Weakness.
Dependence.
A moment soaked in the reality that I cannot do it all.
I am limited.
A few days later there was this hideous voice I heard deep down in my heart.
Look at you. Look how dependent you are on him now. Look how disgusting you’ve become. He will never look at you the same. Just wait until he leaves…
And by that last statement, I knew this voice was coming from a very dark place.
I’ve spent the past 6 years of marriage thinking: if I just can keep doing all the things, then I will be the best version of myself, that’s the key to having a great marriage. If I can just be the strong one: free of needs and reliances on my husband, that’s what it means to be a strong woman, a strong wife.
But it’s been in the messiest most broken moments that our marriage has been exponentially fueled in the best of ways. It has been those white flags: starting with a confession about a past life, then six years later a declaration that I cannot be the wife that lives consumed with trying to keep it all together, all the time.
It has been when I have let John into the darkness, the chaos, and the moments where I’ve found myself flat on my face in defeat:
And as it turns out, that’s where the marriage magic happens.
It’s in the ugly cries. It’s being 100% transparent about where you are and what you can carry. It’s about asking your mate to cover your weak spots because perhaps you are in a season where you can’t cover them yourself…and all this, it is okay. It is more than okay. It is what the gift of marriage and walking through life hand in hand with your mate is all about.
Pride is my Achilles heel. And while I’d love to tell you all this striving to keep it together really has come from a pure place, the truth is that is a lie. Because you can have all the money in the world and still get cancer. You can have a valuable professional skillset and still not be able to get pregnant. You can be the best wife you know to be and yet find he has been unfaithful.
There are no sure things in this life.
And it is in those moments when you have a decision to make: will I live in fear or will I live in faith? Will I fight dependency or will I armor up vowing to never need or rely again?
I’ve fallen more in love with John over the course of walking through this loss. And if I am honest, it really does scare me. It scares me because I can hear all those what if thoughts in the back of my head. But for the record, I’m fighting damn hard to ignore them.
And so we are working out what this new place in our relationship looks like. I am working out what it means to celebrate dependency: to voice needs and embrace the help of a man I am blessed to call my husband. I am learning what it means to trust and love his steady strength and receive his love and support without the but you have to have a contingency plan mindset.
Because ladies, we cannot do and be it all. We are equal and just as valuable as our male counterparts, but within the context of marriage, we do not have to do and be it all. And we certainly don’t have to live a life trying to keep it together all the time.
There is nothing wrong with contingency plans. Just don’t let them rob you of all the goodness of the present…don’t let the pursuit of plan b steal the thunder from the current plan that is unfolding for your life.
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This article originally appeared at RecklessRemainer.com.
