with Angella Dykstra
I'm a mom of three, a professional accountant, and an amateur photographer and writer. I am not a marriage expert. But my husband and I take "Til death do us part" seriously, and here I'll be sharing how we keep our marriage strong while we both do that insane work-life juggle.
Check out my Work It, Mom! profile and my blog, Dutch Blitz.
My husband and I have a lot in common, which is how we ended up being married (Thirteen years this May!). We also have a lot of differences. He is in introvert and I am am introverted extrovert. We have similar, and also different, love languages.
There are a few things I’ve learned over the years about communicating without conflict.
I love awards shows — I have ever since I was a kid — and the two of my three kids who (look like me, and) are wired like me love them too. The three of us sat on the couch with a huge bowl of popcorn and watched the Oscars this past Sunday night. I won’t get into the fact how I think they had the worst host ever or how it seemed to drag on and on and on with irrelevant content (See: All the Dreamgirls stuff), but there were some good moments. Most of them on Twitter, but that’s for another post.
There seems to be some uproar over Ben Affleck’s statement when thanking his wife Jennifer Garner.
Over the course of our (almost) thirteen years of marriage, my husband and I have traded the “top spot” of primary breadwinner. Until last April, I had the “coveted” spot of bringing in the higher pay check and then our roles reversed. Since then, he has been working two jobs and I’ve been working half-time hours. I’d like to find more work so that he can ease off of the labor job he’s doing, but so far we’ve been out of luck.
We’re in the midst of Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas is mere weeks (weeks!) away. There is also Hannukah and other holidays that my family does not participate in, but which we respect your family’s right to. With all of these holidays crammed into such a short amount of time (weeks!), it means that you’re going to be spending at least one dinner with extended family. You might even be trekking for many miles with cranky children, only to have horrible sleeps on spring-loaded hide-a-bed mattresses, and then trying to smile nicely when your husband’s mother asks you if you’re taking a break from working out, because your face seems a bit ‘puffy.’
Never fear! I have five tips to help you survive the holidays with your in-laws, be they the woman who birthed your husband, or creepy/drunk Uncle Ted.
Money has been one thing that hasn’t been a stress in our relationship until recently. We both have jobs and we’re both pretty frugal, but we have felt the crunch in the current economy. There have been some moments where it … hasn’t been pretty. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when talking about money:
Many of my friends have great marriages and they attribute it to their parents. Said parents have been married for decades, have modeled great marriages, and have supported their kids in their own marriages.
My Dad has been married five times (I have eight siblings from the first three marriages) and my Mom has been married three times. That’s six divorces between them, if you’re counting.
When I was eleven years old, my body decided to respond to my female hormones and presented me with the gift of a monthly cycle. I still remember the first time I got my period; I called my Mom to come up to the bathroom, she took one look at the ‘evidence’ and asked, “Is that from YOU?”
Such a bonding moment, that.
She then took me out for lunch and talked to me about how boys were going to want to get into my pants (*cringe*) and how all that boys think about was sex (*ew*) and that if I didn’t want to get pregnant, I better keep said pants on (*MOM!*).
I had a bit of an idea what sex was - thanks to a friend showing me with a Barbie and Ken couple - but everything was still pretty vague at that point. And also, awkward. Talking about sex with your parents is horrifying, regardless of your age.
Now *I* am the Mom, and my oldest child, a son, is almost ten. (I still can’t believe that. DOUBLE DIGITS.) He’s only started having girl friends in the past year, and the bulk of his time is spent playing video games with his (male) buddies. He’s nowhere near being ready to date or anything, but I keep reading horrible statistics about how young kids are when they start having sex and it scares me a little.
Yes, we live in a close-knit community, and yes, we live so far out of town that my kids can’t sneak out to meet up with their friends (Yay!), but I know that we’re going to have to have “the talk” soon. My husband and I are affectionate with each other, the kids know that there is no stork that drops babies off, and that they entered the world via my private parts. I think that the technical details are pretty vague for them, still, so we’ll have to have a little scientific discussion. I just don’t it to be too soon … or too late.
How about you? When did you have “the talk” with your kids? If you haven’t had it yet, when do you think is a good time for it?
While I have never been divorced, I am a child with divorced parents. They have each been divorced a couple of times over, and I wouldn’t call their splits ‘friendly’. Well, except for my Dad’s divorce from his third wife, who I call Mom (It’s complicated). It was a rocky split at the beginning, but they have worked out a pretty good system for parenting their four kids. They are in no way BFF’s, nor do they hang out, but they don’t harbor anger and vent it in front of the kids.
The Internet has been aflame this week with incendiary posts. Time magazine’s cover photo got Twitter/Facebook/blogs all aflutter with their takes on if women were “Mom enough.” Yesterday’s post over at Babble about ‘Top 10 Things Mothers Do Better Than Fathers’ got all of the Dads’ panties (Do Dads wear panties?) in a knot.
It’s 2012, people. Two thousand and twelve, twenty-twelve, however you pronounce it.
There are people who are stuck in stereotypes from fifty years ago, and God bless them. I hope they are happy.
This past Sunday I watched my husband, in character as a street cleaner in Jerusalem, talking about Passover in a monologue/skit that he dreamed up and performed. He gets up in front of over 400 people every Sunday to do an object lesson (Sometimes it’s Coca-Cola and Mentos, sometimes there’s fire involved, you get the idea)(He surprises everyone every week). I feel like he surprises me the most every week, because he never tells me what tricks he has up his sleeve ahead of me watching with everyone else. I’ve been married to him for almost twelve years and the young punk I married would not be standing up there, so comfortable in his skin and his role and doing the crazy things he does.
