Ask the Expert: Your Mother’s Day Challenge
Dr. Parrott,
I love my husband and I want us to have a great marriage, but my life is not constructed for hours of leisure time spent holding hands and talking about our feelings. I’m up at 5am. We have 3 children. I go to work. I get off at 5pm. He picks up the kids and I make us dinner; or I cart them to the ball field. This goes on and on until I collapse about 10pm. And if my husband has the gall to wake me and initiate sex (which he never does), I fear what would happen to him. How does a person like me take advantage of all this great advice?
Erina
Erina,
You’ve asked a great question, but in a first for me, I’m not going to answer the question you’ve asked. I’m going to give you some advice that I feel is much more important.
We are a nation of doers. We work long hours. The latest report on hours worked shows that Americans work more hours than workers in Britain, Sweden, Spain, Poland, Norway, Mexico, The Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, and Japan!1 We maintain social relationships, oversee a collection of sophisticated electronics, and energetically raise children. Many of us feel strange if we’re not doing something almost all the time.
I’ll give you one guess which relationship suffers the most when this happens. That’s right, your marriage. Like most team relationships, marriage is only as strong as the weaker person, and living the life you describe at the pace you describe over many months will make YOU the weakest link.
Erina, you’re probably not going to like the advice I have for you. It will be hard for you to implement. You’re going to tell me you can’t do it, and find reason after reason why it won’t work. But you can do it. You MUST do it. Your health and your marriage depend on it. Consider it your Mother’s Day Challenge!
Get Selfish.
You need to change the daily rhythm of your life to create time to be alone and take care of your own needs. And I don’t mean “needs” like the dentist or doctor. I mean your needs to pamper yourself. You need to do the fun, frivolous things that give life its soft edges. But however frivolous they may seem to others, they are not frivolous to someone whose life is so scheduled and hectic.
We’re going to work on carving out some time each week just for you. I don’t want you to spend this time with your husband sharing and talking. You’re going to work on your marriage by giving yourself the loving attention that will allow you to feel great.
If you’re like most women I talk with about this problem, your response is “I CAN’T! What should I do, give my children away, quit my job, let my home go to ruin?”
I have two small children and we all know that isn’t an option. I believe you can have what you need to be recharged and take care of the necessary responsibilities in your life. You will need to re-think some of the patterns you have established.
Here are some ideasÖ
1. Your children are not always more important than you
If you’re a mom, then you have a deep instinct to sacrifice anything for your children. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that some of the time the energy you give your children and deny yourself is misplaced. For example, it isn’t more important that you spend 45 minutes on a Saturday afternoon entertaining your 6-year-old than it is for you to take a quiet, relaxing 45-minute bath after a hectic week.
Put another way, it’s okay to deny your child some extracurricular activity if it would break your back to consistently get him/her there. It’s okay to miss a ballgame. It’s okay to say, “No, I’m tired and we’re not going to do that.”
We’ve come to believe that withholding any experience from our children will prevent them from reaching their full potential. But studies have shown that if you parent within a wide range of guidelines, your children will be exactly what they should be — healthy, successful adults.
2. Make adulthood look like fun
It’s an idea we don’t often think about. One of the basic lessons we need to teach our children is that adulthood is great. Why else will they want to grow up and move out into the world? What kind of role model are you? Do you have the kind of adult fun that makes your life attractive? (I’m not talking about sex, but rather mature activities that come with the freedom of adulthood.) Or are you modeling a kind of endless drudgery?
You have a responsibility to your children to model an enjoyable, adult life.
3. If your life doesn’t work for you, it’s time for a time-out
Every prominent world religion honors the idea of daily quiet time. Being a centered healthy human being seems to require a few minutes every day of private time to listen to the quiet voice inside us all.
You’ve spelled out your daily schedule for me in your letter. If every day is as you describe, you need a piece of paper, a pen, total honesty, and about 20 minutes at the kitchen table. This upcoming Mother’s Day provides a great opportunity to request a little time to contemplate.
Your biggest immediate needs seem to be more sleep, more quiet time, and more adult fun time. Here are some possible directions to consider.
What are you doing that your husband or children can’t do for themselves? Would it be possible to prep at night and sleep another hour in the morning? Seven hours of additional sleep each week would make a huge difference to your mental health.
Having two boys on two different baseball fields across town may be too much to bear. Can they carpool home with another player? Does your daughter need to choose two after-school activities instead of three? It’s impossible to ask the right questions without the details of your life, but you get the idea.
Some people just think of babysitters for their occasional Saturday night date. I’m suggesting you use a babysitter as an “alone time savior.” You may want to go shopping alone on a Thursday evening, eat dinner at the mall, and relax with a cup of tea at the local Starbucks. Call the sitter. You may want to go with your husband on a Sunday afternoon to see a movie. Call the sitter. I know sitters aren’t cheap, but consider what your mental health is worth and look for ways to channel money into this vital tool.
Is this easy, Erina? Of course not! You may feel guilty at first. Your husband may gripe some. Your children may whine. But when they see how different you become, these gripes will fade. It’s the best thing you can do for your children. It’s by far the best thing you can do for your marriage.
1. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental organisation in which people debate economical, environmental and social questions. The OECD publishes some 500 books per year on a variety of themes, and also produces highly comparable statistics to support its research. For more information on the OECD, please read http://www.oecd.org/about/
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8 Responses to “Ask the Expert: Your Mother’s Day Challenge”
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I love this answer. Thank you.
The advices are great and practical. To be honest, this is how i work on my daily routine as a wife and a working mom. Spouse’s support is just as important as my husband allows me to do the activities I love to engage in. Thank you.
I agree with the majority of the advice in this letter. I agree that women live in a place of sacrifice for their families when they don’t need to do so. I believe that women often work themselves half to death in hopes that someone (their husbands?) will see and appreciate and reciprocate the effort to some extent. Occasionally that happens, oftentimes it doesn’t.
So, we have to take care of ourselves. Hire a housekeeper–if that takes money away from the play fund, oh well.
A necessary caveat–you have to sacrifice your (probably impossibly) high housekeeping standards in order to carve out this time for yourself.
Also, a woman needs to be prepared for a GREAT DEAL of grumbling and refusal to recognize her right to time alone and self-care. Do it anyway and shrug off the grumbling.
Remember your dreams–you’ve a right to them.
The part about what we are showing as a role model is the most prominate to me. We have learned over many, many years to “be-it-all” because of what we saw in our mothers, grandmothers, etc. They were always up before we were, busy all day (usually only on the hosuework) and then the last to go to bed. As society has grown, we have added our own things to that schedule thinking we have to “be-it-all”, we just forget the fact that they had different circumstances than most of us do today. Only in the last several years, has it become more common place to have a two parent working hosuehold. Times have changed and took so many people by surprise, they forgot how to divide things out. We didn’t ever see a lot of what the women before us did, but the way things lasted, I’m sure they took time for themselves. We just have to learn to recharge.
Personally, I saw a difference in my own children when I was running without a finishline in sight versus when I forced a slow down and put them in day care. Big difference on many levels for the whole family. I have gotten away from them seeing how important it still is for mommy to have alone time, but am working on it. They have to know it is okay from us before they think it will be okay for them to do it too. And if you are saying but not doing, it speaks bigger volume to them than you doing AND saying.
So true. We need to be kind AND firm. How can we give to others when we have an empty gas tank ourselves? Jesus said to love others as ourselves. If we don’t love ourselves, then we become martyrs, crabbies, or worse. WE ARE WORTH IT!! You are worth it!! God loves us, and we are worth some time alone. AND, it makes us nicer people to be with.;-))
D
l was frustrated in a relationship l still wish this relationship would work, coz deep down l love my husband. His reason for our problem was every woman’s talks and man’s unwillingness to listen problem,( talking to somebody who does not want to listen to you and looks down on your opinions about the running of the home.) l’ve tried to break the ice but he does not respond or if he does he shows great anger and disgust, l don’t know what to do. Pliz help
As stated above, the idea of being a role model really spoke to me. I think so often as a parent I am not motivated by what is best for me (not good, but often true), but am very motivated by what is best for my children. Maye the problem seems to large for me to handle now, but I can stop it in my kids? They don’t have to “suffer” thru the same circumstances I do.
Regarding our grandparents and their work ethics. I think the ethics are often the same today. We just have different models. Now, instead of working in the home and having that focus, we are overburdened because we have too many roles to play. We want to exceed and excel in all our rolls. But it’s so hard to switch gears like that. It is for me anyway. To go from having my work simple and organized at work because I have a structured enviornment, to the comparative chaos that reigns when children are involved. The constant interruptions and needs. It’s exhausting.
The answer really is to SIMPLIFY and stop doing this we have to have a 2 income family. I am desperate to work back towards only 1 parent working – to the point of moving to another community where it’s affordable. Think of everyone who wins… kids, family,schools,community, church, yourself. You’d have time to recharge during the day to care for the needs of your family when they come back home. To do the long hours at night that the job demands. We have just added too much to our lives! (in my “humble” opinion)
I have been married for almost four years and my husband was my best friend. The first year of our marriage, my husband had a job that he loved so much that he put it first and me second. He walked around with his behind on his shoulders and paid me no attention what so ever. Now that he has lost this job, he has started trying to control me, uses profane language with me (which he has never done before the job), clocks me on how long it should take me to get to work and home, goes through my cellphone and call all the numbers, accuses me of looking and talking to other men too much, the list goes on! I am at the point of walking away from this marriage. I suggested that we go to counseling, but he insist that it’s me with the problems and everything is my fault. I am to the point that I cannot stand to even be around him. He grew up in home where his stepfather physically and mentally abused his mother and cheated on her, and also he was engaged in his previous relationship and caught his partner cheating. Does this have anything to do with his behavior? Please help me!!!!!