Remember Your Spouse?

Hey, you remember that guy you married fifteen years ago? You know, the one that drags himself out of bed every morning at 6:30 am and goes to work and comes home dog tired at 6:00pm, day in and day out? You know, the guy that only gets attention when he forgets to take out the trash or when he turns up the game too loudly on Sunday afternoons?

Yeah, that guy! Remember when you were dating and you would check the phone for messages every half hour just in case you missed his call? Ok, you don’t remember. But maybe you should! We take our spouses so for granted when we have extra ordinary kids.

Parenting challenging kids takes hard work. If you are lucky enough to have a partner, consider this a relationship a privilege, not a right. We need to take time to cultivate that relationship. So often, or kids have that unique ability to triangulate us as parents, and it can be hard on our relationship. So, in addition to providing a united front against the sneaky kids, we also need to work on remembering why we are together in the first place.

Years ago, when things started getting a bit ugly with our first child, and far before we added more than a hammer in our toolbox of parenting, we ended up in marriage therapy. Three things I learned in therapy: I still love my husband and need to see him one on one more often, We were taking each other for granted, and we needed our own time apart, away from each other and the kids.

The therapist suggested a date night for us once a week. Yeah, right. OK, it ended up being about once every two months, but it was good! Then he suggested that we each choose one night a week to get away from the kids and develop our own hobbies and interests. I clung to that principle like the cat hanging on the proverbial rope. It was awesome! Once I got a consistent break from the kids, my resentment toward my spouse went way down.

The date nights haven’t worked out as well, but we still want to have one! Sometimes we squirrel away in hubby’s office or our bedroom. Sometimes we take them to a safe, fun place (Like Chuck E Cheeses) and talk while they drop hundreds of tokens into silly video games. We’ve learned to take breaks together when we can. For two years, we paid for an expensive gym membership so we could put the kids into the childcare and get some peace!

Parenting our kids would be so much more difficult if our marriage would be destroyed. The divorce statistic on parents of children with autism is something like 85%. It can happen to the strongest of couples. Together, we have learned resiliency for our relationship and our family and have also learned how to weather the storms of life. Now that the kids are older, we can even find a sitter now and again!