Extraordinary Tuesday: Two For Tuesday

Welcome everyone to Two for Tuesday. I am Karie from The Five Fish and I post every Tuesday about parenting and life discussions and how we can balance out the role being a parent and being an individual as well as finding a balance with ourselves and with our children.

I have had a lot of talks lately with myself, my friends and my husband and I am finding a similar theme. Maybe the theme is looming because of the impending "holiday" of Valentine's Day. Marriage. I posted yesterday on my blog about marriage and the topic was very raw. I will admit my marriage is far from perfect. My husband and I have had our troubles; really who has not had troubles right? But we reached a point in our marriage that we knew we were broken and some days we are still broken.

We sought help. Help in the form of a marriage counselor. I thought that if we needed to see a couples counselor that our relationship was WAY beyond repair. I was wrong. I was happy to be wrong and to find that our damages went beyond just the two of us in the room. Our damages were from family of origin and how we brought our own baggage to the marriage. Insecurities, fears, and the perpetual mind games resulting in someone who is in need of repair. Couple them with another individual suffering the same ails and you have a disastrous love.

I will tell you that the repair is everyday. Every day! Some days are better than others, other days we both want to throw in the towel. What I will tell you is that the reason we stay married has nothing to do with our kids. While our kids are our primary focus in our relationship, our other primary focus is ourselves and how our relationship impacts them. We considered divorce to allow them to grow up in a healthy home. We considered staying together as well to show them the path to a healthy relationship through working out kinks, disagreements, distrust, and the ever looming family of origin baggage we bring with into our union.

Parenting is work. Marriage is work. We do not give up on our kids do we? "Eh, little Johnny is not going to listen or do as I say, so to heck with him." No. We continue on with our children because we see that this is but a small moment in life; life of course is what you make of the experience. However, I will say that sometimes a marriage is completely beyond repair if and only one person is still afloat in the love boat while someone is swimming away or the love boat itself is sinking.

I had a moment when in therapy that my counselor told me, "You will have a time where you have to accept your marriage is over, you should get a divorce, and you both deserve happiness." A week later I was sobbing to my husband, telling him goodbye, that I love him will always love him, but that he deserved the utmost happiness in life and that we were not happy together. At that same moment we both knew that our love for one another was worth fighting over, the fight was worth the energy, and that we could get past this moment in life.

While we have reached small moments like that again we are able to come together again and work through our differences. In front of our children. Not hiding our pain, our love, our passion for one another and ever confirming to them that we love them and that adults have disagreements. Adults have "adult" issues that need to be worked out and sometimes we cry, we raise our voices, we might leave to cool off, but we always love and we always come back. But we don't come back because we feel we have to for our children, we come back to one another because of our commitment to each other.

Nothing in life is easy. To earn and get anything in life of any value you have to make sacrifices. What sacrifices have you made for your children no matter how hard? What sacrifices have you made to keep you marriage alive? Or the opposite, what sacrifices have you made in the name of love for your spouse or former spouse?