $200 bras? Cars that turn themselves on with the touch of a button? Clerks trained to practically lick your shoes if your meal is 15 minutes late at a restaurant? Special soaps to wash your organic and imported dragonfruit off with? Geez, Louise, what will they think of next? The answer is everything. They'll think of everything next, because that's what we're told to want...everything. We want to look 26 for our entire lives and have perfect worlds to exist in, free from all discomfort and inconvenience.
That massage isn't a treat to be savoured and thought about for weeks after, it's a necessity! Those special clothes, that expensive haircut, that pricey jewellery - why, you deserve that stuff! The time you spend away on date nights, the money on sitters, the time with the girls every week away from your family, those are 'you' times, and you NEED those times, right? If you don't get them, well, that's practically deprivation.
Which brings us to this:
You have to 'take care of yourself'. If you don't, you'll wear out and be a terrible parent/wife/etc.
I don't think I need to paraphrase this one, because it speaks for itself. It speaks of all of the mis-direction, all of the smoke and mirrors of how and why we live today. Put yourself first, always. Put your pleasure and happiness first. Any sacrifices you make should be made reluctantly, and always with the idea of a payback in the future. You owe me one. I owe you one. Then we're 'even'. Take care of yourself, treat yourself well, by this I don't mean be gracious with your insufficiencies and rest in the knowledge that one who is perfect has covered where you lack. No, what this sentence means is to do what you want, because, well, you want to. And isn't that a good enough reason? And if you don't do this, if you choose to go the other way and leave the world and its shortcomings far behind, then all you'll end up with, society warns you, is a shell of who you used to be.
Well, I think you know where I stand on that. But just in case, let me encourage you. Don't be afraid of your life changing, because life changes. It's a beautiful, beautiful life, and wouldn't it be nice to live it, rather than wish it away?
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