Divide & Conquer

There’s a famous line spoken every night around bedtime. It is this…. “Dishes or bed?”

Three words my husband and I speak to each other. We speak in code. If I translated it for you it would translate out to…. Do you want to clean up from dinner, load and run the dishwasher, clean the kitchen or do you want to bathe the kids, get them ready for bed and read them books?

How this is normally determined is whoever has spent less time with the kids that day does “Bed”.

Or sometimes it’s just determined whoever has less patience does “Dishes”.

And sometimes we do it all together.

And sometimes we do none of it and just snuggle the kids, leave the dishes for tomorrow and go to bed.

And sometimes we are both frustrated, maybe even yell at the kids and go to bed. (Sorry I had to share that)

And sometimes I am totally just beat and my husband says, ‘go relax’.

And sometimes he is shot and I tell him, ‘go relax I got it.’

So it’s consistently inconsistent.

But what’s consistent is that we are a team, and we are looking out for each other. We respect each other enough and care about each other enough to be aware of their “state”. Whether its physichal, or emotional state.

I see how over the years we’ve had to decide very simply to work together, or is it me against him or vise versa.

So divide and conquer

Or

A kingdom divided cannot stand.

And believe me, we’ve done the whole kingdom divided thing. It goes something like this, “Hey I NEED you to do this for me.” Or “Why didn’t you help with that?” Or “I’ve got stuff I’ve got to do I can’t do it tonight.”

And that came to be because we weren’t checking in on each other. We were so focused on our objectives and needs for the day that we couldn’t tune in to what each other needed in those moments. So then nobody wins. The kids had “divided us” and we sure could not stand. And we definitely could NOT CONQUER anything!

It became a him against me, and me against him. And then the kids against him, and the kids against me. Yikes! Our kingdom was crumbling.

But then things began to change when I started thinking about our relationship as it’s own identity. I would ask myself what is best for the “relationship”? What can I do to serve my future marriage? How are my actions bettering our status? And also what does my future marriage look like? What is it that I want to create in it?

Oh and then the clarity came once again.

We are side by side. We are strong. We love each other, care for each other and look out for each other. He doesn’t emotionally depend on me. I don’t emotionally depend on him. We meet our own physichal and emotional needs. And then we show up with all we’ve got. We’ve got all our crap taken care of so when we are together, the strength, confidence and clarity is evident. We are clear on what we need to do together, to serve us. To serve our family.

I see you mommas. I love seeing how you divide and conquer with your partners. And some of my single mommas, I see you too. Your doing it. What I want you to see is that there are two ways you can go about this. You can stay in your convinced state that you are “on my own” and try to do it all yourself with resentment and bitterness or we can deal with our crap and allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to speak our truth, stand up side by side with our husband and work together.

We want to do it ourselves because we can’t deal with our own emotional baggage to “deal” with our husbands. Your making it so so much harder for yourself momma. Do the work, ask for help, become a team. Be the king and Queen over your kingdom like you always thought you would be. It’s available to you, just got to do the work to get there.

P.S. If you would like help dealing with what I so lovingly refer to “your crap”, I’m here for it. Do the work, so you can reap the benefits. Step into that role that you’ve always wanted to be in. It’s there for you! Let’s do it!