Seeking Purposeful Direction in Family Life

I have always lived more like a survivor on a life boat than a captain steering my ship.  

From the time I was small, I learned to make the best of the situations I found myself in.  While this can be seen as a good characteristic, living with purpose and intent has always been a challenge for me in my adult life.  

I know there is balance in both of these ways of living, but I have found, especially lately, that a lot of the “living” I am doing is simply reactionary to my life instead of the more intentional approach I would prefer.

Taking time to stop and evaluate our priorities in our personal lives as well as a within our relationships is critical for identifying positive changes we can make, but this is often something we may forget to do. 

Dr. Gottman, in his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, reassures us that we are not alone.  “Many times, we don’t talk about our deepest goals.  Sometimes, we haven’t even asked ourselves these questions.  But when we start, it gives us the opportunity to explore something that can have a profound impact on ourselves and our marriage.”

He challenges us to purposefully work on our marriage and family relationships.  He encourages us to create an environment of friendship, but also a family culture of belonging.  He says that customs are not only linked to ethnic groups and countries but can be part of our families.

“A culture can also be created by just two people who have agreed to share their lives.  In essence, each couple and each family create its own microculture.  And like other cultures, these small units have their customs, rituals, and myths that explain their sense of what their marriage is like and what it means to be part of their group.”

So how do we do this?

Begin today by discussing and setting priorities with your spouse.

What do you want your family life to look like?

Choose some values you would like to emphasize.  

Find ways to both embody and emphasize these values in your everyday family life.

Create an atmosphere of respect. 

Be kind.

Make time to laugh with each other.

The Last Thing on the To-Do List

It’s often difficult after a long day of mothering to have anything left to give to my relationship with my husband.

After an evening of shuttling kids back and forth to activities, planning and making a balanced meal, and staying on top of laundry or the 531 other household tasks that need my attention each night, my energy is usually zapped.  The only thing I want to do is to relax and be still. 

I know that I am not the only one.  My husband has often felt the same way after a long day of working away from home.

Making my marriage a priority is important to me.  Actually, putting it on the very tip-top of my to-do list feels impossible at times. So I knew when I read this quote by Tzvetan Todorov, that he was talking to me.

“To care about someone does not mean sacrificing one’s time and energy for that person.  It means devoting them to the person and taking joy in doing so; in the end, one feels richer for one’s efforts, not poorer.”

In my attempt to effectively manage the rest of our family life, I had lost the joy I feel in sacrificing and loving my husband.  It is a great privilege to love and care for someone else.  It is really something I cherish, but in the drudgery of making everyday life as a mom work, I had thrust this opportunity all the way down to the bottom of the list.  My husband doesn’t ask for much and is very self-sufficient.  He wasn’t complaining at all, but I had lost the opportunity to feel the joy which makes the days richer and more meaningful.

I commit to putting my marriage back at the top of my list.  I have a feeling that if the dishes get done today or the kids making it to every activity this week isn’t going to be nearly as important IN THE LONG RUN as feeling the joy of truly loving their dad and making HIM a priority in my life.

And on the days when I am feeling overwhelmed and underappreciated, I’ll remember the wisdom of these words by Dr. H. Wallace Goddard:

“It takes strength of character to see errors in a partner’s grammar or perceptions and yet resist the temptation to correct needlessly.  It takes godly goodness to see weakness and mistakes in our partners and yet resist the temptation to smirk.  It takes heavenly humility to be proven right and yet to meekly acknowledge that we all make mistakes.”

Remembering this will help me to be gentle with myself and compassionate toward my husband.  And in this way, I can follow the example of Jesus Christ, which is another item which I hope will always be at the top of my TO-DO list.

Tending to Our Marriages

I have a three garden boxes in my backyard.  Every February, my kids and I start the process of getting them ready for a spring planting.  The soil looks dark and rich as we mix new soil with the old.  I love to bring home the seedling plants from the nursery and carefully set them in the holes the kids have dug. There is something special about the beauty of a newly planted garden.  In just a few short months, the seedlings have matured and the tomatoes are growing where the yellow flowers had bloomed. 

My youngest daughter squeals when she discovers a zucchini under the leaves or a cucumber on the vine.  We happily harvest vegetables well into June and though the temperatures are in the 100’s, the mornings are still lovely in the garden. 

By July, however, the air is thick with heat and the pounding sun has driven us indoors for most of the day.  We brave the scorching sun to water the plants, but they still take a terrible beating in the heat and have lost the hardy look of late spring.  Before we know it, we have not watered the garden for a few days and the heat has taken its toll on the mature plants we carefully placed so many months before.  The beauty of the garden is gone and withered and warped.  I hate looking at the transformation of our garden boxes in August.  Every year, I promise myself that I will do a better job of caring for my garden in those steamy hot months and every year, I fail to do a good enough job to keep them thriving.

Spencer W. Kimball said, “Love is like a flower, and, like the body, it needs constant feeding. The mortal body would soon be emaciated and die if there were not frequent feedings. The tender flower would wither and die without food and water. And so love, also, cannot be expected to last forever unless it is continually fed with portions of love, the manifestation of esteem and admiration, the expressions of gratitude, and the consideration of unselfishness” (“Oneness in Marriage,” Ensign, Mar. 1977, 5).

Just as my garden cannot survive without water and care, marriage cannot reach its full potential without an effort to fan the flower of friendship.

Marlin K. Jensen said, “Friendship is … a vital and wonderful part of courtship and marriage. A relationship between a man and a woman that begins with friendship and then ripens into romance and eventually marriage will usually become an enduring, eternal friendship.”

One of the best ways to make sure this friendship continues to thrive is by intentional constant care.  

Are your interactions between you and your spouse mostly positive or negative?  

Did you know that for every NEGATIVE INTERACTION between the two of you, you need 5 POSITIVE interactions to counteract the negative affect?

A Good Combination

I love to eat popcorn while I watch a movie.  It’s a great snack!  The only thing that makes it better is when I add M&M’s to the popcorn.  This takes my movie snack to a whole new level.  Who doesn’t love a bite of salty popcorn mixed with the sweet chocolaty taste of a crunchy M&M’s?  The secret to the success of this simple treat is the combination of both the salty and the sweet.  And I just can’t get enough.

We could argue all day about what we prefer.  Salty or Sweet?  But when it comes right down to it, we agree that there is something lovely about this combination.

Embracing our differences

I think the same principle applies to marriage and parenting.  We could debate all day about the contributions of women and men to marriage and parenting.  Both sexes have great strengths and necessary gifts to bless their partners and children.  We could spend a lot of time listing the merits of both and what their individual contributions bring to their relationships, or we could stop trying to figure it out and savor the combination of gifts and talents, preferences and strengths. 

David A. Bednar said, “The man completes and perfects the woman and the woman completes and perfects the man as they learn from and mutually strengthen and bless each other.”

In a society where we get really hung up on equality of the two sexes, it’s reassuring to affirm that our differences actually benefit us as a unit.  We see this played out every week in football.  A quarterback can’t win a game without the other players on his team.  The collective unit is needed to achieve success.

We know this isn’t just a philosophical sports idea.  

It’s an eternal truth.  

Straight from the Bible we read, “Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:11).  

This type of relationship teaches us that in a marriage or as parents, we are “equally yoked.”  This illusion reminds us that in another century the oxen pulled wagons standing side-by-side and not single-file.  Elder Earl C. Tingey, said that this type of marital relationship has existed from the beginning of time and teaches us that relationships established in this way “result in an absolute equal partnership between a husband and a wife. Eve was to be equal to Adam as a husband and wife are to be equal to each other.”

A Reminder that Equality is different than Sameness

Parenting has taught me this more than anything.  Sometimes my children need their dad and his humor and his personality in a way that is very different from what I offer them.  At other times, they reach out to me, the mom, for consolation or comfort.  They share day-to-day details of their lives and look to me to help problem solve and find solutions.  How grateful I am they have a dad who often picks up the slack of my own inadequacies.

This always reminds me to appreciate our differences as a couple.  While sometimes differences can be frustrating and annoying, I have found that most often they provide a depth and real help to me as we go throughout our lives.  In a beautiful way, I think we also take turns being the salty and the sweet in our relationship.  I definitely need to stop more often and savor our differences just as I do when I eat popcorn and M&M’s.