Intentionality

Having a child means loss of spontaneity. Not being a particularly spontaneous person to begin with, this was not something I appreciated until after the fact. Before, deciding to go out was a matter of getting off my butt and changing out of my pajamas. Now, it’s arranging for a babysitter, shelving out fifty bucks, and enduring her cries as we leave.

I was reading a scene in a novel that reminded me of times when it was just D and I, outside somewhere beautiful, and we felt free and alone and adventurous in the world. We felt surrendered to God, surrendered to each other, like we could face anything together. I still have that feeling in smaller moments, but getting away like that doesn’t happen anymore. At least not unless we make it happen.

In that way having a child is a lesson in what our marriage needs, because we have to be intentional about every little thing. It’s as if I suddenly had to walk a mile to an outhouse every time I had to use the toilet; I’d probably be a lot more aware of how much and when I needed to go than before. And one thing we’ve learned is that marriage is like a bank account: you can’t just keep withdrawing.

D put it well once: “By loving one another, having intimate times with one another, investing in one another, and spending valuable time with God, we put money into the bank. Things like crankiness at home, taking care of E while the other is on call, dealing with parental stresses, worrying about the future, all require that we take out money from this marriage bank.”

Investing in that account simply takes more premeditation than it did before. We have to make an effort to think about the other, to get out, to connect apart from the baby. Parenthood unmasks your marriage for what it is truly made of; reveals how much you are willing to do for it.

Children have this effect on our relationship with God too. My friend calls parenthood a spiritually formative experience: something that forces you to be either more like Christ or less so. Of course other spiritually formative experiences do this as well: intense work, lonely periods, loss of a loved one.

But it is good, to know what matters, and be intentional about pursuing it. Because one day not too far from now, our kids will leave, and it will be obvious whether our marriage was more important to us than our children. One day we will leave each other, and it will be obvious whether God was more important to us than anything else. And when that day comes, I think it will be worth a great deal to look back with no regrets.