When M and I first read this book, we loved all the elements of it (except for the no children part). Our common studies and subjects made the sharing easy. When Sheldon and Davy converted to Christianity they had were unsure of how to incorporate God into their inloveness, but M and I never had that problem since our common faith was the base of our inloveness. We went to daily Mass together and Adoration daily for our whole 18 month engagement, and we prayed several of the hours together a day. We discussed everything that we read and read many of the same things. In my mind I always felt like we had that inloveness preserved.
Then we graduated and got married. I felt that we still had the strong bond with each other. My favorite time of day was the evenings after dinner when we would sit and read silently, read a play together, play cards, just be together. Then we had our first child. It was an adjustment, but once she was a few months old, she went to bed before us. We still had our evenings. We continued daily Mass. The same thing happened with our second child. We still had our evenings. We have been very possessive of our evenings together our whole marriage. I felt that as long as we had our evenings everything would continue happily. But children get older, don't go to bed as early, and we had our third child. What used to be three hours of evening alone time has been reduced to about one, once the older kids fall asleep. And the kids are having trouble sleeping at night, unhappy a lot of the day, and begging us for attention. And I realized that Sheldon and Davy were right about kids ruining a Shining Barrier. We cannot continue as we had before. It is surprising to me that it has taken until the third kid to see how we have not loved them as we should have.
G running to the light. |
Beautifully written! The vocation of motherhood, of parenthood, like all vocations, is one that we grow into. With each new child, God uses that unique miracle to further shape the each member of the family, and the family as a whole. It is beautiful thing to experience God's plan for our family unfold as we grow through and with our children!
ReplyDeleteThat was me, not J. I didn't realize that he was signed in oops :)
DeleteIt did not sound like something he would say. :)
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