Attachment Marriaging

I have been reading about attachment parenting since we are preparing to have our first baby. In general, I agree with a lot of the ideas, because I agree with the parenting philosophy behind it all that you don’t need experts to tell you things about parenting. Parenting “experts” have all kinds of misguided views, for example many are concerned with teaching you how not to spoil your baby or how to not let the baby take control of you or manipulate you. However, I don’t want to talk about parenting here. I want to talk about marriage. Joel & I have created the joke that we are practicing attachment marriaging because we like to be together all the time and do things together. Many people today think it is smarter to have your own separate bank accounts so that no one person, usually the man who makes all the money, will control the relationship. That might be necessary for some people, but not for Joel and me. We share it all and don’t have trouble with one person controlling the whole financial situation. We can talk honestly about wanting to buy things, and we help each other to not spend so much money on things we don’t need and to keep our whole financial picture in mind.

Anyway, so Joel likes his laundry done twice a week, and somehow I have really not taken part in making that happen. Even though we agreed that I am to do the primary cooking and cleaning, I just don’t seem to ever do the laundry. But now that we just had a baby shower, we had two whole loads of laundry that needed to be done for the baby. And I was so excited about it. I was like, Joel, do you have any laundry you need done? He was like Yes! And I happily did the laundry because I was excited to be washing the baby’s clothes. And while folding, Joel folded his and I folded the baby’s. I was telling Joel how much I loved doing the laundry for the baby, and how it reminded me of the first time I did my own laundry when I was younger and how I felt so grown up. And now with washing the baby’s clothes, I feel like I am growing up again. And then I realized, wouldn’t it be nice if I felt that way about doing Joel’s laundry? How much better would it be if I felt like, wow, I am doing my husband’s laundry, I am growing up! And this is going to make him happy and look nice and not be stressed about what to wear, etc… No, somehow I have protected myself against those thoughts. I think from the beginning, I have been worried about being taken advantage of. I was worried about Joel using me, or not being fair, or leaving me to all the unintellectual work. And I realize now that that is just what I am against with all the current parenting experts. I think their advice to me to protect myself from my baby’s manipulations would really keep me from really being attached to my baby. And I feel like with all the advice or worried I have about being married and not letting Joel take advantage of me has gotten in the way of our relationship.

There are some differences from parenting and being married. For one, adults are able to manipulate each other, and also Joel and I certainly do love each other, so its not like we have a big strain in our marriage. We are definitely attached. But I just realized that it would be good to work more on allowing myself to have the attitude of happily doing things for Joel because it does make our lives better and our relationship stronger. Some people really need to worry about being taken advantage of, but I am not married to “some people”. I am married to Joel, and I have definitely seen that he isn’t out to take advantage of me. And he only wants laundry done twice a week because he runs out of clean clothes and needs them for school. I know how stressed he is with school, and it really isn’t hard to do laundry so why don’t I do it? And why don’t I enjoy doing it? I think a part of me gets caught up in the idea that I am very smart and could be “working” so sometimes it is a challenge to feel like I am not wasting my good brain on being a housewife. But it is really important to sort through these feelings, because honestly, if I were working, I would have to do all kinds of things that I don’t want to do either. Such as paperwork, meetings, dealing with problems that arise, it wouldn’t all be fun and stimulating. There are certainly a lot of hoops you have to jump through. Joel had a lot of stress putting together the 16 applications that he sent out this semester for a full time position. That certainly took a lot of time, and he had to write various essays or answer questions and fill out forms and order papers, and have it all out by a deadline, and in the end, he didn’t end up getting any of those jobs. So his work was certainly thankless in some sense. Whereas, when I do the laundry, I get to see Joel’s smiling face or get to enjoy an absence of his extra stress in the morning when needing clothes. Housework is not always a thankless job. Maybe Joel won’t say thanks every time I do the laundry, but while I am doing the act of laundering, I know that someone has to do it, and I am making our lives better. I feel much better about doing our laundry than I do about filling out applications, I definitely hate those things. And it is not true that all I do is work anyways, sometimes I spend many hours on housework a day, and other times I don’t. But I have a lot of time to pursue my intellectual interests. And I have had a lot of time to read about and prepare for birth and parenting, by doing fun projects, meeting people, and reading. And I have the big and definitely fun job of preparing to teach our children in homeschool. That to me is the ultimate intellectual stimulation because I get to teach without all the aspects of the school system that I despise.

In conclusion, I have realized that I want to redirect my thoughts, actions and attitude towards attachment marriageing. I know that it will really benefit Joel & me and enrich our relationship.

Projects

Lately, Joel & I have been doing a few projects to prepare for the baby. We have come to a realization about our different working styles. Here is how things went with trying to make a stuffed animal for the baby.

We decided a few weeks ago to each make a stuffed animal for the baby. I chose that I wanted to make a cat pretty quickly, and Joel wasn’t totally sure what he wanted to make. So he researched stuffed animals online while I thought about how I wanted the cat to go. Then he decided he would make a snake to start off with, mostly because it would be a easier project to begin with. So step one complete, it took me about 2 seconds to decide my animal and no research, it took Joel a few hours of research to come up with his.

Then we went to the fabric store. At Wal-Mart, they didn’t have a great selection, and I hadn’t really thought a lot about what color I wanted to make the cat. I looked around at the colors, textures and prices, and decided that I liked this bright green receiving blanket material. It was soft and made for kids and looked good. Joel didn’t have as much luck the first time around because he was looking for felt, and they didn’t have a good selection of felt. He had decided he wanted to make a coral snake, so he needed black, red and yellow. I don’t think they had more than one of those in felt. We asked and heard that there was a Hancock’s Fabric close by. So we decided to go there for his material. I purchased a yard of fabric and Joel left empty handed. So step two complete for me, I didn’t have a specific thing in mind and was flexible about what I would make it out of (putting more emphasis on the wanting to make it today rather than on what exactly it will look like).

As it turns out, that day Joel was unable to make it to the fabric store because we came home, ate and then it was already time for him to go to Mass. So I dropped him off and went to the fabric store since it was right across from his church. They certainly had a huge selection there, but I couldn’t buy anything for Joel because I knew he would need to see it himself.

Later that day, I got started on making the cat while Joel did some more research online for what he wanted the snake to look like. Joel said, don’t you want to look up online a pattern or how you will make it? I said no, I can put it together in my head. Who needs a pattern! So I did some thinking for how to cut it and put it together, and got working. So step three for me, I began the process of actually making the animal.

Two days later, I was finished with the stuffed animal. So final step – complete!

I do have an advantage over Joel because he is busy during the weeks with his 5 classes, so he doesn’t have a lot of time to devote to making the stuffed animal. That is certainly one thing that contributed to his not getting to the fabric store until the next weekend.

We went to the fabric store and Joel didn’t find anything he really liked there. The prices were a lot more than Wal-Mart and he still didn’t find the felt he was looking for. So no snake this week.

The next week, he went to the Wal-Mart that is 40 minutes from us near a campus he teaches at. I don’t remember if he ended up buying fabric there. But I know that by the end of that week, he had decided to switch to flannel and he was able to get the red and the while fabric, but they didn’t have black. Luckily, we went to visit my parents in another city, and the Wal-Mart there had black. So finally, two weeks later, Step 2 of gathering materials is complete for Joel.

Then the next weekend, which was just yesterday, he began step three of making the snake. He wanted to use the sewing machine rather than to hand sew it like I had done. He wanted more even and nice looking stitches. I just enjoy making things by hand, and while he worked on the snake, I put together a heart shaped pin cushion. Joel looked online a little more for how he wanted to make it, and then he began the process. In just a few hours, the snake was almost complete. He had put together the whole body, and it looked great! All that is lacking is a head and the snake needed to be stuffed. Since the snake is so long, we need to buy a stick from Wal-Mart to push the stuffing way down. But as today is Monday, he won’t be able to finish it until next weekend.

So first observation is the time difference, Joel takes significantly longer to make a project than me. Even when you account for his teaching days, he still takes longer because he puts more time planning it, he wants it to be perfect and he takes his time getting started because he doesn’t want to make mistakes. I on the other hand, just jump right in, and get it done. We knew this about each other while we were in school because I would spend 4 to 8 hours writing a paper, and would complete the rough draft in one long go, where Joel on the other hand would sit for 4 to 8 hours in front of his computer ending in only a paragraph at most. If you watch him, he would begin to write a sentence, and then rewrite it, and then write five versions of it and then think on it for a while, and after an hour he might have decided on how he wanted that sentence to go. It drove me crazy watching him!! He was never late on a paper though, and always started early. And once his rough draft was complete, there was very little he needed to change to make it a final. He writes almost perfectly the first time! Unlike me, once my rough draft is complete, then I have about 2 to 3 major revisions just to catch all the grammar mistakes I made.

We know that just ultimately my way nor his is truly better, because they both have their strong and weak points. For my way, I get things done, and am less stressed about it and in the case of the stuffed animal, there are mistakes which I think add character and make it cute, but Joel & I both agree the stuffed animal looks great! For Joel, he will never finish too soon from the date he started, and he does stress out about it more. But we definitely both agree that his final projects turn out wonderfully as well, and with very little mistakes.

This has been important for us to realize about each other, because I always want us to do a project together and to finish it. Like when we plan to start a painting at the same time, but he is “researching” all up to the time I am done painting. And I get frustrated about it because I want to be painting with him, but he ends up painting a few days later! But I don’t know why I get so frustrated about it. I just need to recognize that about him and give him the time he needs. Because his art work is definitely beautiful!

But another aspect of the whole thing that I haven’t yet written about is what happens if we try to do a project together rather than doing separate projects. Yesterday, after Joel made his snake, we began making a sling together. Already at the beginning, I was ready to cut and sew, to get into it, and Joel needed more time to understand the project and what we were doing. He kept getting frustrated with my attitude for wanting to get going, and I got upset at his attitude for thinking we were going to ruin the whole thing by not knowing what was going on and that we would waste all the fabric. But we got started, more quickly than Joel would like, and after about step 3, we discovered that there was a problem and that it wasn’t going to work. We needed to start over. Oh that was just too much for Joel, he went and laid down for a little bit, and I got frustrated because this isn’t that big of a deal. We can figure it out, make adjustments and not all will be wasted. So I started over with a new piece of fabric and Joel was watching me sew, but trying to help me. I hadn’t used a sewing machine really at all, and I was having a rough start making the seam. I wanted to do it without Joel’s hands there so that I could learn but he didn’t like watching all the mistakes I was making in it. So he cut it off, and helped me sew a new seam. But when we picked that sling up, we realized that it is too long, and the one we made before was too short. Joel just couldn’t take it. We were a little unhappy with each other for a while, then he went to Mass, and I said I looked forward to seeing him come home in a good mood. While he was gone, I cut some fabric to add to the shorter one. I had to rip the seam we made, sew on the added parts and then join it all together again. I had music on, felt happy and relaxed and enjoyed making it. The seams weren’t perfect, but they were pretty good and I definitely got a hang of using the sewing machine. When Joel got back, he was happy with how it looked and we both tried it on and took photos. We had a short talk about how we are different, and how things work out great both ways of doing things but how we both cant stand to do it each other’s ways. So we agreed to never do a joint project basically. But its fun when you both produce something and you can see the differences in style and work.