I hope you all had a nice Christmas. Ours was rather up and down. I won’t get into the details, but it wasn’t what we had planned. David and I both woke up feeling rather depressed Christmas Eve morning, but managed to get ourselves in hand and devise a few ways to rescue the holiday. All in all it turned out ok. Caroline loves her easel. She was far more interested in tearing tiny pieces of wrapping paper off every gift than actually seeing what the gift was. Gotta love these two year olds.
Which brings me to another question I’ll throw out for discussion. I’ve mentioned this one to David a number of times, but don’t think I’ve ever brought it up here. (If I have, humor me and pretend it is something you’ve never heard here, ok?) And people can either answer this as a married person or as a child observing the family in which they grew up.
Do you primarily think of yourself as a couple with a child/children or a family? Do you think this is impacted by the age at which you got married? How long you were married before you had children? How many children you have? Other factors?
I’ll briefly share my thoughts to start and probably share more later as people leave comments.
I think of us far, far more often as a couple with a child than I do a family. I more often think of us as David and Sallie and Caroline (three individuals) as opposed to a family. I think marrying later and being married for nine and a half years before having a child has greatly impacted these perceptions. I think also having an only child makes me less inclined to think of us as a family, even though I know we are.
I’m guessing people who have children shortly after marrying are much more apt to think in terms of family as opposed to couple with children.
Thoughts?
Money, Debt, Christians, and Idols
I don’t know exactly what Ann meant, but I might be able to venture a guess based on my own experience. I don’t exactly consider myself to be an individual or a wife/mom in such a way that those two things conflict. I am an individual who has these roles. It all goes together. The roles are such that they, to a great degree, define who I am. But there is still an individual there, beneath all the spitup, who will have other roles in other stages of life.
With that said, something Ann said resonated with me. I think the part about how the way she once thought of herself wasn’t very helpful. For me, when I thought of us in terms of a couple with children, there was a rebellion against God’s plan for us that lay beneath the surface. To make a long story short, I had a very hard time adjusting to becoming a mom. I felt too young, and I also had wanted time alone with my husband, something I didn’t get much of, especially since the nine months of pregnancy is always filled with nausea for me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that for everyone, thinking one way or another would be helpful. In fact, perhaps thinking of ourselves as a family too much might de-emphasize the marriage. Either extreme might be a sign of unbalance.
Anyhow, when I read Ann’s comment, I guess I saw myself. I saw how asserting something like my own individuality might be a sign that I’m rebelling against God’s calling on my life to be a wife and a mom and perform the necessary duties of those roles. I hope that made sense.
Brandy (25),
What you says make sense and it might be that based on our pre-wife and pre-mommy lives that we approach this question differently. I’m on the opposite end from you. I had so much time with David before we had children that it is hard to think of us any other way than as a couple or best friends or whatehaveyou. We had a lot of time together so we kind of got that out of our system, so to speak. We miss it, but we also don’t necessarily feel like we are missing out now. We had “our” time and now it is time to focus our energies more on being parents.
What makes huge red flags wave for me is when I see a woman say that she doesn’t think of herself as an individual but as a wife and mother. As you said, being a wife and a mother are roles in a woman’s life. They do not define her as a person.
The only thing consistent throughout my entire life is that I am Sallie, a child of God, chosen before the foundation of the world, and saved by grace through the blood of Christ. That is WHO I AM. Period. Everything else is just how God chooses to fill in the details of my life. Right now I am a wife, but if something happened to David I would still be Sallie. When Caroline is grown and gone, I will still be Sallie. I am Sallie my whole life, in relationship with God.
To be honest, I can hardly look at a lot of Christian women’s blogs any longer because there is way too much emphasis on being a wife and/or being a mother. Yes, I am those things but primarily I am a child of God and that is the best place for me to focus. Maybe this is only an issue for a small number of women, but the idea that a woman ceases to exist as an individual when she becomes a wife and mother is unhealthy in my view.
I was glad to see so many women mention in the comments that they focus on their marriage and their “coupleness” because I think far too many people just become parents and forget that the marriage and the husband/wife relationship is the basis for a healthy family, not the daddy/mommy relationship.
Which could also lead into a discussion of limiting the number of children a couple has so they can have a healthy marriage relationship…
Great post Sallie, and great #26 comment!! You know my story, so won’t go into it here. However, I feel exactly the same, and love my own personal identity. I agree with you that we our ownselves and that God has filled in various elements of our life with various circumstances. Whether that is a husband, children, ministry, caretakers for aging parents, etc.
This is a great discussion. 😆
Just a quick thought on the whole individual/wife/mom idea… It’s possible what Ann was saying was that thinking of herself as an individual too much led her to resent servanthood. In our culture, individuality is equated with the ability to do what I want, when I want. Being my own person is an “individual right.”
Christ calls us to serve each other, laying down our lives for each other. Being a wife and mother necessitates a whole lot of that, in different ways than other phases of life. Embracing being a wife and mom means embracing constant servanthood, and that conflicts with society’s idea of the individual.
We will always be women and children of God. That won’t change. We can’t lose who God created us to be apart from husbands and children. But individual rights get subsumed to family needs for a time and often times, and that’s ok. Whoever loses his life will find it… etc., etc. Just a thought…
And I am personally thrilled to finally get to think of myself as a family after infertility! =) But that doesn’t mean that I also don’t think of myself as a couple with a child sometimes. Our marriage is of primary importance to me, and it is the basis of our family. I want to always focus on our coupleness even as we become more and more of a “family” over time. =)
We were married when I was 24 and my husband was almost 24. Our first son was born after we’d been married for 7 years and our second son 17 months later. We weren’t married “real young,” yet also not “later in life.” I guess we kind of fall in between on that one. But seven years is a long time to be married without kids.
However, we’ve always been a family. It’s never been “you, me, and him,” or “you, me, and them” for us. We’ve been married 22+ years now. We also dated (on & off) for three years before we were married (engaged about 10 months).
It’s an interesting thing to consider, though.