ignorethefringes
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2016
- Messages
- 3,005
Honestly it was good for me as a dad too. Let's be honest, I don't always like my kids. I love them always, but sometimes I don't like them. The same holds true for any relationship you might have. What makes one a good parent is being able to move past those feelings to embracing the responsibility of raising your kids to be good human beings. Raise good human beings and you'll like them a lot more often and, frankly, it makes loving them easier as well.My wife has done the same thing at times. It seems to help her enough and I know what she means so I don't get upset.
Relationship are hard. Humility and embracing the suck are (sometimes huge) parts of the experience.
Moving on a little bit, I'll share one of the most important things my wife and I learned. We actually learned it while we were figuring out how to be a family after our first kiddo. My wife came walking into the living room where I was lounging, dressed scruffy, and made a comment about why I hadn't bothered to care about my presentation even a little bit. I quickly responded something like, "Why, who am I trying to impress?"
Almost as quickly, I realized I had stopped caring about "impressing" my wife. Through conversation she came to a similar understanding. We had both stopped trying to give each other the best of ourselves and started giving each other the leftovers after dealing with the rest of the world (including the kiddo) all day. We weren't worried about treating each other better than anyone else, but were actually treating each other worse than just about anyone else. I wouldn't yell at my coffee/cafe/restaurant work for mishearing my order, why would I holler at my wife for a simple misunderstanding? I wouldn't lose my patience with my coworker and risk my job simply because they made some minor mistake (again), why would I lose my patience with my wife or a similarly minor mistake?
Our commitment to love each other should mean that we focus on being better to our spouse than we are to anyone else. It's a challenge because we tend to let our guard down the more familiar we are with people. But for my wife, who I proclaim to love more than anyone else in the world, I have to make it a point to keep my guard up and ensure that she gets the gets of me every day.
The Bible, which is important to my wife and I, has a well known verse that states, " Love is patient, love is kind. . . It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."
For us, we've modified slightly to make it more specific. "Love is MORE patient, Love is MORE kind" etc. Because, as noted above, I can be patient or kind with random strangers. I should be MORE patient with the one I love.
We're not always successful, and sometimes we have to remind each other, but keeping this concept in the forefront has been somewhat of a game changer for us. We're going on 15 years in January.
Sorry for the diatribe. Long story short, give the ones you love the best of you, not the leftovers. And marriage/parenting/life is hard. Even marriage and parenting can be type 2 fun sometimes, lol.