Marriage, It Ain't Always a Fairy Tale

Update:
Right after I wrote this post, I checked the mail and the book had arrived. And then our pastor called to cancel our appointment because some emergency came up. I'm not sure if this is a sign that we should just read the book and not talk with our pastor. I just don't know. But I had taken all day to gear myself up to go talk to someone about my marriage and now it's not happening. I'm a little let down and confused as to what to do now.


I will give you fair warning this will not be a happy post. And I don't think all posts should be that way, you can read more about that here.

Today has been hard. I woke up to a screaming two year old, tried to clean the bathroom as much as I could, threw in a load of laundry, made breakfast for mom and Marissa and then helped the Home Health nurse with Mom's bath, which totally wears me out. I love my mom dearly, there are just some days where taking care of a 4 yr old, 2 year old, hubby, aunt and my, for the most part, bed bound mom just gets to be overwhelming at times.

I think what is at the bottom of all of this is that tonight Jose and I are going to our Pastor for marriage counseling, it may be one session or turn out to be several.

I was hesitant, and still am a little, to post that because his family reads this blog but I think it is important for me not to portray a happy little marriage and happy little life on our blog.

Like I said in the post I linked to above, I think it's dangerous to give people the impression that you have a perfect life and/or perfect marriage. It makes them feel even worse if they are going through trials in their own marriage or in their lives.

They need to know they are normal and every marriage no matter how it may look from the outside, has it's problems and challenges. We have a good marriage and have built our marriage on a solid foundation but if you don't spend time working on your marriage on a regular basis it can fall apart before you even realize it.

Because even when you are totally in love with each other, go to counseling before getting married, try to fight fair, try to put God at the center of your marriage, even with all of those things marriage is HARD.
Then you throw in kids and in laws living with you, stress at work or whatever situations you may face in your own marriage and it becomes all the more challenging to put the time and effort into your relationship. It can all build up and if the communication is not there the results can be bad and really damage your marriage.

There hasn't been any major damage to our marriage yet but we decided, well I think it was my idea, to go and talk to our Pastor. I want to deal with problems as they come up and not let them fester and cause damage in our relationship.

The thing is, I thought our marriage was going great, I guess I had my head in the clouds and wasn't paying attention to him, I don't feel like I have had a lot of time lately to pay attention to anything, and it doesn't help that it's not easy for him to show or talk about his feelings.

He is a great husband and father but there are things in our lives we all struggle with. I'm struggling with things right now, fighting personal demons and he has been too.

It's just been a really stressful time in our lives and I was too distracted and not focusing on my marriage and what the stress in our lives was doing to it.

We ordered the book Sacred Marriage which I learned about from MckMama.
It has not come in yet but I can't wait to get started reading it together.

I'm not looking forward to talking to our Pastor tonight about our marriage, and if I'm totally honest I have came up with three excuses why tonight is not a good night to go.

But I know that I am doing a disservice to my kids, my husband and myself not to mention not following what God put in my heart to do, if we don't go.

So we will go and I know we will work this out, because there is no other option and really in the bigger scheme of things it's not that big of a problem because hopefully we have caught it in time. Just pray that our meeting tonight goes well and we are able to get the guidance we need to get our marriage back on track.