Which came first the chicken or the egg?

While being a wife and mother often go together, they are not mutually exclusive. You can definitely be one and not the other. You can also be a placeholder in the role of wife or mother while not being either.

I often feel that is what I am doing. It is part of the great fraud. I wake up and feel like I am in a dream. Am I doing this right? Is there some secret club meeting I missed that told you the instructions for this job.

I thought when I married Jim that we would have so much fun. He had it all going on: good looking, Harley riding , redneck romantic with a 4x4, tight jeans and a penchant for Jack Daniels. It was like a dream come true. He opened the car door, guided me with his strong hand on the small of my back and gave me kisses that made me melt. I imagined a few years of fun dates and setting up house together. Instead I got pregnant 3 months after we eloped and spent the first year of our marriage nauseous! I tried to do my duties as I saw them and I think I did a pretty good job. I cooked and cleaned and handled the finances. It wasn't very hard. We both had old bills to pay off and we got by and even got it all paid off after a few years. Jim worked all the time and I realized that I would rather have that than a jobless hanger-on. But it was hard to be home alone so much. I went from having two jobs and a very busy social life to sitting at home pregnant in a town where I didn't know anyone. I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into.  My life had changed so dramatically in just a few months. It felt like a bad movie. I was sooo ill and playing house with someone I soon realized I barely knew.

Some things came easily to me.

I really like my house very clean and organized so that part was simple. I love to cook, but Jim ate very differently than I did so I had to figure out how to find a middle road in the kitchen. It was a challenge and for the first year or so we had a lot of bad casseroles! There were a few things we agreed on and Taco Tuesday is a tradition in our house to this day. I have gotten the family to expand their palette to include chicken, pork and even fish tacos which helps me enjoy cooking them more.

So to my question: the chicken or the egg. I became a mother so quickly after becoming a wife that I didn't really get to master the one before taking on the other.

Now, 17 years later, I feel like I have been hanging on to the edge of a cliff and barely pulling myself up a handhold at a time and slipping down as often as climbing up. I want to be a good wife, but I want to be a good mom and it is often hard to know which trumps the other. These two vocations seem to be in conflict more than they should.

I will defer to Jim in all situations, even if I believe he is dead wrong, because he is the head of our family. He has earned that much. I have a hard time doing that, but it has become a very important point for me. I am not good at giving up control of anything, so deferring to Jim, especially when I think he is wrong goes against my basic nature. (If you can read The Temperament God Gave You and The Temperament God Gave Your Spouse, preferably together) Do not for one minute think that this deferral plays out easily. It takes a concerted effort on my part and sometimes an argument followed by some cooling off time before I completely give in. I may still try a new logic on him when we are both calm, but ultimately I have to give in. It is my God directed duty. I do believe that. It would shock most people I know to hear that. I deeply believe that God gave Jim to me to take care of and share my life with. It follows that as a gift from God he is to be treasured above all else. My duty to him is first (after God).

This same logic also applies to my children and this is where the conflict begins.

So do I try to be the best wife to my husband or the best mom. It can seem like a choice between being an astronaut or a mine worker.

I know that the only way I will be successful is if I can figure out how to make the two things one. They came they way they did, just like the other six children we had. All of the moves, job changes, houses bought and sold, tragedies and triumphs, they came when God gave them to us and it is up to us to learn from those experiences the best we can.