Raincity Mama

It feels like we are tread­ing water, try­ing to keep from being washed away by the relent­less waves of every­day life. The days fly past and we aren’t get­ting every­thing done. Our to-do list keeps grow­ing, new items are added but noth­ing is com­plete. It is over­whelm­ing to see what needs doing know­ing that there is lit­tle time to get all of it done.

I was talk­ing with the hus­band about this. We are both feel­ing over­whelmed. The hus­band says that it feels like he’s at the bot­tom of a well. Both of us are feel­ing defeated, unable to start any­thing new because we don’t know where to start. Which task that has been neglected needs to be dealt with first and are there any neglected tasks that are going to explode if they are con­tin­ued to be neglected. Small stuff like the win­dows are so smudged by fin­ger­prints that it looks like the win­dows has a film on them, to “holy crap! our house insur­ance has expired!”

I was speak­ing with another twin mom and she said that it feels like she and her hus­band are lead­ing par­al­lel lives. They are so busy man­ag­ing the kids and the house that there is lit­tle time/energy left over for “them”. They trade off nights so that they can get work done or go out and con­nect with friends but they don’t get a night out together. She is just as stymied as we are as to how to fix this.

When we went to pre­na­tal class the teacher warned us that par­ents of mul­ti­ples have a higher divorce rate and she encour­aged us to talk about what were going to put in place to help smooth the bumps. We sat there rub­bing our preg­nant bel­lies, feel­ing cer­tain that we would not become a sta­tis­tic and talked about how we’d hire a sit­ter and ensure that we had a date night. Thank­fully none of us have added to the ranks of that par­tic­u­lar sta­tis­tic but I think all of us are feel­ing the pinch of try­ing to bal­ance work, life and kids.

I had a rev­e­la­tion the other day that I’m not putting my mar­riage as a pri­or­ity. I’ve thrown myself head-long into car­ing for the kids and return­ing to work that my mar­riage has fallen to the side. I real­ize that I am mod­el­ling what it is to be a mom, wife, friend, insert what­ever role here, to my kids and I worry that I am fail­ing. I rec­og­nize that I am not putting my hus­band on the pri­or­ity list. I don’t want us to become room­mates. I want us to start putting each other first. Even as I type this I worry, will my kids under­stand that I have enough love for every­one. They have got­ten used to my undi­vided atten­tion and they are going to have to adjust as I learn to adjust.

Watch­ing tv last night I saw other par­ents of mul­ti­ples announce that their mar­riage has fallen apart. It is painful to watch. Would it have hap­pened even if the cam­eras were there? Who knows. Watch­ing their life unravel just threw my life into sharper focus. I can’t keep putting off tak­ing care of my marriage.

So for now it comes down to this: we can con­tinue to float, rest­ing because we are so very weary, with the risk that we might drift so far apart that we can­not find our way back to each other; or we can hold each other tightly and face what comes our way trust­ing that we have each other’s back and that we can face any­thing as long as we face it together.

A mar­riage isn’t gaz­ing into each other’s eyes. It is stand­ing side by side, hold­ing hands and fac­ing the world.

Related posts:

1. Pro­cras­ti­na­tion

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 4:12 pm and is filed under love and marriage, parenthood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.