Hard Conversations with Our Spouse - On Parenting

One of the best parts about marriage is having an accountability partner. Not just in the sense of making sure you don’t slack off on whatever new thing you’re trying. But I mean one that calls you out on your bad habits in a way that no one else is allowed to.

B U T one of the hardest parts about marriage is being that accountability partner.

Like when my husband says he wants to lose weight. I have to be very tactful about how I approach reminding him of this when snacking at night. But when I tell him I’m going to go back to intermittent fasting and he reminds me of this during what would be our snacking hour, I do often want to chuck something at his head. Like the cookies I usually find myself snacking on.

Handling hard conversations with our spouse is never easy, obviously. In my head that sentence made sense and once I wrote it down and read it, like duh. Hard conversations, that pretty much gives it away.

Tanner and I are no strangers to hard conversations. One day, eventually I’ll share just how hard some of them have been. For now, I’ll stick to parenting specific ones.

We’ve had this struggle lately. I’m positive we aren’t the only ones. As a mom with my kids all day every day, especially since we homeschool, by the time evening rolls around I am over it. I have nothing left to give. I am very much just holding out until dad gets home. I am quick to lose my patience’s after having been tried all day, and quick to snap out of frustration after having repeated myself all day, in general I’m just out of steam.

Tanner, bless his heart, comes home ready to be my back up! Ready to tag out and take over. Except we don’t often find ourselves on the same page. He feels my anxiety, my exhaustion and my frustration and he builds from that. So within minutes of walking in the door what was already a tense environment has escalated. This is him thinking he’s got my back, the problem is we are essentially puffing our chests out to three small children. And they are confused why Dad comes home angry. Then I’m more frustrated by how he’s been with them all of five minutes and is losing it when it took me all day to get there.

But he doesn’t see my struggle all day. So to him, I am no better than he is. And when we start having these hard conversations about the flaws we find in our parenting style my goodness it quickly becomes a tit for tat. And that is not the intention for either of us.

But if I’m being honest, I get so tired of having to tip toe around what I really want to say. The words burning on the tip of my tongue are never actually spoken. We play this dancing game of cat and mouse careful not to accuse and oh so worried about making sure we use pronouns like us and we. Because heaven forbid we say the dreaded “you” then we get absolutely no where.

All that aside, even if we could manage to utter the dreaded words and take accountability for our own flaws without attaching a counter attack or justification to them, most times it’s easy to identify the problem but finding a solution? That’s when we hit the wall of silence. Tanner, he’s really good at giving me this blank face. I’m sure his brain is thinking something, or I don’t know maybe it’s not? Anyway, I wait quietly though not patiently. My mind is racing of all the things I want to say but must hold back because

**saying I’m sorry, doesn’t ever take the words back. It doesn’t undo the hurt **

Maybe that’s why he is quiet. At any rate we enter this moment of silence. Where neither one of us is contributing, both of us are staring at each other. I’m stewing. I have no idea what he is thinking.

And inevitably we can’t handle the awkwardness and one of us makes a crack or a joke about something, we laugh and move on.

But we never actually address the issue.

This, sometimes can be incredibly helpful, in other aspects of our marriage. Say if we are fighting over something insignificant. But we do it every time. Over the small stuff and the big stuff. And eventually all the stuff you push under the rug, well it comes right back out the other side. And there we are, sitting in silence staring at each other, again.

So with parenting, I can’t even tell you how many times we’ve talked about needing to change our approach, needing to identify triggers, needing to (cue all the buzz words from every trendy article designed to help you be a better parent) essentially change our entire style. But implementation is just not as simple as we’d like it to be.

And to be fair, no sooner do you figure out a stage of parenting, what works for your children and what each of them need, it all changes anyway.

Part of the secret to a successful hard conversation with our spouse, is having the humility to admit when we’ve made a mistake. The maturity to admit it freely without attempting to justify our actions but doing so knowing our spouse isn’t judging us but rather extending the same grace God does to each of us daily.

One thing I do know for certain, these hard conversations aren’t going anywhere. Because parenting is hard. Marriage is hard! Y’all L I F E is hard!

But loving? That’s easy.