Refresh, Verbal Take-Backs, and Playing House

You’ve got big plans, dreams, and goals? Awesome. You can’t squeeze water from a dry sponge. Take time to take time. Find those still places in your life where you can go to for peace. You will succeed even more if you take an intentional time every week to do less.

No matter the justification you deliver that verbal knockout blow with, when your relationship is lying unconscious on the floor, that doesn’t mean you’ve won. No, actually quite the opposite.

Once your Verbal-Roundhouse Punch is thrown, it’s thrown. Just because you apologize and ask for it back, that doesn’t mean your sledgehammer hasn’t already done its damage.

My wife, Naomi, just came in the kitchen and offered to make dinner. I raised my eyebrow, surprised, because unlike my childhood “House,” usually it is I who is making dinner, she who is out there working. “Sure I’m up for some dinner,” I say, as I sit up straighter because sitting up straight is something grown-ups do. As she commences dinner, I attend back to performing life-saving surgery on my old Nintendo. My heart aches, as my old friend is not responding to any of my treatments. “Here’s dinner,” Naomi says. Mournfully I walk back to the kitchen, a tad surprised at the rate she was able to turn the word dinner into actual food. And as I look to see what was concocted with such dinner-ease, I see a bowl of cereal. Blue, orange, green, purple rice nuggets wading in a milky pool—Fruity Pebbles, my favorite childhood cereal that’s fed me with delightful fruity goodness for oh so many years is my dinner. And I couldn’t be happier. As I sit there munching excitedly, every bite reminding me of playing House—of life with pretend responsibilities—when my Nintendo was a spry young bachelor with his whole life in front of him, Naomi interrupts. “Paul, we need to talk about our budget and really start finalizing some numbers.” Startled, I jump back. Budget? She puts Fruity Pebbles in front of me and now a conversation about the budget?! Am I the little rabbit she has lured out into the open with fruity deliciousness and has captured with the stranglehold of savings, college loans, and car payments? You can’t mix a cereal that has Fred Flintstone on the box with a detailed ten-year savings plan.

As we go to bed that night, lying there side by side, I think about my poor Nintendo, about Fred Flintstone, about all the things I don’t know under this new title of husband. “Naomi.” I speak up into the dark air, the absence of light making the presence of a confession much easier. “Do you feel sometimes like we’re not grown-ups who are actually married, but just kids playing a game of House?” “Yeah, I’ve felt like that a couple of times …” And as Naomi talks, I learn I’m not alone. She has her own insecurities about being a wife—whatever a wife is supposed to mean, supposed to be. She doesn’t feel the part sometimes. Is she supposed to be like her mom, like my mom, like the elderly lady at church who is always offering Naomi her sage advice? She’s learning about wife, just as I am husband. She doesn’t have it all figured out either. And I love her dearly for it. Naomi loves saying, “We get to create our marriage.” And I think she’s right. Marriage doesn’t define us, we define it. Lying there in bed, one thing leads to another as they say, and the conversation excitedly turns to something else entirely. And if I wasn’t convinced before, it’s pleasantly confirmed that House wasn’t as accurate or all encompassing as I once thought.