Married Life..{ A Tune Up...and a Prayer }

Its been a while since I have done a married life post hasn't it!? Well today I am thinking about what has happened to our lives since summer and thought I would should share some thoughts with you. 

This past summer ( well this past June and July ) has really been hard on my husband and I. We got all the kids here from their other homes and all hell broke loose. There were so many problems that we faced with the kids alone that even our marriage was a struggle. Nothing.. and I mean nothing was going right. I think during that time I was focused more on the kids and the house.. we did a huge move in June and really not thinking about the damage it was causing my marriage. I think the first thing to remember is.. Your marriage should come before your kids. I know this sounds completely crazy and I grew up in a home where really, the kids were the ones that came first. I have believed for a long time this was the right way to live because if you show your children what a good marriage is, it will not only show them by example how important that relationship is but in most cases your husband was there before the kids and should be the one that is still around after the kids leave one day. So I think its so important to take care of that relationship first. 

Honestly... in June and July that could have not been further than the truth for me. I tried.. but things kept coming up and I just couldn't seem to balance it out well. All the problems with the kids became personal problems for us and our relationship. The kids were simply eating us alive. About the second week in July I had enough. I started working hard to show Scott how much I love him. But then another problem would pop up and we would have to start all over again. I also think my thoughts had a lot to do with the issues we were having. I was just waiting on the next bad thing to happen instead of focusing on the good. All the advice from family and friends was not helping. Well, my best friend Shanna kept telling me, get to a new day.. it will look completely different in the morning. And that did help on a lot on those hard late nights. My thoughts were limiting me because with all the negative stuff bouncing around in my head, there was not a lot of room left for good thoughts.  I had to forgive my husband for the things I thought were wrong on his part, and he had to do the same with me. There will never be a lasting marriage without the act of forgiving. Sometimes you just have to apologize or accept an apology so you can forget it and move on. Not so easy done but its the only way a relationship will endure the test of time. I suck at apologizing and I plan on doing another marriage life post dedicated just to apologizing. Because I have had some big lessons on how to truly apologize and what it actually means. It sounds simple but really its not.

  So as August crept up.. I made the decision to try to focus on the positive in my life and my husband instead of the problems. I even started a new journal/planner that is more geared towards happiness than anything else. I am trying to change the way I think because I believe that will change everything from the energy I put out,  to how my husband feels, to how I parent the children. I am trying be more positive in every aspect of my life and I do believe it has been life changing. I think we all need reality check sometimes. I think this complex, complicated relationship trouble has given us the chance to clean up our relationship.  While I am reading marriage books and looking for a therapist for us.. I feel that we are getting stronger by the day as a couple. We have been together for a very long time at this point and both of us have invested everything into this relationship. But as summer wore on.. we were just drifting apart on so many levels. Remember you will never really just get closer together.. you will always drift apart unless you work at making time for each other. In any relationship you are either improving, growing or decaying. And  Both Scott and I have been really bad about this the past few months.  Instead of us getting closer in June and July we were pulling further apart. Once we both realized that was happening, we both started working hard to fix it. We know that we have lots of areas to improve on and instead of just letting things get worse.. we are taking a conscious effort to make it better.NOW. And I will explain how in a future married life post but we are trying to spend more time together, talk more, and we are both working really hard at showing our love and making each other feel special. Still there are hard days and there will be many more to come but I know we have the foundation that will hold us together as long as we want. But instead of living in hell with constant fighting and complaining, we are just taking baby steps to make things better. Maybe more marriages might survive if they realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse. We have a lot of work ahead of us but I know....brighter days are ahead.

Marriage is always changing. You are either getting closer, more intimate, more honest, more caring, more loving or not. But it never stays the same. 

Which way is your marriage/relationship changing? Are you getting closer or further apart? Maybe its time for a tune up in your relationship too. Its never to late to start! 

xoxo

K Jaggers

 ♥