Virtual Blog Tour, October 2012, Fifth Stop: Marriage Comes First

Original Blog Post as a tour stop with Jennifer Dwells and her original blog at Life’s Breathe.  Below is the content of that blog stop. I encourage you to subscribe to her blog directly if you get the chance.
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Hello AGAIN to Jennifer’s blog readers.  As you already know, my name is Heather D. Nelson and I’m the author of the book God Had Other Plans – Keeping faith thru pregnancy loss and infertility.  Today, October 5th, is my official 5th pit-stop in my virtual blog tour and Jennifer was kind enough to host me today for a SECOND time!  This is just the Fifth stop of a multi-day blog tour discussing various aspects of infertility and the fall out it leaves behind so if you like what you read, you can check out my information below for the previous and following dates.

So far in this blog tour we’ve covered the basics of what infertility is, and how your faith can affect your life as you make the journey.  We’ve also discussed some practical tips for surviving the fall-out of the drugs and pressure of treatments as well as how to interact with the rest of your friends and family when their attempts at support sometimes fall short.  Today’s topic is a FAVORITE of mine as it’s an often critical and overlooked issue in the common fertility discussions.  YOUR MARRIAGE!

It might seem silly to discuss the importance of maintaining your relationship with your spouse during infertility treatments, but believe me when I tell you that the stress of fertility treatments is like  puttint your marriage in a PRESSURE cooker.  You are isolated, to an extent, from your normal social outlets, many things you used to do together become side tracked by necessary doc visits and the like and even the things you loved to do for fun get waylaid by financial strains.  Add to that the anticipation, emotional upheaval, and more and you have a perfect recipe for even the BEST marriages to wear thin around the edges.  Now I talked about tricks for surviving the waiting period of each cycle and we’ve briefly touched on ways to otherwise hold onto your sanity, but keeping your marriage safe is a topic all on it’s own.

SAFE?!  Yes — Safe.  If you envision your marriage like a true treasure to hold onto throughout your life, then protecting that and keeping it SAFE is the key here.  Just as you would never parade your spouse into the line of fire at a dangerous situation, so should you NOT parade them into your own personal line of fire when things get tough.  Your marriage is your partnership, your rock foundation in life to lean into – not against.  You should be the fronted team to the world that stands firm.  Your spouse is NOT your doormat to take the emotional beating of your circumstancial days out on.  Nor are you their punching bag to graciously endure their own emotional whippings.  Now all that sounds harsh, but lets take a good example of how something simple can spin wildly out of control if you don’t keep the protection of your relationship at the forefront.

Wife visits endocrinology clinic for the millionth time, gets a setback that the cycle has to be cancelled due to overstimulated ovaries (OHSS).  She distraught at the missed opportunity and physically in a ton of pain from the bloating and pressure.  She is sobbing as she enters the house because of another month baby-free whisking by and she fears she’ll never find success.  Husband asks whats wrong, and when she tells him of the cancellation he immediately begins to rail about all the money they just dumped down the drain and states that they need to quit wasting dollars and just give up already.  Wife is FURIOUS at husbands callous response and turns both barrells at him as she sobs and cries and somewhat screams at him that he must not want a child at all and how could he say those things to her in her given condition.  He gets defensive and fires right back at her that it doesn’t matter if they have a baby or not if they end up in teh poor house to do it.  Wife storms into her room and slams the door – hubby crawls into his man-cave of choice and neither of them speak for the rest of the night. — #end scene.

Look familiar?  It should.  Take out all the infertility verbiage and insert ANY major life crisis and you could have almost the same argument over  and over and over.  Women react to disappointments with tears and emotional outbursts, typically, and men go straight to the controllable logistics that can be fixed.  In this case — money.  The real kicker here though is that they are BOTH RIGHT!  Take a minute and let that sink in…in the above scenario, whereby the sparring parties end up not speaking to each other and the marriage communication walls went up, they were both in the right.  The wife had EVERY RIGHT to be horribly disappointed given how much of her personal body and emotional energy she had invested into that cycle.  And to get so close and have that yanked out from under her was enough to warrant a crying outburst from anyone.  And the husband was spot-on that the money train had to stop rolling at some point, funds aren’t limitless, money DOESN’T grow on trees, and to have hundreds of thousands of dollars flushed down the toilet would piss ANYONE off.  THEY WERE BOTH RIGHT.  So where, then, did they go wrong….easy….by forgetting the most crucial peace of scripture that God lays out for us when discussing how a husband and wife should treat each other:

Ecclesiates 5: 21-31

21Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.22Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.  23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in Everything.25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26to make her holy, cleansing#26 Or having cleansed her by the washing with water through the word,27and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.28In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.29After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—30for we are members of his body.31″For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

• Men — LOVE YOUR WIFE.  Whatever it is that she needs to know you love her, give it to her.  Infertility is hard and it’s her body getting beat up over it so suck it up a bit and give her some loving.
• Women — RESPECT YOUR HUSBAND.  He is not just the doormat for your emotional outbursts or the punching bag of your tear-filled day.  He is your husband and deserves the respect that comes with it.  He works hard, he is a part of this journey too, and his opinion is VALID at all times no matter what.
• Men — EARN THAT RESPECT.  Nowhere above did I quote the bible saying you need to lord your power over the household like an iron fist.  Nope.  Never. Not once. You want respect, earn it.  Be confident enough as a man to LISTEN to your wife and be loving enough of her to put her first when the fertility treatments are taking it out of her faster than she can keep up.
• Women — EARN THAT LOVE.  Is infertility hard, yes.  Do you feel drained and drugged and unsexy and useless at times, yes.  Does your husband still deserve your respect and consideration even when you don’t feel like giving it, yes.  Put your feelings in their place…they are valid but not valid weapons of torture.  If you want your husband to be loving to you, then you need to be respectful of him.

BOTH OF YOU — REMEMBER WHY YOU STARTED THIS JOURNEY!!!!