Love

Spent some time with parents of young children yesterday…discussing with them how hard it is in today’s culture to maintain a quality relationship with one’s spouse.

Two-thirds of marriages take a nose dive in quality once the children come along.

It’s hard to “be enough” as a mom…to protect our children, to stimulate them, to take them to all the classes we’re told are important for them, to provide interactive quality playmates…all the while, trying to keep up with the latest decorating ideas from Pinterest, decorating like HGTV suggests, and working to regain a figure after birth of baby…and to appear to do it all, effortlessly, and with joy.

It’s hard for dads too…there’s a lot of pressure to ensure a family has all the necessities (with the list of necessities ever growing with cell phones, internet, computers, tablets, etc.), stay in shape, work very hard (but not too much), be a dedicated kind considerate dad and father (all the while being a knight in shining armour)…the signals we get from our culture about how to “be” are high and can be conflictual…

and overwhelming…

and when overwhelming…something’s gotta give…

and often, one of the first things to go is connection with our partner.

We think partners can wait, kids that are hungry/dirty/tired cannot.

And the most important relationship in our lives, and in our children’s lives, then suffers. And when the couple’s relationship suffers, everyone suffers…including the kids.

These parents did a lot of nodding and chiming in to affirm what I was saying as I was talking about this stuff…I was preachin’ to the choir!

One of the moms chimed in that after her first week on the job as a student counsellor at the university, her supervisor asked her how it was going…she said she had been surprised by one thing that came up over and over in particular, as she talked with a variety of students.  He nodded knowingly and smiled, wrote something down on a piece of paper, folded it shut, and slid it to the center of the table. And he asked her what it was, and she said:

The relationship these students describe between their parents, and the level of conflict and the level of security they felt from their parent’s relationship between each other.

The director of the centre opened his piece of paper and she found that this was exactly what he had written. He knew that she would hear over and over, as students came in to talk about courses and school and studying and focus and attention and progress and frustration and coping and stress…when students talk about this stuff, it so very often results in talking about the quality of their parent’s relationship. 

When parents of young children struggle with feeling “enough” and feel overwhelmed, it’s important that they be a soft place for each other to land…to be empathic and supportive of each other…to help each other through the tough times.

I gave each parent a page of possible strategies they could try to be able to connect even amongst the stress of  young children…finding ways to reduce the demands of their lives (one woman spoke about deleting her pinterest account as being helpful), finding ways to be gentle and thoughtful with themselves and each other, realizing the incredible benefit to the children that investing in a quality couple relationship is (i.e. “date night” is not selfish, it’s an important investment that has vital ripple effects to the children)

On the other side of the page was this poster I created, a definition of love by Brené Brown, from my new favorite book, Daring Greatly. (Yes, I know there is a spelling mistake in the last line, but I didn’t change it on purpose…life is too short to be perfect all the time)