FAMILY

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is a family?  I thought I knew, but during one of my mandatory therapy sessions, I had an epiphany about my definition of family.

I had always defined a family to include children.  How many times had I heard, “We are starting our family” or “When are you starting your family?” in reference to getting pregnant and having a baby.  Since we didn’t have any children, I defined Mr. Small Town and myself as a couple.

However, my therapist challenged my definition about family with a different perspective.  He pointed out that on the day we got married, Mr. Small Town and I were joined together to create a new family, separate from our parents.  We didn’t need children to have a family because we were already a family – just the two of us.  He noted that the phrase ‘breakdown of a family’ usually referenced to when parents – the original family members – got divorced.  He then went on to say how important it is to nurture the marriage so there wouldn’t be a breakdown when children were added, thus changing the dynamics of the original family.

I understood what he was saying and it made sense.  But, I still wanted our family to include children!  He laughed, shook his head at me and gave me my assignment for the week:  Assess and nurture my relationship with Mr. Small Town and report back to him at my next appointment.

At this point, Mr. Small Town and I had been married for 5 years and had a pretty good relationship.  The first year was rough – we had to bring two very independent people who had separate households, lives and careers together under one roof.  Good thing divorce was NEVER an option!  As a result of that first year, not only did we write out a marriage covenant listing common goals for our marriage and family, but we had also constructed a “Rules of Fighting” document together so that when we had disagreements and frustrations with each other we resolved conflict in a healthy manner.   I didn’t see the need to assess or nurture the relationship any more since were doing fine.  However, I had the assignment and I always completed my assignments.

The first thing I assessed about our relationship was that we spent a lot of time apart.  Not that we didn’t like each other or avoided each other – it was because our jobs were in very separate industries with different work environments and work schedules.   Also, with Mr. Small Town’s support and encouragement, I was completing the last 2 years of my bachelor’s degree in the evenings and on the weekends.  We rarely had the same day off of work but when we did, it was good.  As I began to asses our life, I realized how little time we actually spent together – just him and me.  Second, I noticed that while we were going through the infertility together, we stopped having fun.  We needed to start having fun again.

Now that I was not working, Mr. Small Town and I began spending a lot more time together, which proved to be interesting for our relationship.  When he was home, I was home, and vice versa.  It was a new beginning for our relationship which came with some adjustments.  I developed my daily schedule and he had his daily schedule and then we would make either lunch or dinner plans together which often included a movie too.

Pretty soon, we became known as the ‘restaurant reviewers and movie critics’ for our friends.   Who knew that we would love to discuss plots, meanings, and actors’ performances?   Before we knew it, we were Siskel and Ebert!

While exploring new restaurants and movies was entertaining, we needed something else.  Since we both were transplants to the area, we started planning day trips (aka – a car versus an airplane) to become familiar with different parts of the area.  We discovered that we both had a sense of adventure and a desire to explore new places.  We began to enjoy ourselves and made countless memories just between the two of us.

Oh, and remember how the library became my new place to hang out?  We started reading books together, our own little book club.  Together we discovered what genre of books, authors, book series and plot lines we each enjoyed.   With some books we would find our favorite spot on the couch and I would read the book out loud to us.  (Yes, we ARE corny!)   I remember a particular book that we read together regarding boundaries with the opposite sex outside of our marriage.  The book was full of wisdom and led us to make some changes to our family covenant.

After a few months of purposely spending more time together and planning fun, our relationship changed.  We discovered why we liked each other so much and why we got married!  I had to admit that the therapist was right.  We needed to nurture our family.  Over next the four years, this was the pattern of our marriage.  It was a gift from God to us to create a strong foundation in our marriage.

Today, I am both thankful and humbled that I adhered to that therapist’s advice.  On our last wedding anniversary, we celebrated 21 years together.  Now that we have a 12 year old in our family, we still nurture our relationship except now we have ‘date days’ where we go out to lunch, watch movies at home, or take a day trip.  We are still creating memories and space for the two of us – the original Small Town Girl family members.

 

Friend, has it been awhile since you and your “family” had fun?  Has life gotten into a ‘routine’ that you forgot to have fun?  Do you need to assess a relationship in how it could be better?  Do you need to nurture a relationship?  Do you need to change a frame of thought?  I did.  And look what it did for me.  I am grateful that I took the opportunity when I was given it because God knew we would need a strong foundation for the next chapters that He had already written in my story.

 

Blessings to you my friends!

 

 

You can read the posts leading up to this post by clicking here, photo post, post 2, post 3,  post 4, post 5, post 6,  post 7 and post 8.
This is post 9 in the series.