This is especially true when children enter the picture. In no other season of marriage is such serious energy required at the very same moment we have little-to-none to pour into it. Nurturing the needs of a spouse while also tending to your kiddos is no small task.<\/p>\n
I remember a few years ago, sitting on the stairs with my husband, both of us weeping. \u201cI haven\u2019t supported you,\u201d I confessed. \u201cI don\u2019t even have the energy anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t loved you like I should,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n
It was a painful breakthrough, but we finally acknowledged that our marriage had been on the backburner since having children and we were ready to do something about it.<\/p>\n
Here are three \u201cviews\u201d that reinvigorated our marriage:<\/p>\n
A tomorrow-view of marriage.<\/h3>\n
This may seem obvious but in the intensities of mothering it can be easy to forget. If you can hold onto the old adage\u2014this is only a season\u2014<\/em> and give your spouse grace during it, you\u2019ll make it to the other side as a stronger, more connected team. Also, having children can bring up a slew of emotions and resentments. There\u2019s no shame in seeking marital or personal therapy during this season. A counselor can help you both work through the sour patches of marriage, so that the long run will be much sweeter.<\/p>\n As much as we need that long-term view, we can\u2019t neglect the present relationship. After our emotional staircase conversation, I began to ask myself the question, \u201cHow can I say \u2018I do\u2019 to my husband today?\u201d And when I had some extra energy (or perhaps an extra jolt of caffeine), I would try\u2014and still try\u2014to show him one act of love and support at least<\/em> once per week. That might mean a small romantic gesture like sending a card to his office, texting a flirtatious bitmoji, or perhaps even initiating sex at an unexpected moment. One week, I hired a neighborhood kid to mow the lawn so my husband didn\u2019t have to. It didn\u2019t require much of my time or energy but he felt loved and seen that day. Loving each other in small ways has helped carry us through this big season, and has set an example to our children of how to love with action.<\/p>\n In the early years, I was so freaking exhausted; the last thing I wanted to do was get dressed in normal human clothes and go out in public. So for a season, every Thursday night after the kids went to bed, we sat on the porch in our pajamas to talk. Sometimes it was forced. Sometimes it was fun. Sometimes we had a glass of wine, or a bowl of ice cream, or decaf coffee. Our front-porch discipline eventually turned into one of our favorite memories as a couple. I once heard someone say that to love well is to do two things: listen and encourage. That\u2019s what the porch became for us: a place to listen to and encourage each other while in the trenches of parenting. Now we\u2019re sixteen years and three kids into marriage. Our first baby is a tween. I can\u2019t believe it! The front porch has served us well.<\/p>\n When the Law of Motherhood requires more from you than anyone else, it\u2019s not easy to take these \u201cviews\u201d of your marriage. But if you can invest in the most important relationship you have \u2013 the one with your spouse \u2013 you\u2019ll never regret it.<\/p>\n Aubrey Sampson the mom of three crazy-hilarious sons, which is also to say that she spends most days in her pajamas drinking entirely too much coffee. On the days she manages to get dressed, Aubrey is an event and retreat speaker, a blogger, and the author of Overcomer: Breaking Down the Walls of Shame and Rebuilding Your Soul (Zondervan, 2015)<\/em>. She and her husband, Kevin, just planted their first church in the Chicagoland area.\u00a0You can find and follow Aubrey at aubreysampson.com<\/a> and @aubsamp.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is some undocumented, yet (I am convinced) scientific Law of Motherhood, stating that every time my husband travels, my kids will wake up sick in the middle of the night. If I could perform a time-travel\/alternative universe experiment, I\u2019d undoubtedly discover that if he stayed home instead of me, our children would remain as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140,"featured_media":3217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,117],"tags":[104,388,436,137,437,114],"class_list":["post-3216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-relationships","category-wellness","tag-advice","tag-communication","tag-healthy-marriage","tag-marriage","tag-nurturing","tag-wisdom"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A today-view of marriage.<\/h3>\n
A front-porch view of marriage.<\/h3>\n
\n![\"Aubrey](\"https:\/\/blog.mops.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/AubreySampson_small.jpg\")
<\/p>\n