This Mum Gets Real: “Marriage Is the Hardest Thing I Have Ever Done...”
Is your marriage driving you to drink? [Photo: Giphy]
I don’t know about you, but every summer my Facebook feed is flooded with peonies, pretty white dresses, and perfect-looking brides as they say “I do.” It all looks like a fairy-tale dream, but as one blogger points out, marriage can be “f***ing hard.”
Not Your Average Mom is a blog written by Susie, a 44-year-old mother of seven living in Connecticut. While the picture in her bio is reminiscent of the idyllic wedding photos you see on Facebook, her blog is all about the reality — and in her most recent post, the serious struggle of being married.
“Marriage is the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life,” she says.
“I’m tired of rehashing the same s**t over and over. I’m tired of feeling like I’m failing. I’m tired of working on one thing only to realise I have another thing to work on. I’m tired of not feeling listened to and not feeling understood. I’m tired of being blamed and having a finger pointed at me, and I’m tired of blaming and pointing the finger at someone else. I’m tired of fighting, and to be honest, I really am tired of trying.”
She then goes on to explain that this life was not the one she envisioned when she walked down the aisle.
“I envisioned his face lighting up when he saw me in my wedding dress. I envisioned babies. I envisioned decorating a house together and doing romantic stuff like making s*** out of clay while he had his arms wrapped around me from behind as ‘Unchained Melody’ played in the background.”
She pictured the things we all picture thanks to movies like Jerry Maguire and Say Anything. What she forgot about what the minutiae of the everyday.
“I didn’t envision that some of the things I loved so much about him when we first started dating would turn in to some of the things that would bug the ever living s*** out of me 10 years later. I didn’t envision that the way he would want to do things and the way I would want to do things could be on completely opposite ends of the spectrum. I didn’t envision disagreeing on so many things and being unable to find a way to work them out. I didn’t envision arguments and misunderstandings and insults and silent treatments. I didn’t envision my husband thinking that my way of doing things was not always the best way.”
She admits to being caught up in the fairy tale. But even after all of this, she still wants to stay married.
“I’m not done yet. I’m not ready to pack it in,” she says.
She talks about how stories like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella don’t tell us what happens after “they lived happily ever after,” and that if they did, the stories probably wouldn’t be so different from her own reality.
“I bet if there were sequels to those stories, we would have read that Snow White and her Prince had to file for bankruptcy and Belle and the Beast had to find a way to grieve together after experiencing a miscarriage and Cinderella and the Prince had their house foreclosed on (that stuff happens to rich people).”
But it’s not all bad. She ends on a positive note, saying, “So no, my marriage isn’t perfect, it’s nothing like I envisioned it would be, and making it better is going to require quite a bit of work. But I signed up for the long haul, so I’m not veering off course just yet.”
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