You Are Enough
On the iPod “Don’t Give Up On Me” by: Andy Grammer
The other night, as the 5 of us sat at the dinner table, Luca looked up and asked “what is divorced?” I asked him to repeat himself at least twice before I realized what he was saying. It kind of threw me off. We are blessed to have family and friends with all different family make ups so I never really thought my boys were really aware of the differences. I guess I’ve never actually explained it to them because I’ve never had to. So as I thought about my words very carefully I responded, “divorced is when someone’s parents are no longer married, they live in separate houses and the kids get to spend time with both of them. Sometimes the parents get re-married to other people and then their family gets bigger. Did someone at school tell you that their parents are divorced?” Luca responded, “Yes “Sally” told me that her parents are divorced and she has two houses.”
Of course then Levi chimed in, “Will y’all ever get divorced?” Looking at us wide eyed.
I could have easily said of course not but as I looked at Mike and our three boys I said the truth, “I hope not...we are choosing to do everything in our power not to...we are doing our best...and always working on it. It’s sort of the reason it’s important for y’all to sleep in your own rooms. Don’t get me wrong sometimes its so fun for all of us to snuggle up together and have a sleepover. But mommies and daddies need to also have time just to themselves so that we are able to still build our relationship while we are building our family. But the truth of the matter, boys, is that marriage is hard. Harder than I ever thought it would be. One day you will meet someone and it might be an immediate spark or it might slowly grow over months or even years into the kind of love that takes your breath away. You will come to the realization that you want to spend the rest of your life with that person and that even the difficult days are better because you have each other. But the realities are that the difficult days while dating are not even close to the difficult days you will have raising children, paying bills, creating a home, dealing with family, and growing older. Loving someone while you aren’t married is much simpler than loving them while you are. So you better be ready to fight for your marriage through the hard times if you want it to survive!
That answer seemed to be enough for them right now but it hit me that one day it might not be. One day their question might be well why...Why do marriages fall apart? And I don’t know if I will ever have a good answer for that. But if I know anything from the conversations with my closest friends its that we are all struggling with being “enough”. Enough of a parent, enough of an employee or employer, enough of a spouse, pretty enough, thin enough, sexy enough, rich enough, healthy enough, smart enough, happy enough, and even at times being ourself enough.
The other day I told a friend that sometimes I feel like a messy tube of toothpaste... I based it off a counseling activity that I saw on Facebook where you teach a teenager that they can’t take back their hurtful words by having them squeeze a tube of toothpaste out onto a plate and then asking them to put the toothpaste back in the tube after... showing them that once the words are out the damage is done…the tube will always stay messy and half empty. The problem is that I think most of us are walking around as messy half empty tubes of toothpaste not just from our relationships now but in general from everyday life.
So now you might say to me... Amanda, this is easy... we just need to stop pushing out each other’s toothpaste...save what we have and we will just continue on. That’s how you make the marriage work....But it’s not enough... our tubes are too messy... we have cracks on the outside...we don’t look the same anymore...because in fact we aren’t the same anymore. So what do we do? I wish I knew the answer to this... but at this point the only thing I know to do is to start cleaning up the mess... Maybe if We start building each other up maybe our tubes will get cleaner.... I can’t clean your tube for you because unfortunately I’m afraid you will still see the old toothpaste. But I can remind you that you are enough... I can build you up so to say and together we can get enough toothpaste back in and we can clean enough around the edges and you can feel enough and maybe if we feel enough… we will be enough... the thing is that I’m not sure if it will save everyone’s marriages in the long run. But it might just save us.
If you are reading this…I want to tell you that you are ENOUGH.
Love,
Me
