Marriage Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Why She’s Sad on Sundays

Why She's Sad on Sundays

She stands in the kitchen with her arms up to her elbows in soapy water. She smiles when you come in, but it’s one of those tired smiles, like her lips aren’t convinced the effort is worth it. There’s a sadness in her eyes, too, and you can’t figure it out.

You didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything. As far as you know, the weekend was great. She made pancakes for breakfast; you got that project done that she’s been asking you to do for weeks. Then you all went to the park, and you listened to her chatter endlessly while you watched the kids play.

So what gives? It’s like you can’t make her happy, no matter how much time you spend together. It’s never enough for her.

You shuffle out of the kitchen thinking, “If she wants to talk, she’ll talk.”
But she doesn’t.

Even though I don’t know your wife, and I don’t know you, I think I know why she is sad on Sunday.

She is sad on Sundays because the weekend is already used up, and the next day, you leave again. Tomorrow, you go back to work, and she is left all alone with everyone in the sometimes overwhelming work of motherhood and homemaking. Your wife feels the weight of a week stretching out before her, and she feels very alone.

Sad Sunday

“Boy, I’d sure much rather stay home all day than go to work,” you might think. Please don’t say it—just listen. Your work is hard; she knows it. She knows it’s not fun to get up in the morning every day and physically go to work. She knows you put in long days, and you do it to provide for her and the kids. She loves you for that.

But at the end of the day, you get to shut your office door and leave the work behind, most days.

She doesn’t.

Because “home” for you is not the same as “home” for your wife. Home for you is the place you come when your work is done. It is the respite, the rest you’ve earned. You can turn off the car, walk up the front steps, and be done.

Your wife lives at her work. She wakes up every day to work and goes to bed every night to work. There is no break, no marked finish line, no 5 o’clock quitting time. Every space she moves in is one she has to care for; every mouth is one she has to feed. All the things that make your home warm and comfortable and inviting are things she has to dust and sweep, wash and put away.

That’s why she gives you the evil eye when you leave your socks on the floor, because at the end of the day, she feels she is responsible for this space you call home. Of course you pitch in and help. You are not one of those men who comes home and just checks out. But the emotional weight of caring for a home and children is different for you than it is for her.

That’s because it’s her job.

You see, your wife does not just stay at home; she lives at work.

And it is good and lovely and all those things, but it’s also constant, never-ending, and exhausting. There is always something more to be done, and when something isn’t done, she feels as if it reflects on her as a wife, mother, and woman.

When she doesn’t do a “good job” at home, she feels bad about herself.

I know that’s hard to imagine because if you’re like most men, you’re good at putting work in a box and viewing it logically. You know all the housework isn’t hers, and you know it’s not her fault that the laundry didn’t get done. So why does she feel that way?

Maybe this will help: imagine you and your wife own a doughnut shop. That sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Doughnuts all day, every day.

But you don’t just own a doughnut shop, you live there. And you don’t just live there by yourself. You live there with all of your customers.

Every day, it’s your job to promote your doughnut shop. You bring samples to people and deliver special orders. People love you. They throw money at you and beg you to come back tomorrow. You’re the hero. You’re the doughnut guy.

Meanwhile, your wife stays at the shop. She makes the doughnuts, serves the customers, wipes down the counters, answers the phone, mixes up more dough…all while the customers are eating everything she’s made, putting sticky fingers all over the freshly-cleaned tables, and complaining that they wanted chocolate and not vanilla.

When you get home from your rounds, your part of the job is done. The customers cheer when you walk in, and you take off your coat and wrestle around a bit until they’re hungry again. You take a peek at your wife, who’s in the kitchen, where it looks for all the world like a flour bomb went off.

You wonder what she’s been doing all day, but you’re smart enough not to ask.

Let me tell you: she’s been doing the same things over and over and over again all day long, and she is beginning to think she will never get to the end of it. Worse, she feels like a failure because she believes that if she was just was a little more organized, or a little less scattered, or a little bit…better at this, she could get to the end of her work. She could be done.

And she could enjoy you and the kids the way you do when you come home from work.

That is why she is sad on Sunday. Because even after a weekend, even with you home, she is not done. She is not angry with you or resentful. She simply wishes for all the world that she could pause time and just be in her home and not at work.

She lives at work

It’s not that she needs you to work harder or help her more, unless you are one of those guys who just checks out. But husband, if you look at your wife on Sunday night and see that kind of sadness in her eyes, there are some things you can do to help.

Write her a note and leave it on the coffee pot where she’ll see it Monday morning.
Call to check in on her. Sure, she texts you a million times a day. Tomorrow, beat her to it.
Pray for her. Let her hear you.
Write out Scripture passages and leave them on the fridge. Here’s a good one: “An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.” Proverbs 31:10
Make it a habit to ask, “What’s one thing I could do to help you tonight?”
Help her relax even when her work is not done (because between you and me, it never will be). Make the popcorn and start the movie, then pull her out of the kitchen for a break.
Be appreciative. You earn a paycheck and praises at work, but she doesn’t. Say thanks—it will encourage her heart more than you know.

When your wife is sad on Sunday, pull her close. Let her know she’s not working alone. You are in this together, and she is home.

I Should Have Married the Other Man

I should have married the other man

I wish I had married the other man.

You know the other man—every good romance has one. He’s the one who vies with the hero for the maiden’s attention. He is good and kind and handsome like the hero, but enough different that you don’t know which one she’ll choose until the very end of the story.

After sixteen years of marriage, I think I chose the wrong one. I should have married the other man.

I stand in my kitchen, sometimes, beating eggs while the man I chose sleeps in, and I think to myself, “The other man would not put wadded up socks in the wash, and he wouldn’t make that face in every single family picture. He would spend less time in his office and not go to Walmart for eggs and come home with Doritos.”

(The other man would understand that I can consume an entire bag of Doritos in my mind and the calories will somehow manifest on my thighs.)

I think about the hard parts of our marriage, where our differences rub each other wrong, and the parts that make me ache, and I wish things were different.

But then I spy a little yellow sticky-note on the coffee maker, and I see my man’s microscopic, scribbly handwriting proclaiming his love for me in pencil. There’s a hand-drawn silly face at the bottom, like always, and it makes me smile, like always.

The other man would probably send me roses and let the sixteen-year-old clerk write the words he dictates over the phone onto a little paper card so I wouldn’t have to strain to make them out.

The man I chose comes out of the bedroom and sees me deciphering his words.

“Hey, Baby,” he grins as he wraps his arms around me. “Let me make you some coffee.”

He might bring home Doritos, but the man makes the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. I don’t even know how he does it because I’ve watched and there is absolutely no magic involved.

The other man would fly me to Paris for espresso in a little café where I would wish the cups were bigger.

I Wish I had Married the Other Man

“What are you working on today?” my man asks, and he listens as I babble on about this project or that one while the eggs cook. Hesitantly, I tell him that I need to spend a little money to keep up this writing gig I’ve got.

The other man would be independently wealthy, of course, but this one, the one I chose, has to work hard for every penny. I see his uniform draped over the banister, and I know that he’s given up more for me than I have for him.

“Do it,” he says while pouring coffee into my favorite mug. “Spend the money. Your writing is worth it.”

Tears singe my eyes. The other man wouldn’t make me cry.

The kids tumble down the stairs with sleep-ratted hair. “Dad!” they scream because they’ve forgotten it’s Saturday, and he’s home.

He air-punches the boys and hugs the girls. “You know,” he says over the hub, “when your mom’s a famous writer, I can be a stay-at-home dad.”

The kids cheer, and my husband looks at me with a sly grin and says, “I’m secure like that.”

I am not, and I have to swallow a little bit of fear that I might not turn out as great as he thinks I am.

“I’m going to have to write a lot of books before I can afford to keep you home,” I mumble, but even in that moment, I can’t help but soak up the way he loves our kids.

The other man could not have made me a mother. Not their mother.

“You will,” he says, because he married me not only for who I am, but for who he believed I could be. “I know you will.”

The other man would not be so delusional, I think.

He would not have looked at my swollen belly and sleep-deprived eyes and believed I could be a great mother. He would not have waited patiently through sixteen years of marriage for me to grow and change and stop leaving my makeup all over his side of the counter.

He would not be waiting still.

The other man would have whisked me around the world in his corporate jet and let me tag along while he did amazing things.

The Other Man

But the man I chose has made a home with me.

It is not a perfect home, of course, but then, no home is. It is built together by two imperfect people who, if given the chance, can choose to see all the broken bits, all the failings, and all the shortcomings. They can choose to compare the worst in their spouse with the best in another option, and they can think that life would have been better if they had made a different choice.

Or, they can choose to believe that, barring extremes, the very best husband or wife for them is the one they married. They can choose to focus on the blessings–those bits of the hard that rub them more holy and grow them up and make them better than they ever would have been alone.

Because every marriage has its hard, even the other marriage or the next marriage or the marriage you think someone else has that you don’t.

Even mine.

The comfort is that God’s very best for me is the man I said “yes” to all those years ago. Despite the hard days, the imperfections, and the growth that still needs to come in both of us, I could not have had a better life with any other man.

He is the only other man God intended for me.

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Cherished

Cherished

All I ever wanted for Valentine’s Day was the one thing he could never give me. I wanted to feel completely loved and cherished, but my husband always fell short in that department. He wasn’t the kind of guy who bought flowers or gushed sentiment.

On the good days, I thought he enjoyed my company. I could be cute, sometimes, and funny. I made good deserts and edited his papers.

But other days, I wondered if he even liked me. I could be bristly, irritable, and unlovely. The deeper into love I got, the more broken I found myself to be. I couldn’t hold on to affection or warmth or tenderness—it all seemed to run out through my cracks.

Somewhere along the road, I’d been dropped a few too many times. I had learned what no one ever intended to teach me: I was not worth holding on to. I was replaceable. Forgettable. Only worthwhile as long as I was perfect and pretty, compliant and amusing, holy and willing.

When I couldn’t be all of that, well, people let go.

And I shattered.

Because I knew I was rarely perfect and hardly ever holy. Truth be told, I wasn’t even funny. I only pretended to be so I could keep people far enough away to where they couldn’t hurt me.

If I had to be all those things, who could ever love me? I learned to keep part of myself back—the part that really mattered—so when someone let go, not all of me fell.

Only, I didn’t really know it until a boy tried to love me and couldn’t. He tried to love me when I was loveable, and I wondered if I could keep it up. He tried to love me when I was un-lovely, and I didn’t believe him. He tried to be my constant, only the more constant he was, the less worthy I felt, and the more sure I was that I would mess it up.

Some nights, when sleep wouldn’t come, I would look at him and wonder if his next wife would be better. After I was dead and gone, she would love him more. She would make him happy to come home. She would make up for all these wasted years with a crazy wife who probably needed medication.

Yet all that time, I cried inside because I wanted to be that wife myself, and I couldn’t. I wanted to be the cherished one. I wanted to be the one who made his life sweet and beautiful. I wanted to be his partner, encourager, supporter—but I couldn’t seem to patch myself up long enough to hold the love it would take to be so lovely.

The truth was, love made me more uncomfortable than just about anything else in the world. I couldn’t control it, couldn’t hide from it, couldn’t keep it where it belonged. Love was wild and bold and pursuing. It overlooked brokenness and brought out beauty. I didn’t deserve that, and I knew it.

What’s more, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe anyone could overlook my flaws for long. I didn’t believe my husband could. Or my children. Or even God.

Not really.

I longed to feel cherished, but I was utterly unable to accept it. A person could wear himself out with the pouring, and I would only feel a drop of it. He could be utterly doting, head-over-heels in love, and hopelessly romantic, and it would not be enough.

The deeper into love I got, the more broken I found myself to be.

But love is relentless. And sometimes, God uses a husband’s love to soften the cracked ground so the Father’s love can soak in.

My husband did not go away.

He did not love me only when I was lovely.

He did not withdraw his love from me when I wasn’t.

So why didn’t I feel it? Why didn’t I feel cherished by a husband who cherished me?

I began to look into my heart, and the cracks began to show: I did not feel loved by my husband because I did not feel loved by God. That is something a good Christian girl was supposed to learn, and young, but I was busy learning other things.

I understood Jesus loved me enough to die for me because if there was one thing knew, it was that I was a sinner. But to understand the depth of the Father’s love, the kind of love that chose to love me in my unloveliness? That was something I simply couldn’t grasp.

And because I could not understand God’s love, I could not accept my husband’s. My husband could never love me enough.

Only God could do that.

Only God did do that.

I had been expecting my husband to meet a need in me that was never his to meet. I did not feel cherished by him because I did not understand that I was treasured by God. The deep longing in me to feel like I was worth something could never be met in the husband who married me unless it was first met in the Christ who purchased me.

That purchase had nothing to do with my worthiness or loveliness or holiness, even though I kept trying to make it so. He chose to set his affection upon me knowing full well that I was broken and wretched, unholy and imperfect. He even knew that most of his love would be wasted on me, and he loved me all the same.

There was no need to hide from that kind of love. He already knew me. He knew I wasn’t really funny, couldn’t stay pretty, and was cranky without coffee. And he decided to love me anyway. God chose to love me.

If God chose to love me, could I ever make him un-love me? Was there anything I could do to make him change his mind?

Never.

In spite of my brokenness, he would never go away.

He would not drop me when I failed.

He would not replace me with someone more lovely.

He could not because he chose not.

It was the very thing I had wanted all along, but couldn’t see that I had. I was completely accepted and loved.

I was cherished

When I understood God’s love for me and was secure in the know that I could not change it, no matter what I did, I could finally begin to see and accept that I was also loved by the man who had chosen me. All those years, when the love poured out through my cracks, and he could not make me feel loved enough, I was already chosen and loved beyond my wildest dreams.

I was cherished.