Sharing Burdens
Lately, I've been missing my husband.
No, he hasn't been away - he's just gone back to shift work after nine weeks of 9-5 (ish), Monday to Friday work and the one week he had off after Lara was born.
It's a weird feeling, missing someone's company when you eat with them, sleep next to them and share the same house with them! It wasn't so much going back to shift work that bothered me, in fact I looked forward to it.
I don't know if you get the same feeling, but things just didn't feel.......right. Fair enough, I've just had a baby and I've had a few things going on that have been niggling me. I didn't really want to talk about it and it was easy to avoid - I never found the time. I was always busy with dinner, feeding a baby, seeing to children or tidying up......
Anyway. Things came to a head this week.
My poor man came home from doing some grocery shopping for me. He forgot to ask for the chicken breasts from the butcher to be put in bags of three. Then he got a phone call just before I put dinner on the table that night. So we had to wait while he finished his conversation. And there was something else as well that I can't remember now (funny how those sorts of things can make you so angry at the time but then after it's all sorted out you can't remember what the issue was in the first place!).
So because of those few little things, because I'm post-natal, fatigued more than usual, missing him and having a few other issues going on, I did my usual sullen sulky wife routine while he tried to figure out what was wrong.
He went off to night shift and when I sat down to my nightly Facebook fix, I read something on there that filled me with remorse and reminded me that my marriage is something the devil would love to see destroyed - and here I was chipping away at it myself, helping him with my poor attitude and unwillingness to talk about how I was feeling.
So, I swallowed my pride and sent off an email, apologising for my behaviour and trying to explain how I was feeling. I was surprised and even more remorseful when I received a gracious, loving reply.
You know what?
I immediately felt better. It was like a lump of concrete had been removed from my stomach.
Since then, we've gotten on better and I noticed that our body language has changed. But we haven't been any less busy and we haven't managed much time alone.
But just the simple act of sharing a burden has brought us closer together and healed a small breach which had the potential to become a big issue. All we had to do was just share the burden with each other.
Never ceases to amaze me that after eleven years of marriage we are still learning!
No, he hasn't been away - he's just gone back to shift work after nine weeks of 9-5 (ish), Monday to Friday work and the one week he had off after Lara was born.
It's a weird feeling, missing someone's company when you eat with them, sleep next to them and share the same house with them! It wasn't so much going back to shift work that bothered me, in fact I looked forward to it.
I don't know if you get the same feeling, but things just didn't feel.......right. Fair enough, I've just had a baby and I've had a few things going on that have been niggling me. I didn't really want to talk about it and it was easy to avoid - I never found the time. I was always busy with dinner, feeding a baby, seeing to children or tidying up......
Anyway. Things came to a head this week.
My poor man came home from doing some grocery shopping for me. He forgot to ask for the chicken breasts from the butcher to be put in bags of three. Then he got a phone call just before I put dinner on the table that night. So we had to wait while he finished his conversation. And there was something else as well that I can't remember now (funny how those sorts of things can make you so angry at the time but then after it's all sorted out you can't remember what the issue was in the first place!).
So because of those few little things, because I'm post-natal, fatigued more than usual, missing him and having a few other issues going on, I did my usual sullen sulky wife routine while he tried to figure out what was wrong.
He went off to night shift and when I sat down to my nightly Facebook fix, I read something on there that filled me with remorse and reminded me that my marriage is something the devil would love to see destroyed - and here I was chipping away at it myself, helping him with my poor attitude and unwillingness to talk about how I was feeling.
So, I swallowed my pride and sent off an email, apologising for my behaviour and trying to explain how I was feeling. I was surprised and even more remorseful when I received a gracious, loving reply.
You know what?
I immediately felt better. It was like a lump of concrete had been removed from my stomach.
Since then, we've gotten on better and I noticed that our body language has changed. But we haven't been any less busy and we haven't managed much time alone.
But just the simple act of sharing a burden has brought us closer together and healed a small breach which had the potential to become a big issue. All we had to do was just share the burden with each other.
Never ceases to amaze me that after eleven years of marriage we are still learning!
Comments
Post a Comment