Secret Sunburns

I subscribe to an email list called The Generous Wife, and I get a daily email on how to be, well, a generous wife. Now I want to put a disclaimer out there - the author of this list is also one of the authors of The Marriage Bed. I think The Marriage Bed has a lot of great advice, but one thing I strongly disagree with is their stance on DD. This post is not about my views on that, so I will go into it on another post. Anyway, the husband of the lady who writes the Generous Wife posts has a companion list entitled The Generous Husband. Occasionally she will share one of his posts, as she did today, and I found it particularly relevant to my relationship with Nick:

Calamine Anyone?
Filed under: dealing with self — The Generous Wife @ 1:30 am
My husband did a lovely post yesterday that I want to pass on to y'all. It's a very helpful concept when you find yourself clueless over your husband's (or your own) behavior.


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Imagine I had a bad sunburn, but wore a shirt so you could not see it. If you came up and hugged me (I’m from Texas, everyone hugs) it would hurt – probably a lot. Now imagine if rather than hugging me, you slapped me on the back – very hard. That would hurt even more.

In the first instance, you have no intention to hurt me – in fact, you intended to bless me. In the second instance what you did was not nice, and would have hurt had I not been sunburned, but my pain would be far greater than what you intended.

What if I reacted in each situation without telling you I was sunburned? In the first case you would think I was crazy, in the second you would think I was a big baby making way too much out of something minor.

The same kind of things happens in marriages all the time, except that the sunburn is wounds of the heart and mind, wounds that can never be seen. What’s more, we tend to either not know or not care that our wounds are not the norm – we expect the world to see the wounds and treat us accordingly, or we think the entire world is similarly wounded and thus similarly sensitive.

So, your wife has one of these hidden sunburns, and you do something you think is nice, like a hug. She reacts with hurt or anger, and you have no idea why. She can’t or won’t explain. Or, you slap her on the back and she goes off on you, telling you how mean and horrible you are. You can see that it might have been a bit much, but her reaction is so over-the-top that you feel wronged by her. It’s clear to you she is unreasonable and can’t be talked to, and you pull back.

You can avoid a lot of trouble by learning see the wounds in yourself that your bride is hitting. Help her to understand, or at least be aware of, your injuries so that she can try to avoid them while you work to get them healed. Additionally, when your bride over reacts, don’t chalk it up to her hormones or just being irrational – try to figure out if you are hitting an internal sunburn.


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Be generous! Lori

Nick and I have been arguing a lot lately. And when we've not been arguing, we've been closed off from each other, wary of getting too close. And this email made me realize that we've both had some "hidden sunburns" that have been affecting the way we've been reacting to each other.

Nick has recently started rebuilding a 1958 Ford Fairlane. Now we don't have the extra money in our budget right now for such a project, so he took out a small, low interest loan through his job to pay for the car and part of the remodel. The guy who's selling it to him is not in a hurry for the money, but still, he needs to be paid. The problem was that the Friday the loan check came in, his paycheck was very, very short due to his manager forgetting to credit him with a week's vacation pay from when we were in Texas. So the extra money had to go for bills. Then last week when the correction from the last pay period came in, the whole check was less than we had expected due to some short days and a missing day for the Labor Day holiday. (At his job, they get a flat $40 for holidays as opposed to the $200+ they would usually earn that day). So basically, the loan for his car got eaten up by life's circumstances. And this is where the fighting came in.

I saw him as being completely unreasonable because he was blaming me for the shortage, even though I didn't run out and blow the money - I just paid the bills that had to be paid (you know, utilities, mortgage, phone bill, etc).What I wasn't really looking at was how very disappointed he was over the fact that after working as hard as he could and making every effort to make arrangements to cover the price of the car, it just wasn't happening right now.

Added to that, he and several of his friends (including the guy selling him the car) had plans to take the Fairlane and another guy's old Buick to a car show a few hours away this weekend. Unfortunately the Fairlane needs more work than there's time or money for to get it drivable by then, and that was a bitter pill for him to swallow. Plus we had made sitting arrangements for Morgan, and Daisy and I were going to make the trip with him. Now it will be just him going and sharing a ride and a hotel room with the other guys because we don't have the gas money to drive my car down or the money to pay for a separate room.

All of this has been filtered through some struggles he's having because money has been understandably tight since we went to one income. My personal belief is that I'm doing what God wants me to do in staying home with the kids. What he's thinking is "We don't have money to pay the bills because she's not working." Meanwhile I'm thinking "Hey, if you're so stressed about money, maybe you should not do things like take on a project car."

That said, I am willing to go back to work if that's what Nick wants, but it's not as simple as just going back to my old job. If I go back to the bank right now, it puts Morgan without a ride home from school, and Daisy in full time day care. In the summer it will get even more expensive because we'll have to pay for care for Morgan full time as well. Unfortunately my mom's health has declined to the point that it's just not an option for her to babysit like she did while I was working.

If I get a part time job somewhere at nights so that we don't have to have child care, it will not only have Nick and I never seeing each other, but all of his free time is going to go away completely as he'll be watching the kids while I work, so he wouldn't be rebuilding a car anyway. And that's not an ideal situation for him either. He knows in his heart that at this point in our lives we're just going to have to live a scaled back lifestyle for the good of our family, but I do understand that it's difficult to have to work so very hard and never see a dime of it, and that's been coloring his reactions and level of disappointment and blame.

As for my sunburn - well, I confess to fostering some hurt over the complete disappearance of DD over the last few months. I've tried to be reasonable and understand that he's probably not consciously neglecting it. But when we argued the other day about my decision to pay the bills without running it by him first and he started with "You say you want me to be in charge, but..." I wanted to scream. I've been so angry lately, finding myself wanting to purposely not do the things I know need to be done around the house (indeed, the things I intentionally signed up for when I became a stay at home mom) just because it seems obvious that he's not interested in showing any form of appreciation or leadership no matter what I do.

Adding to my frustration was the fact that he decided to buy this car without ever discussing it with me. His viewpoint? "You're not working, so it's none of your business what I do with MY money." Okay, I can even see where that's coming from, but I still expect us to be a team. And if he's not going to get my input, then at the least I expect to not be blamed when the plans he made without me don't come to fruition. And if he insists on taking all the freedom of decision that comes with being head of the household, then he also needs to take on the responsibility of meeting the needs of the household (and wife!) he is the head of.

And I might be right in all of that. But none of this is productive. I have to do what I need to do regardless of whether or not I feel like he's doing his part. My obligation is to be the wife God leads me to be, and I can't base that on what Nick's doing. His job as my husband is between him and God, and I have to stop worrying about it. I can't say "Well I'm not going be the wife he needs until he's the husband I need." That doesn't help anyone. And we did get some hurts resolved a few days ago after we took the time to step back from our anger. I don't want to portray Nick as a jerk here, because he's not, and we've both been at fault. I do realize that he's taken on a lot in becoming the sole breadwinner (other than my still very small photography business), and that comes with a lot of stress.

Anyway, the email really gave me a different perspective on things, and I wanted to share. Sorry this has not been much of a fun blog lately, and I hope you are all doing well.