“Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.” Adam Hochschild
If you’ve spent the whole summer spending quality time with your kids, but also using that as a way to avoid dealing with the problems in your marriage, then now is the time.
Now is the time to stop avoiding and distracting yourself.
The problems haven’t magically been fixed and hurts haven’t instantly been healed.
The problems are either lying there in the silent shadows or they’re slowly making the distance between the two of you wider and wider.
But fixing a marriage is hard.
Pouring our time, energy and love into our kids is easy.
Determining whether or not you can fix what’s broken is hard (and scary).
Numbing out with a glass of wine or pouring ourselves into work or friendships is easy (and unproductive).
So, we breeze through the summer months and tell ourselves, I’ll deal with it when the kids go back to school.
There’s Never a Convenient Time
When I ask women struggling in their marriages how long they’ve been struggling, their answer is typically years, or even decades.
They never intended it to go on for that long, but here’s how that can easily happen:
The kids are going back to school, there’s fall football games, Halloween and then before you know it, the holidays are upon us….lots more distractions, lots more reasons, lots more stress.
The new year arrives and you’re filled once again with hope that maybe this will be the year things change.
Except things typically don’t magically change on their own….
Spring break comes and goes (we have a family vacation planned, after all). And then before you know it the kids are out of school and summer is upon us again – ripe with opportunities to avoid and distract ourselves from the pain of our lives and the brokenness in our marriages.
This is how years of resentment turn into a decade of regret.
There’s never a convenient time to do what’s difficult. But you could dive-in now, using this time in between the summer kid submersion and the chaos of Christmas to see if there’s the opportunity to make your marriage better, maybe even make it feel good again.
The Alternative?
You could open another bottle of wine, hang on tight and wait for the holidays.
It’s just a choice.
