Trouble in paradise

The notion of an ideal marriage has been drummed up to us at an early age.  All storybook romances lead up to the ultimate victory, when he gets down on his knees and proposes. And fairy tales always end with ‘and they live happily ever after’.  This is where it all goes wrong because this statement could anything be but farthest from its truth.

Marriage is not a one-time triumph of woman getting man to propose.  Consciously choosing to commit to someone and build a life together is a lifelong obstacle course – and not all survive.  Asking two people to share everything together: their lives, decisions, choices, needs and wants is one of the most daunting challenges to expect from two human beings. And yes, it can be extremely fulfilling too — when it works.

Giving up what you want in order to compromise, or arrive at decisions on which both parties are truly satisfied is difficult. Just reaching a middle ground is victory enough at certain times.  Add children to the equation plus the western concept of individuality and everything becomes overwhelming.

Women in general tend to lose more because we are the more giving gender. We are so used to giving up a lot of our own needs, and ourselves and so it becomes natural for us to take the back seat in pursuing our careers once we have children. We forget ourselves often.

We are born with the mother instinct, the nurturing nature, and we easily make room and space for everyone else in our lives. Pack up our bags and move to wherever our boyfriends live or where our husbands’ next job assignment takes us.  Because “someone has to take care of the children and hold the fort while he goes out hunting.”

Women and the myth of work-life balance

But times have changed and we’ve realized since then that we are intelligent human beings equally capable of hunting and nurturing at the same time.  So we invented the work life balance concept believing that we can have it all. We tried, and we find out it isn’t quite working out well as we expected.  We thought we could juggle careers and take care of the household and have children in between.  And we’re all ending up stressed out, distraught and feeling like we’re all failures.  How do we find our inner peace from all these opposing schools of thought and external chaos?

In her book A Year by the Sea:Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman, author Jane Anderson and her husband decide to take a “vacation” from their marriage when she refused to follow him to his new job in another state and instead cocooned herself in a beach house in Cape Cod.  Her two sons were all grown up and married by then.  What follows next is a woman’s journey of self-discovery and communion with nature, and thereby regaining her own self. Classic.

Her story serves as a helpful reminder to every woman in midlife or any age actually, to take the time to nurture our own person, the woman inside of us, while we try to fulfill all the other areas of our lives.

I don’t want to wait until my children are all grown up and look back at all these years behind me feeling like a lifetime passed me by.  I don’t want to wake up and realize one day that I’ve given too much of myself and forgotten me because I know the things I do now at thirty plus years will feel differently if I do them at fifty. I want to believe that I can have connubial bliss and raise my children and pursue my highest truth in this moment, as I live them.

What we really need after all is to be able to experiment with different models of how to make our relationships and our lives work.  It may entail long stretches of time away from the conjugal state without feeling threatened if this means rejuvenating ourselves from the demands of family life. It might mean scaling down a bit on the career front. Or happily giving up our jobs for domestic bliss. Whatever works.

And we can certainly do with a lot of understanding, help and kindness from the people around us, and a lot less judgment and criticisms.