I want to start this post off by saying, it's going to get worse before it gets better. If I were to describe my marriage, I think I would akin it to the Rocky Mountains and the Mojave Desert. Long, high mountain tops with weeks of fun between the two of us and pretty solid communication. But these experiences are almost always followed by some sand and grit.
I...was a terrible wife this week. Dreadful. I found myself in the Desert and decided to set up camp.
That's right, I chose to wallow.
I think that I've confessed this already to almost every person that I've had a conversation with. For some reason, if I've had a moment alone with a friend, I haven't been able to hold it in. I think I have felt so despicable that it seemed like the only way to redeem my "horrible wife week" was to confess it. To every.single.person.i.know. It's come up a lot.
It all started pretty harmlessly. Marriage is tough, ya know? I absolutely love my husband, I truly believe he is God's gift to me, but sometimes I just get a little irritated. The annoying things stand out a little more. And if you're married, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Because you, my friend, are 1.married, but 2. human and 3. married to another human. We love each other, but every now and then we get annoyed/irritated/fed up with/angry at/moody to...each other. It can be the teeniest, tiniest little thing that set it off, but then it starts to snowball. This annoying thing leads to that annoying thing, and before long you've got the Abominable staring you in the face.
And when that happens, my gut reaction is: alone time. Leave me alone. I hole up. I find reasons to avoid. I don't answer questions with full sentences...or even half sentences...and sometimes not even with WORDS. Grunts, head nods, etc. I'm SUPER mature this way. How MISERABLE. He tells me details about his day. "That's cool." He tells me it's fun to have me working from home. "Yeeeaaaah." He continues, in spite of my snark-i-ness, to pursue me. And I continue, because of my snark-i-ness, to chafe at his pursuit.
Oh, I notice I'm doing it. That's the worst part. After each one of my half-hearted, let-me-show-you-just-how-much-you're-annoying-me responses, when G walks away without success again, I have a pang of guilt. Something is tapping at my little soul. My little ungrateful, caught-up-in-my-self again soul. And hour after hour, day after day, I continue to ignore the tap. It's telling me I'm being rude. Ignore. It's telling me that I'm not demonstrating love. Ignore. It's telling me I'm putting myself above him. Ignore.
And I continued to ignore it. Until a week and a half later, I've built a wall up that's higher than a hot air balloon on a windy day. (Pretty high, right?)
And then one day, now that the tension in our little apartment is thicker than my own head-o-hair (wow), I realize that I don't even have a valid reason to have pushed him away, and suddenly my cards are showing. I'm now vulnerable, because I'm left with needing to explain what is wrong...and I've got nothing. A couple of annoyances? Really, Beth?
Wow. What a lame duck I am sometimes.
All I can do is apologize. And pray that this instance will prove to be useful in future instances. That I'll remember how not beneficial this has been. How damaging and hurtful it was to avoid.
Thank goodness that I'm married to man and serving a God who both love me in spite of myself!
I read an incredible quote today about marriage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (no, I can't claim I was reading his book. This is a stolen from facebook.)
It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on,
the marriage that sustains your love.
I do admit, sometimes in leaning on the Covenant of Marriage that I made with my husband, I find myself falling back in love with him all over again. The Covenant that we made keeps us together, even when we have a hard time loving each other. And by staying together, we continue to find love in ways we never expected. It's a pretty beautiful thing.
