The Pause Button: How to conquer the hectic life of a wife

Author: Tiphane Pate

As wives and mothers, we often find ourselves with lots of boxes to be checked: the mommy box, the household duties box, the career box, the goals box, the social life box, the marital relationship box, and so many, many, mannnny more. If you’re like me, you can be really hard on yourself when you can’t honestly feel good enough about one of those boxes to check it off on any given day. That’s because you, like me, are a bit of a control freak. And the biggest enemy to a control freak is the pause button. The pause button keeps you from being able to check off one or more of your boxes for an extended period of time, leading you to believe you’re failing in that area, and the pause button usually comes from something that’s completely out of your control. Let me give you some of my examples.

There are small pause buttons, like “I really need to get this house looking better, but my child just got sick and I have to spend my time taking care of him.” Pause

Or, “I’d like to do something specific and special for my husband, but I’ve got to wait until I can save up enough money – that won’t need to end up going to something else.” Pause

And then there are bigger pause buttons: “I’m doing everything I know how to do to get my dream job, but I don’t seem to be able to get the right attention.” Pause

And the hardest one for me right now: “I’m ready to grow our family and have another baby, but I just got this diagnosis, and it looks like it could be a long time before we can make that happen.” Big Pause.

I struggle with pause buttons because, as a recognized control freak, I tend to think that I’m asked to wait on the things I want the most more than other people, and I know that’s simply not true. We all have things that we’re waiting for and working towards, that God teaches us to be patient for because we have to be truly ready for them.  Sometimes whatever it is has to be made truly ready for us. This was best illustrated for me remembering what it was like going through childbirth with our son. Max was born nine days late. I got so excited during the nine or so months of pregnancy thinking about what it would be like to see his face and meet the person I’d been getting to know privately. On his due date, we went to a restaurant and I ordered eggplant parmesan on the off chance it would speed things up, and of course, it didn’t. We waited seven more days, each day thinking my water would break or something, but nope. On the seventh day, I went to my OBGYN and she concluded that I should be sent to the hospital to be induced. I was so excited! It was finally time, and I was going to meet our little boy. Little Boy felt differently. They induced me that day, and the contractions got stronger but not much else happened. In the very early hours of the next day, my water broke on its own and I thought, “This is it! Things are really going to move now.” What followed was the most painful day of my life, and at the end of it, I still didn’t have my baby. The centimeters crept along at a snail’s pace and all I can really remember are the people who were around to comfort me as I laid awake, moaning and crying and wondering why in the world it was taking so long. By the third day of labor, when they finally told me I could push, I was so weak and sleep-deprived that I didn’t think I had enough left to bring out what I had in me, even though it was what I had been laboring for the whole time.

That’s the way it is with the pause buttons that show up in front of the things we care about most in life. We try to work through them and in spite of them; we push hard and we give it everything we have. We get so close sometimes to our goals as wives and mothers and women of ambition and we think, “This is finally it!”, until disappointment shows up and slaps us in our faces. We cry and grieve over our failures and when we’re closest to the end, we think we have nothing left to get through the final stretch. But then we do. Because we were built to. When the pause button is released on some of my check boxes and the delay is over, I look forward to breathing the same sigh of relief that I did when I held Max for the first time, and believed that what had been accomplished was worth pushing through all the difficulty that stood between us.

Fab Wives Guest Blogger