More Marriage Counseling Homework
Describe your parent’s relationship, in story form, as you experienced it, using at least one positive and one negative memory or experience. What do you wish to take into your marriage and what do you want to leave out of your marriage from your parents’ relationship?
What do I want to leave out? Oh, just about everything.
What do I want to leave in?
My mother was the sixth child out of seven. They grew up dirt poor and she barely knew her father. He took off when she was young and was eventually declared legally dead. It turned out later that he was not in fact dead, he was in Arizona.
My father grew up with one older sister. He was the prized and heralded child who got anything he wanted, being the “male heir,” as it were. He father was was a kind but rather taciturn man, who waited hand and foot on his wife. His wife, my grandmother, was a fairly elitist and snobbish woman who always seems to feel that my father married below his station, although their family was not wealthy either.
My mother is a conservative woman. She was raised Baptist and in her fairly strict family, there were only two acceptable occupations a woman could pursue - teaching or nursing. She choose teaching. My mother is a smart woman, but not an intellectual one. She doesn’t like to read and was never good at school, not because she was a bad student, but because learning something for the first time is difficult for her. She needs things spelled out slowly and shown to her a number of times before she can grasp it. She did well enough in high school, but college with its fast paced ways was hard for her. Nonetheless she worked at it diligently and passed with good marks. I think her personal problems with learning is what makes her such a great kindergarten teacher. She knows how to explain things so kids understand, and is incredibly patent with the ones who struggle. She rarely drinks, swears or cuts loose. She was home visiting from college when she met my dad. Her sister and brother in law lived in the house next to his parents.
My dad was incredibly brilliant, I would have even called him a genius. I don’t know what kind of grades he got, but if I were to guess he would have been like me - a slacker when it came to homework, rarely paid attention in class, and procrastinated when it came to assignments, but still did well because his teachers knew he was smart because he aced all the tests. My father loved books and didn’t read them so much as he devoured them. There was nothing he couldn’t teach himself. He also loved engines and speed. He owned 28 different cars and two speed boats between the time he was 14 and when he married my mother at 26. He professionally raced for Ford.
Really, I have no idea how these two hooked up, except that perhaps my mother appealed to my father because he could see that she was ideal “wife” material - the kind of woman you want to have children with. My father was wickedly handsome and quite the bad boy, I am sure that appealed to my mom as being quite different than what she was used too.
Not surprisingly, they didn’t have a good marriage. I really don’t remember there being a lot of problems until sometime after my sister was born, but I am pretty sure that’s only because I’ve blocked a lot of it out. My father had a wicked and verbally abusive temper. He could also hold a grudge longer than any human being I’ve ever met. My mother never knew how to deal with his temper. Her way of responding was just to ignore him and block him out in stony silence.
One of the few times that do I remember them fighting when I was young happened when I was about 5. I don’t know what it was about, but the yelling got so bad that my mother put a coat on me and she and I went for a walk to allow my father to cool down. Instead, he took a hammer and nailed the front door closed. When we came back my mother couldn’t get back into the house until he pulled out the nails.
I was about eleven and my sister was three when I start remembering regular blow out fights. Things got bad. My parents decided that the answer was the church, and began attending the same Christian Reformed Church that one of my aunts went to. Ultimately, it didn’t work, their differences were just too basic. Up until my father became sick with cancer I expected them to get a divorce at any time - heck, I encouraged them too. My sister and I both did. They would say they couldn’t, that they still loved each other and that they were staying together for us - the very ones who were begging them to separate. I know my father had affairs, we were close and one particularly bad night he told me about it. I had suspected for some time that was the case, and I am sure I wasn’t the only one.
Though times weren’t always bad, I am having a hard time remembering any positive memory about the both of them. I remember lots of positive things about each of them individually. They both loved Megan and I very much and did a lot for us and I have tons of respect and love for both of them. While I will not say that I had an ideal childhood, my sister and I turned out just fine and I cannot complain about how we were raised by either of them. But to try to think of a positive memory from their relationship as a married couple is difficult.
But there is this - I have one memory, I might have been around twelve when I walked in on the two of them kissing in the kitchen. They had been washing dishes together. My sister came in at the same time and we teased them about being “lovely dovey” and they just laughed about it and kept hugging. That’s one of the very few memories I have of them being physically affectionate.
That is something I want in my marriage - physical affection. Except I don’t want it to end the way that theirs did. I want to be able to hug and kiss and touch my husband any time. I want to run my hand along his shoulder when he’s cooking dinner and snuggle with him at night. I want to cuddle on the couch and get kisses whenever we part. I honestly believe that if you are touching one another lovingly you are building a connection that is more than hands on skin, it deepens your love for one another, your caring and your tolerance. I think it is the first step towards keeping emotional barriers down.
What I don’t want in our relationship is the difficulties I saw my parents have when it came to arguments. I know I have the potential to have my father’s temper. Temper like he had was not healthy, normal anger - it was a weapon, and I know how that tool can be used to flay someone to the bone. I have worked most of my life to learn how to control it. I very rarely get angry now. I realize that for the most part, it is a waste of time and energy. Problems are not solved by anger and arguments, problems are solved after the yelling has stopped and the quiet honest discussion begins. I prefer to skip that first step and move right into the discussion. It’s not an easy skill to learn, since it isn’t what we are conditioned as people to do, but once learned it makes life so much easier. Michael agrees with me and because of that we can calmly discuss things and work things out, rather than fight about them. Which is the other part of what I don’t want. My mother has never been able to just say what she is thinking. She locks everything up and expects you to read her mind. While I don’t approve of my father’s anger, she was not totally blameless by any means. For me, communication has to be one of the cornerstones of a relationship. People have to talk to one another. I know it isn’t always easy, sometimes these discussions hurt, but they are far better than locking everything up inside or yelling and screaming.
I think all of my life I wanted a relationship that was different from my parents. There are characteristics of both people that I admire very much. There are certainly aspects of my father that I admired enough to search for those same characteristics in a partner. However, I want to start over. I want to clear the slate and create something different in my relationship. I want a relationship based in trust, respect, communication, and of course, love.
What do I want to leave out? Oh, just about everything.
What do I want to leave in?
My mother was the sixth child out of seven. They grew up dirt poor and she barely knew her father. He took off when she was young and was eventually declared legally dead. It turned out later that he was not in fact dead, he was in Arizona.
My father grew up with one older sister. He was the prized and heralded child who got anything he wanted, being the “male heir,” as it were. He father was was a kind but rather taciturn man, who waited hand and foot on his wife. His wife, my grandmother, was a fairly elitist and snobbish woman who always seems to feel that my father married below his station, although their family was not wealthy either.
My mother is a conservative woman. She was raised Baptist and in her fairly strict family, there were only two acceptable occupations a woman could pursue - teaching or nursing. She choose teaching. My mother is a smart woman, but not an intellectual one. She doesn’t like to read and was never good at school, not because she was a bad student, but because learning something for the first time is difficult for her. She needs things spelled out slowly and shown to her a number of times before she can grasp it. She did well enough in high school, but college with its fast paced ways was hard for her. Nonetheless she worked at it diligently and passed with good marks. I think her personal problems with learning is what makes her such a great kindergarten teacher. She knows how to explain things so kids understand, and is incredibly patent with the ones who struggle. She rarely drinks, swears or cuts loose. She was home visiting from college when she met my dad. Her sister and brother in law lived in the house next to his parents.
My dad was incredibly brilliant, I would have even called him a genius. I don’t know what kind of grades he got, but if I were to guess he would have been like me - a slacker when it came to homework, rarely paid attention in class, and procrastinated when it came to assignments, but still did well because his teachers knew he was smart because he aced all the tests. My father loved books and didn’t read them so much as he devoured them. There was nothing he couldn’t teach himself. He also loved engines and speed. He owned 28 different cars and two speed boats between the time he was 14 and when he married my mother at 26. He professionally raced for Ford.
Really, I have no idea how these two hooked up, except that perhaps my mother appealed to my father because he could see that she was ideal “wife” material - the kind of woman you want to have children with. My father was wickedly handsome and quite the bad boy, I am sure that appealed to my mom as being quite different than what she was used too.
Not surprisingly, they didn’t have a good marriage. I really don’t remember there being a lot of problems until sometime after my sister was born, but I am pretty sure that’s only because I’ve blocked a lot of it out. My father had a wicked and verbally abusive temper. He could also hold a grudge longer than any human being I’ve ever met. My mother never knew how to deal with his temper. Her way of responding was just to ignore him and block him out in stony silence.
One of the few times that do I remember them fighting when I was young happened when I was about 5. I don’t know what it was about, but the yelling got so bad that my mother put a coat on me and she and I went for a walk to allow my father to cool down. Instead, he took a hammer and nailed the front door closed. When we came back my mother couldn’t get back into the house until he pulled out the nails.
I was about eleven and my sister was three when I start remembering regular blow out fights. Things got bad. My parents decided that the answer was the church, and began attending the same Christian Reformed Church that one of my aunts went to. Ultimately, it didn’t work, their differences were just too basic. Up until my father became sick with cancer I expected them to get a divorce at any time - heck, I encouraged them too. My sister and I both did. They would say they couldn’t, that they still loved each other and that they were staying together for us - the very ones who were begging them to separate. I know my father had affairs, we were close and one particularly bad night he told me about it. I had suspected for some time that was the case, and I am sure I wasn’t the only one.
Though times weren’t always bad, I am having a hard time remembering any positive memory about the both of them. I remember lots of positive things about each of them individually. They both loved Megan and I very much and did a lot for us and I have tons of respect and love for both of them. While I will not say that I had an ideal childhood, my sister and I turned out just fine and I cannot complain about how we were raised by either of them. But to try to think of a positive memory from their relationship as a married couple is difficult.
But there is this - I have one memory, I might have been around twelve when I walked in on the two of them kissing in the kitchen. They had been washing dishes together. My sister came in at the same time and we teased them about being “lovely dovey” and they just laughed about it and kept hugging. That’s one of the very few memories I have of them being physically affectionate.
That is something I want in my marriage - physical affection. Except I don’t want it to end the way that theirs did. I want to be able to hug and kiss and touch my husband any time. I want to run my hand along his shoulder when he’s cooking dinner and snuggle with him at night. I want to cuddle on the couch and get kisses whenever we part. I honestly believe that if you are touching one another lovingly you are building a connection that is more than hands on skin, it deepens your love for one another, your caring and your tolerance. I think it is the first step towards keeping emotional barriers down.
What I don’t want in our relationship is the difficulties I saw my parents have when it came to arguments. I know I have the potential to have my father’s temper. Temper like he had was not healthy, normal anger - it was a weapon, and I know how that tool can be used to flay someone to the bone. I have worked most of my life to learn how to control it. I very rarely get angry now. I realize that for the most part, it is a waste of time and energy. Problems are not solved by anger and arguments, problems are solved after the yelling has stopped and the quiet honest discussion begins. I prefer to skip that first step and move right into the discussion. It’s not an easy skill to learn, since it isn’t what we are conditioned as people to do, but once learned it makes life so much easier. Michael agrees with me and because of that we can calmly discuss things and work things out, rather than fight about them. Which is the other part of what I don’t want. My mother has never been able to just say what she is thinking. She locks everything up and expects you to read her mind. While I don’t approve of my father’s anger, she was not totally blameless by any means. For me, communication has to be one of the cornerstones of a relationship. People have to talk to one another. I know it isn’t always easy, sometimes these discussions hurt, but they are far better than locking everything up inside or yelling and screaming.
I think all of my life I wanted a relationship that was different from my parents. There are characteristics of both people that I admire very much. There are certainly aspects of my father that I admired enough to search for those same characteristics in a partner. However, I want to start over. I want to clear the slate and create something different in my relationship. I want a relationship based in trust, respect, communication, and of course, love.