What's The Point Of Hating Your Husband?
When given the choice between resentment and gratitude, choose the latter.
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss why you should truly appreciate the beautiful relationship between your children and their father.
First, I just want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love and support for my newsletter and our collaboration with Evie Magazine earlier this week. I couldn’t be prouder of the community we’ve grown here.
And while this week has been full of exciting moments, it also feels like I’ve lived a year in the past six days. Without going into a laundry list of issues our family has faced this week, the biggest challenge stemmed from my husband being gone on a work trip.
I thought he was done traveling for the year, but then he sprung (even though he claims he told me about it) a four-day conference on me. I don’t resent him for working hard or having to travel. I know it’s a necessary part of our family’s survival. However, him being gone means there is no one I can lay my head on at the end of the night after being everything to everyone.
Every night, I kept thinking about how sad and lonely I felt about him being gone. Again, I never felt resentful, just overwhelmed by the week. Typically, I turn to my sisters when I am lonely. A lot of them experience the same level of travel from their husbands and sympathize entirely with my lot in life. But even our almost nightly calls did little to heal the little fractures in my heart.
This week was especially hard because our dog had a pretty serious health scare the day before my oldest daughter was set to have her second surgery on her leg. All I wanted to do was curl up into the nook of his shoulder and take a deep breath.
I know the girls feel it too. They want him home with us just as badly as I do. Like every family, our unit works best when we are together. Still, in my mind, I am selfishly focused on my own need to have him there, without considering that our girls are missing him too.
What made matters worse is that my husband was supposed to come home the night of our daughter’s surgery. We were all emotionally prepared to have him gone until then. But his flight got cancelled after a day full of delays. When we got the news that he wasn’t coming home, the girls started breaking down one after another.