With just four months until my due date, I’ve been hyper-focused on all things baby and motherhood, as I think most pregnant women would be. You can imagine my excitement one day while I was browsing Formed (aka the Catholic Netflix) and stumbled across a series called Motherhood Matters, because a Catholic perspective on how to tackle the issues surrounding motherhood is exactly the kind of preparation I’ve been hoping to find in these next several months. I thought it was interesting, though, that the very first episode really wasn’t about motherhood at all. It was about being a better spouse. It started to make so much sense to me as I watched: being a wife is, as they said in the episode, my primary vocation. Before my husband and I tackle parenthood together, we’ve got to have a solid foundation to our marriage. Our dynamic is about to change dramatically after the birth of our daughter; it’s going to be a stressful time, and we have to make sure we’re strong. The show suggested three key virtues needed for being a better spouse: kindness, humility, and mercy. I’ve been spending some time reflecting on these virtues, doing a self-inventory, so to speak, and identifying the areas in which I can improve. It’s been an eye-opening experience that I’m so glad to have taken. KINDNESSAs I listened to the host and guest talk about the importance of simply being kind, I was immediately reminded of something my husband said to me in the car last weekend. "Why are you so grumpy all the time?" I refrained from yelling out in frustration, “because I’m pregnant!” Growing a human isn’t easy. I don’t sleep. Body parts hurt that I didn’t even know I had. And I’ll be honest: I’m afraid of this whole labor and delivery thing, and it’s been causing me a great deal of anxiety that I haven’t felt comfortable talking about. To anyone. In my defense, with all of these changing hormones, sometimes my “grumpiness” isn’t entirely something I have a lot of control over, or something I even notice.
Still, whether it was the sun, the game, or any of the other things I mentioned, there was one thing that wasn’t the cause of my frustration that day: my husband. But being the only other one in the car with me, he was the natural recipient of all of these feelings coming to the surface. And that’s not fair, is it? After being married for a while you sometimes start to take each other for granted. I’m guilty of letting other things in my life dictate my mood toward my husband, and I need to work on talking to him about how I’m feeling instead of projecting it all onto him. Sharing, not blaming. Just simply being kind. There’s a lot on my shoulders right now, and I don’t think he realizes that, but how is he supposed to know if I don’t tell him? One of my favorite points that this Motherhood Matters episode made is that kindness is reciprocal. Your spouse will respond to you based on the way you treat them. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain by increasing in this virtue. HUMILITYI’ll be honest… the past struggle I’ve had with humility isn’t necessarily in how to live it, but in truly understanding it. What does it mean to be humble? In my (possibly naive and definitely incorrect) understanding, I always took it to mean lowering yourself, looking down on yourself. Maybe not even having a lot of self-worth so as not to risk feeling overly important.In reality, you don’t have to lower yourself down, you just can’t lift yourself up higher than you deserve. From Catholic Culture, humility is a virtue that keeps a person from reaching beyond himself. A virtue that “restrains unruly desire for personal greatness.” As Motherhood Matters put it, we are not God. Nor are we higher than anyone else, so there’s no place in our marriage (or our lives!) for acting like we are. It can also be helpful to not just focus on being humble, but also on trying to avoid the opposite of it: pride. How do we practice this in marriage? One of the points that Motherhood Matters makes is that when we do things for our spouse or around the house, we shouldn’t do them expecting a thank you in response. We aren’t after recognition. Rather, we offer all of our tasks to Jesus Another thing that can be humbling in a marriage is to acknowledge that your spouse doesn’t exist for the sole purpose of making you happy. My husband doesn’t exist to fulfill me. Only God fulfills us. I’m becoming more aware of the need for independence in my life. I’ve often felt like a side character in my husband’s life instead of a main character in my own, so when another character enters the mix in February, it’s more important than ever that I know who I am and what (or, rather, Who) fulfills me as a person. MERCYI can honestly say that this is one area that my husband excels in. I can also honestly say that this is one area that I do not excel in. This isn’t to say he doesn’t get angry with me, but he doesn’t stay angry with me. He’s one of those that just doesn’t go to bed angry, while I’ve been guilty of pretending to be asleep on more than one occasion just so I wouldn’t have to say goodnight. (It’s awful, I know.)
But one really important thing that I’ve taken from this episode of Motherhood Matters, maybe even the most important thing I’ve taken from it, is this: we’ve got to see our spouse through Jesus’ eyes. There’s no better example of mercy, no better person whose lead we should follow when it comes to how we treat others. No better model of patience and forgiveness. And those two things (patience and forgiveness) are possibly some of the absolute most important qualities you could have in a successful marriage because they carry right over into parenthood as well. Learning more about God and all of His qualities is essential because it’ll show us exactly who we are supposed to be, what our qualities should be, and how we should be treating people. He is the map. He is the blueprint for life. It’s easy to look back on everything written here and feel bad about myself, about my flaws as a wife, about the long list of things that I’ll be working to improve upon in these coming months. But another thing I took from Motherhood Matters is that being aware of these flaws is a gift. It’s a gift to be able to identify these less-than-perfect things about ourselves because it gives us the opportunity to grow. Without taking a look at ourselves under this microscope, without taking the time to make a really thorough self-examination, we may continue to carry on living on autopilot, never making the effort to truly grow in virtue. It may not be easy or fun, but take some time to check in with yourself. Identify what you do well. Identify what virtues you can grow in. And know that if you feel a little lost along the way, God has already laid the blueprint out for you. How has becoming a better spouse helped you to become a better parent?
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Generally speaking, taking six months to conceive is basically no time at all. There are couples that struggle for years, and I don’t take for granted the fact that it took my husband and I a fraction of that time. Still, knowing that we weren’t getting any younger, and having already waited so long for this (we’ve been together almost 13 years), I can’t downplay the disappointment that came with each month of negative pregnancy tests. Those stark white, empty circles that I stared at from every angle, under every possible lighting. My husband and I had decided during the summer of 2018 that 2019 would be the year we started trying to have a baby. We knew that it would never financially be the “right” time, but we were better off than when we first married, and we knew that we could responsibly bring a child into the world with what we were working with. So I started asking Jesus to bless us with a child, but only if it was His will, and only when it was His timing. Not when we wanted it to happen, but when He wanted it to. Because He knows better than we do, and I trusted that. January through May were unsuccessful, and even through the disappointment I reminded myself of my constant prayer and took solace in the fact that it clearly just wasn’t His time for us. Still, I wanted to take that prayer a step further. And I’ll be honest, maybe my reasoning wasn’t the most important one, but it was important to us: I knew that if we conceived the following month, the baby would be born in February. February has always been a special month for my husband and I. It’s our favorite for reasons that are irrelevant to list here, but nonetheless, we held out hope that once again February would prove to be special for us. My husband even said it himself once I presented him with May’s negative test, “maybe everything is pointing to February.” Knowing that a February baby would be so meaningful to us, we both started to say the Novena for Couples Hoping to Conceive via praymorenovenas.com. We had hope, but still knew in the back of our mind that His timing would always take precedence over our timing. Luckily, we were all on the same page. On June 9th I found out that I was pregnant, and that my due date was the same day that my husband and I started dating almost 13 years ago (one of the reasons for our love of February). Sometimes God answers prayers. Sometimes He answers them in a huge way. And for us, this due date was huge. It was our sign that this baby was a direct answer to our prayers, picked just for us, just at this time. Are novenas some kind of magic answer to our petitions? No, of course not. But they help us persevere in prayer as we spend these nine-day periods with a deep focus on what’s in our hearts. It’s our Upper Room; our version of where the Apostles remained in prayer during the nine days between the Ascension and Pentecost. Novenas have been a source of great blessings for me. Not only this particular one, but on two other occasions I’ve received clear, nearly immediate answers. From a novena to Our Lady of Loreto which found us our home in the most coincidental way ever just two days after the novena’s end, to a Christmas novena to St. Andrew that repaired a seven-year-long issue in two months, I’ve been blessed and am so grateful, but I know that is isn’t always going to turn out that way. That’s why we pray first and foremost for God’s will to come before ours. Always. Still, there is so much to gain from novenas even when they aren’t answered the way we hoped for. The Novena for Couples Trying to Conceive can be found here. If you’re like me and prefer a paper to read from, I’ve put it together in one simple page that you can download and print below. The purple sections are what you begin and end with, with the daily changes in the middle. Please share your favorite novenas with me in the comments; I love to hear all the ways in which God works in people’s lives. And for all of the couples hoping to conceive, I pray that you’ll get your miracle at the perfect time. Download here:
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AuthorCatholic. Wife. New Mama. Trying to figure all of this out one step at a time. Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.
-Proverbs 127:3-5 Archives
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