I am in a pensive mood. It’s been a big week of worries. The sort of worry that you can’t do anything tangible about because it is out of your hands. But you worry all the same and the spouse treads around carefully in your fragile environment hoping fervently not to push you over the edge at any point.
On Monday, my Mum went with my Dad to the hospital for a four hour Angioplasty surgery. Those must have been a horrible four hours of waiting for her. He is fine now, and life appears to have resume to normal for them all. But in those hours of need, my mother was by his side. Despite all that they have gone through in their marriage in the past 30 odd years of raising a family and building a life together. The sweat, blood, fights and tears. It boiled down to them two in the hospital hoping for more moments together.
They never were equals nor shared loads in anything. My Mum worked harder in the family business and was ever more involved in our upbringing and decisions on our education. My Dad made sure there was always a roof over our heads and the bills got paid. This is not a huge contrast perhaps to my current household except S is more involved in our daughter’s life and the decisions that get made about her upbringing. We work more towards equality but there are days where I wonder if sometimes the energy I put into fighting for equality within our marriage could be better expended in acceptance and just doing those chores.
We have always fought. That’s our happily ever after marriage picture. We fought all the way into our marriage and last year, fuelled by short fuses from sleep deprivation and the eternal worries of a first time parent we escalated to new levels of spite for each other. The difference is that as a mother to a young child, I could not walk out of the marriage anymore. I had to consider that my daughter loves her father and would learn so much more being there with him everyday. We both had so much to give her because we came from such opposing ends of talents and values.
So yesterday when I found out two of my friends’ marriages were on the brink of ending, my heart stopped and it went out to their two young children who will be caught in the midst of it all. I then thought about my friends who will have to bear parenthood alone and it all seemed too heavy a burden for me to contemplate. I couldn’t breathe amongst it all.
The thing is. That could very easily be me. I am a victim of sacrificing much much more than my partner. But I couldn’t help but remember an interview I did once with a successful Partner at my old work place whose husband was a CFO and how she in one sentence attributed her success at being a working mum with four young children to her supportive husband and then in the next one very quickly clarified that she is definitely still doing most of the work.
So I look back at how I have dealt with the anger and spite that built up within our marriage last year and whilst I cannot prescribe this to everyone else, I hope at least for those mothers who still have loving husbands that still want to be a contributing part of the family (no matter what percentage that may be), I hope that the changes I have made to my mentality below could be of some guidance to them.
1. I gave up on the idea of divorce. Because its not the easy way out. Because either way it was going to be difficult to move on in life and there was going to be heartbreak and tears staying or going, but I believed that the heartbreak was better being on my end rather than my daughter’s. And so I choose to stay and fight it out.
2. I accept that sometimes I am too strong-willed and particular to allow the household to be run in his way and so that’s why I don’t actually accept his help. So this means that I start seeing amidst my exhaustion and frustration, I need to see that it isn’t that he doesn’t help, it’s that he is doing the same thing but in a different way and he has a different level of tolerance to the same issues I see.
3. I understand that he cannot change the person he is. At least not through me telling him to do so. The notion most dramas and soap operas drum into us as young girls seeking romance is that true love changes a man to want to be a better person. But in reality, people are more set in their ways than that and true love to that extent is very very exhausting. I am not saying it is impossible, but for now I choose to put it on the same shelf as fairy tale endings and lead my life revelling in the small wins instead.
That’s how I mentally keep our marriage in check. I suppose it helps that my toddler is more independent now and our lives are back on a manageable track. We have routines which may be mundane at times, but they work and we each know the plan so it cuts out on the misunderstandings and miscommunication we had all of last year.
Yes my sweet sweet daughter helps too. She is so much of him in her quiet ways, her sense of humour and her clever ways of figuring out how things work. Yet she is so much of me in her eagerness to please and will to get her way and desire to be excellent at what she does. I realised whilst picnicking atop a mound in the park last weekend that she was no longer a baby. That she can now fork fried noodles into her own mouth and then take a swig of water to wash it down thoroughly enjoying herself in the moment. She was a delightful companion to me at the art gallery, understanding the experience of the installations and revelling in the mysterious beauty in Yayoi Kusama’s creations. She chatted and conversed with me and listened back when I had my say. Such a different environment from when we were spending time together last year whilst I was on maternity leave. I didn’t feel quite as alone or clueless as I was.
I think that's why we get married and build families. So that we walk through life together and live for each other's happiness and worries. We get companionship out of it all so that we may never need to be alone.
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