Today, my husband made our breakfast, as he does every single day. He gets up in the morning, has his shower, goes downstairs and starts juicing the apples, celery and lemon ready for our smoothie. He washes the juicer and blender, puts all the bits back together for the next morning.
Today, he washed up several times, played with our toddler and took her to the beach, made cups of tea for me and his sister who was visiting, changed nappies and later, put our toddler to bed. He did some work. He spent a good 90 minutes cleaning and tidying downstairs.
People say to me 'You are so lucky! My husband would never do all of that!'
Whilst my husband was doing all of the above, I was feeding our little one, I was helping our older daughter get ready in the morning for school, I was doing laundry and folding, I was hoovering, I was feeding our babe again and resting with her as she fell asleep for her afternoon nap. I did some work online whilst she slept. I picked up our eldest from school, co-tutored a children's class and got dinner sorted.
I was gave a 40-minute bath to our youngest. I taught her how to count to ten in Mandarin and we played with ShopKins. We played on the bed with her big sister for half-an-hour, tickling, singing, laughing...I got her all sleepy with my milk and said prayers with our eldest and read her the Secret Seven and waited until she fell asleep.
I have lay-ins on weekends. I make sure I am the one who tends to our babes at night, every night, since their births. I let my husband sleep. I make dinner, he makes dinner, sometimes one of us does more, the other does something different. We are always doing something of value to add to our family.
This is how it rolls every day in our home. It is not luck, this is how we orchestrate it. We are a team. We both work hard. We both have different roles. We both put effort in to make our family work. My husband is not 'helping me'...we are helpmates for each other. He is not a baby sitter for our children. He is their father.
We are two wings of a bird! We try to keep our flight steady so that the bird of our relationship can fly.
I am grateful for his input into our family and he is grateful for mine, and we both thank each other for the input we put in, every single day.
We have known each other for 25 years and been married for 15 and I put this down to:
- Respect for each other.
- Love for each other.
- We thank each other every day.
- When we disagree, we consult and we resolve. We listen and we hear each other. We try to see things from the other one's perspective.
- We pray together. We eat together. Say we love each other. I cry and feel overwhelmed. He sits as patiently as a rock and holds me tight. I hear him with all this woes. We sit side-by-side on computers together. We do stuff apart. I encourage my husband whilst he studies at Uni. He encourages me with the things I do. He does the stuff I can't do. And vice versa. He makes me laugh. I make him laugh. He rolls his eyes at me and I roll them back!