Hi!
It is been awhile since my previous post and how life changes me in between.
Today, I'd like to share a little snap of my thoughts about three main aspects
I encountered recent days:
1. Why did I settle down?
2. How to adjust to my new role and what should I
leverage from my pre-marital life?
3. How to seek self-help?
I
know and I understand that majority of people are encountered similar situation
as mine. Some people seem got over it easily and some other are stumbling. My
post aims to help those people who are around my age, 25+, and have the urge to
discover more about themselves and hopefully together we will choose the right
paths in life.
Why did I settle down?
I am
actually surprised that many people are surprised of me being married. As I
reminiscing my wedding day, the feeling of being married to my husband was a super easy feeling.
It feels right, and it feels good. It is harder for me to neglect his presence
rather than to accept that we cannot be always 100% present to each other. So
in my opinion, there are 3 criteria to meet before settling down:
-
Marry because of LOVE. Up until now, love is
still a mystery to many, but it is a light for whoever embraces it. With this
idea, the premise becomes easier: Whatever the reason is, do not marry, if you
do not feel the love for each other.
-
Marry because both of you share same PURPOSE.
People say, love will burn out and it won’t be always there to fuel your
relationship, but if you hold the same values and purposes, you will become well-balanced
rotors that will generate power to move both of you up. Depends on which
purpose you hang upon, your marriage is a motor of your career, hobby,
ambition, and dreams. Your marriage is so powerful that sometimes it gets
bigger than yourself. But don’t worry, a good marriage will nurture.
-
Marry because you know that you CAN survive
alone, but you CHOOSE to stay. I think this is very important. It is about
self-worth and vulnerability. There are many cases, especially from women
perspectives, that are forced to marry due to necessity. I am afraid that
although many arranged marriages are successful, it won’t be as fulfilling as
the marriage that you choose for yourself. With this premise, you understand in
advance about its consequences, its hardship, and your expectation to work together
for both of your happiness.
Of
course, there are many more advices that should have been included in these
criteria, but I choose to limit in its basic three.
How
to adjust to my new role (as wife) and leverage my pre-marital life?
Honestly,
I will elaborate more into a modern wife dilemma rather than a very traditional
perspective of women as breeder, cooker, and lover. I want to emphasize that
being wife is more than domestic tasks, and we have to make good strategy to
make our family workable, livable, and enjoyable.
In
my case, my husband fly back to his country after 2 weeks of our marriage, and
we need to live a separate life still. It is so difficult and it is a torture
for both of us. I am already loosing my counting over how many times I cried
myself before bed, how many times I had to hold my eyes wide open waiting him
finishing his clock out schedule, how much money, time, and energy I spent on
juggling all these bureaucratic papers of our marriages, how to overcome stress
that piles up because of resignation from previous work, language learning, and
being broke. How could I keep telling myself that marriage is more than touch
and good night spooning… those are hard. Those are my sacrifices, as a wife
that whatever bad circumstances happened, my husband and I believe there is
always a light at the end of the tunnel.
So
instead of thinking what could go wrong, I repeatedly tell my husband that we
are good, we will be together soon, and I am literally wholeheartedly hanging
myself into this promise. If you can't provide tenderness in the family, who else
can?
So
how I leverage my pre-marital life?
It
feels like grace and curse at the same time. Some women are feeling satisfied
with themselves being married, posting photos about them doing their hobbies or
dressing the babies. Unfortunately, my parents aren’t brought me up into that
traditional womanhood. I am expected to excel, to gain, and to achieve as much
as men counterpart does. So marriage is totally not the end of my own dreams. I admit that there were times I won’t respond
to my husband dearly because I was so drawn into my own realm of works. Moreover, after a deeply self-assessment, I came across a very good analogy of my
marriage. Have you ever heard about push-pull train? So as a woman, she might think that she was a wagon which pulled of by a locomotive (a
husband). Often as women, we agreed that this locomotive already has its own wagons (his
dreams, his entitlement, or even his sentiment towards another women… because
we were just a wagon, anyway?). But let's imagine that every woman is locomotive her own
wagons, someday and somehow, this lady-loco meets a gentle-loco with his own wagons. Together these lady-loco and gentle-loco make a
longer and more powerful train with a push-pull system! It requires
cooperation, it requires technique but nobody left behind and easier to maneuver in tricky railways called life.
For
example, I was worried for being not able assimilating easily in my husband’s
country; what do I eat for breakfast everyday? How do I maintain to get a job?
How do I study with doing chores in between? Every time these bad thoughts come
to me, I always remember that I have a very supportive husband that more than
willing to share responsibility with me and vis a vis. By doing so, my husband is actually
making his life easier by empowering me.
How
to seek self-help?
Yeah!
It seems sweet on the tongue, but I admit that often there were bitter, gloomy,
and desperate thoughts I hung on my wall. When people fail me, when visa is not
issued yet while my study is approaching, when I have to survive with the last
Rupiah I have and not putting my hand under anyone’s kindness. I know that I am
being hard to myself and I kind of proud with it. Often many people are too stubborn to admit that they are stressed or depressed. It is not good. As an
overly sensitive adult, I want to say that, "it is okay to show you pain and your
weakness, the world can judge but you can heal." Particularly for healing
therapy, I can recommend some books based on difficult situation you
encountered:
- If you want to balance daily life as a mom,
please read: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.
If you want to balance your ambition and your
home duty, please read: Women, Work & The Art of Savoir Faire by Mireille
Guiliano.
- If you feel helpless as a working mom, please
read: Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.
- If you lost feel helpless and cannot change
anything in your life, please read: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.
- If you feel like running from hectic city life,
please read: The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner.
-
If you feel time consumes you, please read: The
Time Keeper by Mitch Albom
These
suggestions are legitimately personal and I can recommend them because I read
them. I believe that whatever problems, sadness, and disappointment we feel
now; there is nothing new under the sun. These people will help us to describe,
rooted, and analyse our shortcomings and somehow help us to make a peace with
ourselves. I knew that I should have also include Eat, Pray, Love by Liz
Gilbert, however, I do feel like the story is too dark to be explained here.
But, if you encountered similar situation as Ms. Gilbert, my suggestion is to
go to therapist for a more coherent professional help. Nobody guarantee that these books will help except ourselves :)
Well,
I honestly made this long post because, I myself, is experiencing difficult
situation now, and I always feel better after I put them into words. In
addition to this, I hope whoever read my long monolog is willing to wish me a
pray regarding my reconciliation with my husband. There is no wife on this
earth that want to live separately with her husband; I hope God and universe
listen to our prayers.
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