Today’s question is from an anonymous commenter on Formspring. S/he asks, “How do you find time for your relationship with your husband when you’re so busy with your kids? In a world where divorce is common, how do you keep that spark there? What do you talk about in the evenings? Do you ever find homeschooling consumes you entirely?”
What? What’s that you say? I can’t hear you, as homeschooling has eaten my head. *crunch crunch*
In all honesty, homeschooling does sometimes consume me entirely. It takes up most of my morning and afternoon. Planning takes up a portion of my evenings. Homeschooling certainly takes up a large percentage of my thoughts. I spent a neat little chunk of time writing about homeschooling.
Homeschooling hasn’t been the biggest stumbling block in our marriage this past year+, though. The thing that has really been draining is parenting in general. I have spent the last five straight years pregnant, breastfeeding, or a combination of the two. We have three children, ranging in age from 17 months to almost ten, plus a beagle. Someone always wants something from me. I’m tired and drained, physically, mentally, and emotionally, much of the time. I’m tired of people touching me. I have stints of a lot of anxiety, both generalized and specific. I can’t use the bathroom without a pottience or someone banging on the door, hollering through the door, sniffing and scratching at the door, crying “Mama! Mama! Mama!” outside the door, or getting into a fight downstairs. We’ve had one or more small people sleeping in our bed with us for the last four years. Mix that up with Officer Daddyman’s work (very late nights) and the homeschooling in the morning, and sometimes it does feel like the whole world, or at least the portion of it occupied by our children, is trying to come between us.
Keeping the spark is hard. A lot of the time, I couldn’t care less about the spark. I’m starved for a few minutes of intelligent adult conversation far more than I’m starved for romance. I sometimes trend towards not making enough effort, because I’m just too lacking in energy to care. Even in the less sparkful times, however, I always find Daddyman interesting. I like talking to him. I’m interested in what he has to say, whether it’s stories from work or explanations of a game system he’s working on. I like how he seems interested in all the probably-boring stuff I did during my day. I stay up almost every night until he gets home, even if that means forgoing a couple extra hours of sleep that I probably need. We spend a little time talking, maybe watch an episode of whatever show we’re watching on Netflix (right now it’s Studio 60 on Sunset Strip), maybe eat a little snack. Sometimes we have Quality Adult Time™ together. Sometimes we just have time together.
We have periods when we spend a lot of time together, periods where we drift too often to our separate computers, but mostly, I like Daddyman more than I like just about anybody else, and he seems to like me pretty well, and I think that’s what keeps us going. I like parenting with him, having general life stuff with him, having conversation (however trivial) with him. We actively work on getting it together and keeping it together. We’re honest with each other and we try to lay it all out there so nothing is hiding, building up resentment. Every once in a while, we have great big fights and great big make-ups, and that’s always nice, too, in the long run. It’s a work in progress, but I think any good marriage is. I want to keep working to find ways to make it better. I want to keep working to find ways to not just keep the spark, but to want to keep the spark. I see us making a lot of improvement in that area. I think it will keep getting easier.
Ultimately, I don’t think homeschooling is any more (and probably less) of problem in our marriage than any thing else. It’s a common interest and a shared project, and it means we’ll nearly always have something to talk about.
