Keys to a Happy Marriage when you are a SAHM

I was going to call this post "Bible Study" because I am blogging about what we talked about in Bible Study this morning but there was not much Bible in our study because I think we went on a bunch of tangents.

Today we started Bible Study talking about how we need to have a good relationship with our husband and how we need to forgive them. Seventy times seven. We need to forgive them even when they are not sorry and even when they don't say they are sorry. So from there, I am not quite sure how we got on the five millions discussions that ensued but basically it seemed like people started to divulge frustrations that they have with their husbands. With an underlying theme being that they wished their husbands helped out more or helped out better or rescued them from the kids after a bad day. So here are some things I took from the class..most are my own observations and not my teacher's.

1. Do your job - Teacher did discuss this one. Treat your stay at home mom job as a job that you need to do to the best of your ability. This may mean staying home more to get your job done. You are after all a "stay at home" mom. Try to get your job done during business hours so that you can have a more relaxing evening when your husband gets home. And my thoughts on this are God has called me to be a mom and it is a job and it has a ton of responsibilities. And yes, it is a 24/7 job and yes, it is tiring. But it is what God has called me to do. Being a full time mom is NOT what my husband has been called to do. And yes, parenting is a job for both but the responsibilities of the mom should not fall on the dad even if you have had a bad day. We also discussed how you shouldn't expect perfection. Your house may not always look a realtor's open house and your kids may not get a bath every night. Only so many hours in a day and some things are going to take different priorities on different days.

2. Communicate with your husband - It is important to have good communication
about what your expectations are and what your roles are in the family. If you don't have these expectations established, then you will become resentful on what you think your husband should be doing. If your husband knows that he always takes the trash to the curb and you always do laundry, then you shouldn't be resentful for when your husband doesn't do the laundry. Now you probably don't discuss and have written out every household chore so I move on to point 3.

3. Lower your expectations! - (mostly my thoughts not teacher's) In the Jewish custom, the woman was the administrator of the household. It's your house. You run it. Now don't go out and make major household decisions without him but do realize that it is your responsibility. If there is something that lies in the "gray" area of whose responsibility it is, then make it yours. If you need help with things, that is when communication comes back into play. I like to get my husband's help before a major party. It helps if I ask him to do a few things rather than running around like crazy cleaning and getting mad that he is reading his book and not helping me. That situation doesn't actual apply to us. I do ask for help but my husband is pretty smart about helping me clean and not relaxing when I am hyperventilating about a party.

4. Respect that your husband has a full time job. Moms complain about how their jobs are 24/7 and a husband gets to leave his work. The thoughts from Bible Study were you don't know what kind of day they have had and what kind of stress they have had to do at work so it's not fair to them to immediately hand off the kids when you are at your wits end of your day. This one I struggle with because I frequently want to be a working mom so I am frequently resentful that I am stuck with the kids all day. It would be so nice to sit in an office for a day. But that has gotten better for me since I am away from my kids three days a week while I work. I also struggle with it because if like my teacher says if you treat your job like a 40 hour a week job..well then where does that leave me when I work 20 hours? Well Chris did point out to me once that I did get to do a lot of extra stuff during the day. I go to Bible Study, Weight Watchers, Peter's music class, play groups, lunches. And whereas these things are not part of my "job", they are things that need to get done and it is nice that I can get them done during Chris' work time so that it frees up more time for Chris to have activities during the week and more family time on weekends. So I sort of see it as I have free time in the morning and Chris has free time in the evening. And sometimes we both have to work in the morning and the evening to make our house run but we do have a good amount of free time between us. So that's another point..Make sure your husband has free time! He should be allowed to have time to work on personal stuff. You can't monopolize all his time while he is home on evenings and weekends with the kids and house stuff.

So only about 3 people read my blog so when my husband tells me I should blog more, I say "Why? No one reads it". So Chris...this blog's for you! But don't expect me to practice what I preach.

Peace out.