AskHal

Dear Hal,

Mary In Ohio

Thanks so much for the question, Mary. Yours is a question I receive often, and I can definitely understand why.

So many of us enter into this parenting game as an outpouring of our marriage. We not only want to share our lives with our spouse, we want to shape the future together. We want to become co-participants in Creation, combining our blood, genes, histories, and influence to contribute not just to our lives, but to Life itself.

But as soon as that new life enters our world, everything changes. Sure, there are the changes we all laugh about—less free time, less sleep, less sex. But there are more significant changes that occur within our marriages, and within ourselves. Now, we feel this incredible pull to focus our whole life on the child. Now, we feel this weird conflict about our spouse that sometimes feels like a competition between him/her and the baby. Now, we see our spouse as not just a partner, but as a parent.

In an effort to reduce the anxiety of new changes, we try harder. We try harder to gain our spouse’s support, or we try harder to be inclusive with whole family events. Or we try harder with increased date nights, or counseling sessions, or even self-help/parenting books.

But so much of the time, we feel like failures because our struggles continue. We feel so overstressed and overcommitted, that we begin to “lose it” with our kids, those precious continuations of life that we so eagerly anticipated in the first place. Often, the lack of support and understanding from our spouse seems to be the primary aggravation behind it all. All we know at that point is that something has to change, or the paddy wagon will be on its way to our doorstep. 

I believe that experience is why ScreamFree Parenting has been so successful thus far. People are absolutely thrilled to find a program that lays out a new focus and approach—one that requires no cooperation on anyone else’s part.

So many of us feel trapped by any effort to improve our family because it seems to require the very type of family unity we’re missing to begin with. “Follow these steps to a have a closer family” usually never addresses the very lack of support needed to follow those very steps.

You know by now, Mary, that parenting is about learning to focus on how you want to behave, regardless of how your kids behave. It is about learning to focus on yourself and doing whatever it takes to be a strong person of integrity, even when your kids don’t get it and don’t respect you. What sounds more difficult for you to realize is that becoming a ScreamFree Parent involves becoming a ScreamFree Spouse as well. You do not need your spouse to validate your efforts to calm yourself down and grow yourself up. You do not need him to support your efforts to take care of yourself. Yes, it would be nice to have him “on board” in this way, but your need for that support only prevents that from happening.

I know that sounds strange, but it’s simply a relationship law: whenever we anxiously need something from someone, our neediness actually reduces our chances of getting it. It puts the other person, and the relationship, in a no-win situation. If you need your husband, for instance, to support your desire for “you” time, then he cannot win. If he refuses, then you think he’s a selfish jerk and you’re stuck with your overstressed life. If he does support you, then he’s trying to appease you and now he’s expecting you to come back stronger, with “less complaints about your life and these children you always wanted.” You’re not really taking care of yourself, you’re simply asking him to take care of you. And then you’ll resent yourself for needing him, and he’ll resent you for the same reason, and the cycle continues.

Learning to take care of yourself is about learning how to do so without anyone else’s cooperation. “But I need him to watch the kids!” I can hear you say. No, you don’t. You don’t even have to ask him. You can hire a babysitter and simply inform your husband. Or you can do like my wife has done a few times, simply inform me that, as planned, she’s going to play tennis. And she doesn’t know what I’m going to do with the kids, but she’ll be back by ten o’clock.

It sounds to me, Mary, that your call to growth here is not deciding to “outgrow” your husband, as I hear so many frustrated wives say. Your call is to outgrow the old ideas and expectations about what this “family” thing was supposed to be like. Especially the old definition of family as the place of haven from and support against the outside world. No, the primary areas of struggle are right inside our four walls, and the vehicle to growth inside those four walls is choosing to follow your carefully, and calmly, chosen path, with or without your family’s cooperation.

So take care, Hal