Sometimes, I Hate His Guts

  I have a friend who says, just like the most adorable third grader you ever met, "Sometimes, I hate his guts." She is talking about her husband and she means it. Sometimes, I hate my husband's guts. I'm sure he feels the same about me from time to time but he is too good to confess it. 

  I spent several days earlier this month hating my husband's guts. He hadn't listened to me about something that I felt was important. It was also a stressful time because the kids were sick with a stomach bug. I selfishly turned it into more than it was. I pulled all the other times he hadn't listened out of my treasure box of grudges and threw them at him. I lay at night as far to my edge of the bed as possible, actively hating his guts and feeling sorry for myself. I shunned intimacy, though I craved it. He said I was acting really pregnant and that only fueled my anger. 

  Then I read a blog post that was circulating Facebook, I can't find it now, but it was a woman who had been recently widowed offering marriage advice to her daughter. It was beautiful and poetic and I cried through the whole thing. She was so wise. I imagined being in her shoes. How heartbroken I would be. How I would miss everything about my husband if he were gone. That nothing that I was upset about now really mattered in the grand scheme of life or even in the grand scheme of this week.

  I get in these ruts sometimes where something really irks me about my husband and I dwell on it and I add to it like rolling a big snowball for the base of a snowman. When I am busy rolling my snowball, it is very hard to stop. I am suddenly blinded to the positives and the negatives shine like a lighthouse. 

  You see, my husband and I are very different. Apart from Keith and me, a Proffitt and an Owen would never marry because we are so different. But, we all know that opposites attract and I fell in love with Keith for a lot of reasons but there were some specific opposites that were very attractive to me. I forget that some of things that irritate me now are the very things that caused me to fall in love with him in the first place.

  I am really in no position to offer marriage advice to anyone. The story above is an example of what not to do. I did learn that anytime I fall into this rut of begrudging my husband, it is when I am being selfish. In love, one cannot be selfish. Love is not selfish. 

1 Corinthians 13:4-5

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 

  So, basically, everything about hating his guts is wrong and here it is straight from the Bible, in a very familiar passage that we have all heard and may be able to recite. Read it again. 

  I spent the last two months helping a friend facilitate a marriage course at church because marriage matters to me. My marriage matters and I care about other people's marriages too. I want people to be happy. I want people to stay together if they can. I want children to live with both of their parents if they possibly can. A man who had participated in the course with his wife shared that they had not been living together prior to taking the marriage course and that after taking the course, his wife had decided to come home and they were experiencing healing and renewal in their marriage.

  Our own marriage was in crisis a couple of years ago. I had built a huge snowball of hurts and I was lost in the dark with only a lighthouse to show the way. The light beamed only on my unhappiness and the darkness veiled all that was good in my marriage. 

  We went to a marriage counselor. It was miserable. We sat in his office feeling like we were broken, but knowing that we weren't really broken. It was incredibly painful to share our wounds with another person, even a professional counselor. The counselor listened to our stories and advised us not to talk to each other (about issues) until the next week when we were in his office again, so we never went back. We didn't have time to wait a week between talking about issues, we had to talk immediately. We were better than this. We had to get out of crisis mode immediately.

  So we talked about everything, not just the problems that seemed so big at the time. We learned each others' fears and insecurities and renewed our love. A bottle of wine in Paris led to a real breakthrough. We discovered that an underlying problem was my parents' recent divorce. It had scared the crap out of us, and it took several glasses of wine in the City of Love to get us talking about it, a few days without our kids added to that equation too. He was afraid that I would leave him and I wondered if there really was such a thing as true love because my model had been shattered. If my parents got a divorce, it could happen to anyone. I realized that we were not immune to divorce, then I had to learn that we were not destined for it.

  I knew how much Keith meant to me and how much he means to our children, but I realized that our marriage matters to a lot of other people too. We are a unit and we have a meaningful place in our sphere of influence. If something were to happen to us, the effect would be devastating. A devastating current would wave through our selves and our families and ripple out into that sphere indefinitely. That realization was slightly burdensome but it put everything into perspective. There really isn't anything between us that would be worth setting that wave in motion.

  

  Just like any personal story I share here, I share this for the purpose of helping others. Maybe someone will read this who can relate and glean hope from my experience. Just because visiting a counselor didn't help us at the time, doesn't mean that going to a counselor would not help another. We all have unique situations and perspectives and we all require different tools to help us with our problems. I am in no way discrediting the counseling profession. It just felt really wrong to us at that time. 

 The marriage course that I referred to is the Alpha Marriage Course, an eight week video series with a workbook to go along with it. Participants sit at a small table as a couple and enjoy a candlelit dinner followed by the video lesson and built in discussion. The beauty of this format is that each couple can have complete privacy as they discuss their marriage. Keith and I participated in this course and really enjoyed it. 

  

  

  

They Say the Kitchen is the Heart of the Home; It Might Just Be the Heart of Me

  I am sure you have heard it said that the kitchen is the heart of the home, maybe you've said it yourself. I have always cringed at those words. I have a love hate relationship with my kitchen. Okay, mostly hate. I hate all of the messes that I make when I cook. Cooking is exhausting in itself but it also comes with dirty dishes, counters and floors. I don't often clean my cooking mess the same day that I cook, I usually leave it for about 12 hours and let it suck the joy of cooking right out of me.

  My first kitchen was a tiny little hallway into the suite that I shared with three other girls when I was in college. I used the kitchen more than the other girls because I had to cut my meal plan in order to  afford tuition and housing. I spent $25 a week on groceries and made all of my food. Okay, not all of it. Keith always paid when we went out to eat and that was fairly often. My poor roommates had to deal with the mess I left in the sink. If I had a lot of school work, I would tell myself that I didn't have time to clean or do dishes. I often waited until Friday afternoon to clean up from the week. After projects were turned in, papers written, and tests were taken I could think about pesky things like a weeks' worth of dishes piled next to the sink waiting to be washed. By hand.

  My next kitchen was also a hallway in the apartment I shared with my husband after we got married. That semester was very strange. I am glad that we don't have to relive it. I was student teaching and that meant spending 7:30 to 4:00 at school everyday. I also had a full load of school work to complete at the same time. It was equal to being a full-time student with a full-time job. Meanwhile, my husband was in his last semester and only had nine hours, not even a full-time student. While I was gone at school he would make the apartment look perfect and expect to be treated like a hero when I got home. It was annoying. I felt like he wanted me to be happy with him because he did my housework for me. It was my work because I was the woman. I didn't see it as my work, I saw it as our work. We lived there. We ate there. At least I never had to do the dishes.

  There was another apartment, I barely remember it. It had a nice big kithen with a dishwasher, but I hardly remember using it. My husband had started working full-time and I was in my second semester of student teaching. Once again, full-time course work along with full-time unpaid internship in the classroom. I didn't like to go home alone in the afternoons so I would usually go to a coffee shop to work on projects after school. Then it would be rush hour and I didn't like driving back to our suburb apartment at that time. Usually, Keith would meet me for dinner and we would head back later in the evening. That's probably why I don't remember it, we hardly spent any time there. 

  That spring, we bought our first house. I was pregnant with our first baby and unbelievably exhausted. We kept our house very clean. Thanks to Keith. I knew that he would clean anything I left out and sometimes I would just let him do it and be glad. Most of the time though, I tried to have everything picked up and cleaned up before he got home because I wanted to just relax with him. The problem was that no matter how clean I had the place, he would still walk in the door and start cleaning. It made me feel like I wasn't good enough and I resented it. A great deal of bitterness built up inside me and I sometimes left everything undone because I knew he would find something no matter how much cleaning I had done. What was the point, I reasoned.

  Now we have 3 kids and the days of having a very clean house at all times are over. Keith is still better at cleaning than I am but I try to appreciate it rather than resent it. Actually, he is better at "picking up" than I am. There is a difference between "picking up" and cleaning. He also doesn't touch the kitchen anymore, unless I specifically ask him to clean the floor or unload the dishwasher.  

  We understand each other much better now, so housework is less of a fuss. I realize that he has a need to do some cleaning in order to unwind. For example, when we have something to really think about and talk through, I sit down on the couch or the bed. I can't do anything while I'm thinking. He walks around picking up toys, he can't do nothing while he's thinking. He isn't cleaning because I didn't do enough, he cleans because he needs to. That realization was liberating for me.

  The last few weeks I have been doing  a lot of extra cooking so the kitchen has really suffered. Most days I have more than one dishwasher load of dishes so the sink is never empty. Even if it is empty, it only lasts a few minutes before someone's sippy cup gets tossed in there.

  We spent the entire weekend making messes in the kitchen and then leaving the mess in order to run off to soccer or church. Every time I walked in the kitchen, I wanted to do something about it but I was too exhausted. I am fast approaching my third trimester of pregnancy. I thought I would clean it before bed on Sunday night but we ended up letting the kids play outside until bedtime. I fell asleep wondering how I was going to clean up the next day and still homeschool my children well.

  Monday was a fantastic day. I sat with the boys while they did their morning school work then I sent them outside so I could focus on the kitchen. Eventually, I locked them out so they would leave me alone. They were fine. I could see and hear them through the kitchen window. Everly hung around with me and "helped." It took an hour and  a half to load and unload the dishes, put away all of the things that were out of place, clean the counters and table and sweep and mop the floor. 

  Once the kitchen was clean, I felt awesome. I felt free to focus on other things. The messy kitchen weighed on me mentally, physically, and emotionally. I felt like a failure as a woman and a wife and a mother as long as the kitchen was a mess. It didn't matter that I have done some of my best cooking ever in the past week. It didn't matter that we sat down together and had hot, homemade food every night last week. We even had the neighbors over for an impromptu chili dinner because I had made a huge pot so I offered and they had no plans so they joined us. Those things should have made me feel like a successful home cook but I allowed the disorder of the kitchen to cause me to feel like an utter failure. 

  It seems that my kitchen is not only the heart of my home, it is actually connected to my heart. What goes in, what comes out, the work in between and the state it is left in are all connected to my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It seems a bit ridiculous but having suffered a guilty conscience over messes in the kitchen or eating poorly for lack of a  good meal plan has finally brought me to the unwelcome realization that there is something about the kitchen. I don't want it to matter but it does matter.

  I don't want to have to cook and clean simply because I am the woman of the house but somebody's gotta do it and I am a bit of a control-freak. My 23 year old self would not recognize my 29 year old self. For a long time I would have preferred to work outside of the home and pay others for childcare and help around the house and take-out food. I tried to stay home when I had my first baby but only lasted a few months before getting depressed  and lonely and going back to work part-time. I knew I couldn't work full-time but I also couldn't stay home full-time. 

  I felt like I owed it to women in history who fought for the right to work outside the home if they wanted to. I felt like staying home in this day and age was like going back in time. I felt like my degree was going to waste, that I needed to teach part-time because eventually I would want to work full-time and I needed to keep my foot in the door if I was ever going to have the career I dreamed of.  Work made me feel important, housework made me feel very low and worthless.

  On one hand, I feel like anybody could do this, there is no special skill involved. On the other hand, I never feel like I have kept the house or kitchen well enough. Since I stay home now, this is the only thing I have to do but I still can't do it all. Alternatively, I put a great deal of energy into making things perfect and feel spent when I am done, with little satisfaction to keep me going. I feel like I am the only woman in the world who feels this way, but I know that I am not. 

  Last Monday was the first time that I felt satisfaction from thoroughly cleaning the kitchen. It felt awesome so I reveled in it. I felt good about myself and I let that feeling really take hold because it is rare. Maybe the state of my kitchen is of no importance to the world, but it is important to me, and it is important for my family. It turned out that it mattered for the neighbors last week as they got to eat dinner with us.

  When I turn off all of my own negative ideas about myself and my role, I can unashamedly enjoy the simplicity, though hard fought battle, of a clean and comfortable kitchen that functions as the heart of our home and is an extension of my heart for my family, as well as, friends and neighbors who may happen to step in and enjoy a meal with us. It is small, painfully small sometimes, but I no longer believe it to be insignificant. It is hard work but I finally feel the value in it.