Many prayers, Kate.

praying

praying

Prayers for all of you! MammaANDWife my only suggestion is to stop and thank him for the part he is doing. You couldn’t take care of them with your full attention if he wasn’t. gratitude goes a long way.

Hi, I am new to the couple chat and I just want to share that my Hubby and I have had our share of rough patches over the past few years. We had an extramarital emotion affair, the birth of an extremely premature child, a layoff, unemployment, and lots of heart ache. Throughout the past few years our path to God and the Church and become wider and allowed us to really sink deeply into our faith and what God designed for a marriage, for a Husband and a Wife. Recently, to deepen the road we are on we attended a Retrovaille session. Although, we were not currently in the hurts and heartache of our marriage, we can vividly remember those moments and we both learned something from that experience.

So, I pray for each of you that you continue throughout these trials and bumps of marriage that you continue to put your faith in God and that He has chosen the husband that you need, not that you necessarily want at the moment. Submit yourself to the Lord, and he will bless you.

Take care.

Distant Wife, I know how you feel about being unable to get away, and also how sometimes it’s easier to just keep a distance and not deal with a husband who is irritable and snippy.  You do mention that there are a couple of teens in the house, so perhaps when the time is right for you, you can rely on them to watch the younger ones for a bit so there can be a date night at least, however, it doesn’t sound like you are there yet. 

I had (and have from time to time) patches of time where my husband was/is nearly impossible.  Snippy, rude, unhelpful, irritable, bordering on verbal abuse at times.  Truthfully, his more negative attributes, including anger, come out the more hours he works.  There were many times I was hurt or angered by his responses to things and felt I needed and should have more help and support from him.  Things are not, nor will they ever be, perfect for us.  We love each other very much, but it’s just his personality to get grumpy and angry when he’s working a lot and mine to get irritable in response to that.  We each work on it in our own ways and I really do find the more I either smile and walk away from that, or just offer something nice in return, the less often he gets that way.  BTW I’m not suggesting that means it is in any way my fault he gets grumpy, or yours that your husband does.  Its just the way he is, and when I try to be supportive instead of butting heads with him on it, it seems to help the situation a bit.

As small as it might seem, I do find that taking the time for the Rosary helped me immensely.  The Rosary being a repetitve prayer works for me much like meditation apparently works for those who practice it.  It calms me, relaxes me, and gives me that little break in the day.  I come away from it feeling refreshed, like I’ve had a rest.  It’s hard to explain, and I’m not sure it’s like that for everybody, but for me it worked.  I also would make a point of starting my prayer time with a personal prayer for patience and a loving attitude towards my husband.  Sometimes, the more we reinforce in our own minds what our intentions are, and ask for that grace in our lives, we receive it.  Not overnight mind you, it’s a long road at times and being human we slip and slide down it. 

If there is a way to ask or assign the task to your teenagers to take 30 minutes of their day to be responsible for the younger ones so you can have some time for you, you might find it helpful…even if you have to leave the house to get any peace LOL.  They might just find after a week or two that mom does come back to them in better spirits and find it benefits them indirectly.  My suggestion is to try to do this before your husband comes home from work.  That way you have had your break already and perhaps will be able to be a little more able to handle whatever attitude comes through the door with him. 

I wish you the best and pray for all of you struggling right now in your marriages.