30| Wife First Then Mother, Keeping Marriage the Foundational Relationship in the Family
Welcome to Intentional Motherhood, the podcast for real moms like you and me who are just trying to do our best to raise the amazing kids that God has given us and really want to enjoy motherhood. You're in the right place if you know that you have a God given calling and purpose in this life to raise amazing families and you want to find ultimate joy in this calling and purpose of yours. I'm your host, Kelsey Redd, a mental health counselor turned stay at home mom of four little kids, twins included, all six and under. And today we're talking about marriage, the couple relationship. As you may have guessed from the title, we're going to talk about why it's so important to keep this relationship as the foundation of our families.
Kelsey Redd:I've been hesitant to talk about this subject because I don't necessarily feel like it's an area of expertise for me, although I have spent many years working with couples in my clinical practice. But I just don't feel like I can keep moving on talking about motherhood and how we can do our best be the best version of ourselves in motherhood without addressing the marriage relationship. Buckle up, lets get started. Thanks so much for being with me today. And I hope that we can have a really good conversation about why and how we can keep the marriage relationship as the foundational relationship, the foundation of the family, because that is so critical in creating a healthy, stable environment for our children.
Kelsey Redd:And not to mention, we need to have this relationship at the forefront of our mind because it's actually the relationship that's going to outlast our busy motherhood phase of life that we're in now. Eventually your kids are gonna grow up, your kids are gonna move out of the house and you'll be left with your spouse. And so many couples have a hard time during this transition because they have lost the sense of themselves and as a relationship as a couple during the co parenting years. And now they're meeting this essentially stranger twenty years later and having to rebuild a new relationship with their spouse. I called this episode Wife First and then Mother because I think it's really important to remember, assuming we're talking within the context of a traditional family system where a husband and wife are married for the first time to each other at a younger age and then they develop a family together.
Kelsey Redd:Obviously there's exceptions to that rule and that may create some different family structures and different chronologies in the family system. But speaking from this general context of this traditional family, we enter into a relationship first with our spouse. And then as the years progress, we move into the phase of marriage that Matt Townsend, a renowned marriage expert that I really enjoy his teachings and I recommend you go look him up. Calls this stage of parenting that we're in now with these little kids, the co parenting stage. And it's a really challenging stage of marriage.
Kelsey Redd:So I want to give you a little bit of context into my life and my experience. My husband and I were married very young, and we expected to start our family quickly after being married. But as God would have it, we ended up spending over a decade without any children in our family. We were trying to have kids for most of that time, but it's just not the way it worked out. We were able to build a very solid foundation in our marriage.
Kelsey Redd:Of course, it wasn't without its trials. And I will tell you that infertility takes a toll on every aspect of your life and your relationship. And that created some really difficult and challenging years for us as we navigated the grief and the longing and the treatments and all the things that go along with infertility. But we were able to spend over a decade, which is more than a lot of couples have, building a relationship, a partnership with each other. And then we entered the co parenting stage of marriage and I think there was a little bit of a honeymoon phase of that new stage for us because we had wanted and longed for our children for so long that we were just kind of in this blissful heaven with our children for a little while, a few years maybe.
Kelsey Redd:But as the years go by and as more kids come to our family, we are definitely in the trenches of the co parenting phase. And it's difficult to keep our marriage as a high priority. It's like, I kind of compare it to the example of someone who is really into fitness and exercise and who has maybe some fitness goals or body goals, and they work for years and they have a plan and they put so much time and effort into reaching their lifting goals or their BMI goals or their race time goals, and they finally hit this goal and they think, Oh, I've made it. I've achieved all of my fitness goals. Now I can stop working out.
Kelsey Redd:Well, they're not going be able to maintain those goals, right? Like, of course, that's not the way it works. You don't just stay in that perfect state once you reach that. And that's kind of how marriage is. It's like we are spending so much time, we have the ability to put all of our resources and our energy into our marriage relationship.
Kelsey Redd:And if we just stop at some point, at whatever point that is, whether there's kids or not involved, we can't maintain. There will be no, it won't just magically stay a perfect relationship just because we used to be there. So bringing this back to Matt Townsend's stages of marriage, he talks about the yearning stage, which is when we are first meeting and dating and the chemicals and the chemistry is really high and active, and you're just very attracted to each other. That's what leads to marriage and procreation, right? Then we enter the earning stage where now instead of the love being maintained by our chemicals, our love has to actually be earned through actions and choices and behaviors.
Kelsey Redd:And this is where the co parenting stage lies, is within this stage. And he talks about, Matt Townsend that is, talks about the concern of so many couples where the kids have taken priority over the marriage relationship. And he makes some really great suggestions for what to do about this and how to keep the earning of love and the choosing of love and the service within the marriage alive so that the connection can stay strong even through these co parenting years. So that when you get to the end of the co parenting years, you're not married to a stranger that you haven't dated in the last eighteen to twenty years. So Matt Townsend suggests having rituals.
Kelsey Redd:He suggests that you have two to three little daily rituals. These can be rituals about how you greet or leave each other, such as with a hug and kiss every time you greet and leave each other. He also recommends having one to two weekly rituals, and these might be a date night or a movie night. It doesn't have to be something big. It might even just be knowing that you're going to have a cuddle and watch a movie weekly so that you have some connection to look forward to throughout the week.
Kelsey Redd:And he also recommends having one to two yearly rituals where you really celebrate your marriage and your relationship, maybe celebrating anniversaries, or making a big deal of some birthdays or other important dates in your family, so that there are these rhythms and rituals that carry you through the child rearing years and keep the love growing and earning and staying in touch with your spouse. And by the way, the last stage that Matt Townsend recognizes in relationships is the enduring stage, which he defines as a mature love and partnership rooted in trust, choice, and shared history. And I think that's the goal. That's where we all want to get. And I don't think we have it's not like we don't get to it until after the co parenting stage.
Kelsey Redd:I think it can be something that is kind of a foundation within the stages that we're in. But it definitely doesn't happen without effort and energy. And it's so easy, especially for us moms, to put all of our energy and emotional and physical energy into our children. And it's hard not to when they kind of rely on us for life or death and we have to just do certain things to keep everyone in the house alive. But we will be doing our children a disservice if we don't demonstrate to them, show them through our example, and teach them that their parents' relationship is the most important relationship in the family because it is the foundation of the family.
Kelsey Redd:And it is the relationship that will teach all the children what to look for in their future relationships. That's so important to realize is that the way they see their parents interact is what they will expect and think is normal when they enter into their own marriage. And as we've mentioned before, we actually will spend more of our lives knowing our adult children than we will ever know of our children in their childhood. And on the flip side, we will spend so many more years in a partnership of just our spouse than we will as co parents raising a house full of little children. Of course, we'll always be children once we have those kids born to us.
Kelsey Redd:But as far as the nitty gritty, in the trenches raising of the children, that phase is such a short part of the overall marriage relationship. So we have to keep that in perspective. We have to keep in perspective that these children will move on. These children will move out. These children will find relationships of their own.
Kelsey Redd:And they will not look to us as their most important relationship anymore at some point, but they will remember what I demonstrated was the most important relationship in my life, which is the marriage relationship. So a couple takeaways for you from today's episode. I want you to remember Matt Townsend's three relationship stages: the yearning, where the chemicals are in charge, the earning stage, where we demonstrate service and mutual effort into the relationship, and enduring the mature partnership that's rooted in shared history and the constant choice to choose each other and to stay committed in our relationship. And also remember his ideas to introduce some rituals into your relationship. Maybe this week you and your partner can take some time to identify a couple of daily rituals that you can incorporate every day and maybe one weekly ritual that you can do this week.
Kelsey Redd:Get started and plan on doing regularly so that you can keep your marriage healthy and vibrant so that it can set the foundation for the family so that you can be the best mom you want to be, and your husband can be the best dad that he wants to be, and your family and your kids can have that stable, healthy relationship to imitate later on in life. If this episode has been at all helpful to you, please share it with a friend who might also benefit. Post it on your social media, write a review, or just text it to a friend. Thanks for being with me today, and I will see you next time on Intentional Motherhood.