send your wife away!

No, really;  send her away.

I mean that in the good sense.

There comes a point in every healthy marriage (with children) when you realize that one of your roles as husband is to be the guardian of your wife's sanity.   Not that Mrs. Felix is going crazy, mind you.  Oh dear, I'd better try to explain.

One of the gifts which we try to give each other is the space to get away.  Sometimes the young and the starry-eyed think that every waking moment must be spent together.  Which maybe is okay, and it is the way to go for some folks.  But there is also the need to be refreshed, especially when life is busy and sleep is a rare commodity.  And sometimes the gift that we give is not so much ourselves, but a chance for the other to be herself or himself.  The gift of time, and space, and quiet.

So Mrs. Felix is going on a bit of vacation to the east coast for several weeks this July, taking #1 and #4 with her.  The pater familias of the Felix clan has a lovely place in Nova Scotia, overlooking the ocean.   So grandpa and grandma will do the necessary pampering, and help look after our eldest and our youngest.

Which means, of course, that I'll be looking after these two for three weeks in July.

• casseroles may be dropped off any time between July 3 and July 25
• baths will take place only in the context of "the sprinkler" on hot days
• household cleaning supplies may be dropped off on the evening of July 24

Comments

[steve the z]

Even without kids in the house I noticed my wife enjoying the odd get away without "him" (being me of course) being healthy for Her, It's good, I encourage it. I always get a better version of all that I loved before when she comes home.

[joseph]

steve, I remember reading a book many years ago ("The Mystery of Marriage" - Mike Mason). In it there's a phrase that really stuck me; "we are guardians of each other's solitude".

I've been pondering the depths of that phrase for a long time.

ps it's one of the few "christian marriage" books that isn't a whole lot of rot.

[steve the z]

"we are guardians of each other's solitude"

good phrase, haven't read that one, I'll look for it.

[Susan McKeown AKA Jobeena]

The phrase actually comes from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, I think from his Letters to a Young Poet. I assume whoever the heck Mike Mason is that he wasn't even born before Rilke was dead and that Mr. Mason had the honesty to give the proper attribution.

"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down
all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner
appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each
other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility,
and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs
one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once
the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite
distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them,
if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives
them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole
and before an immense sky."

[joseph]

Susan, I don't recall if he cites authorship or not. It has been a number of years since I've read it, so I'll look through the shelves and see if it is around. As I recall, he is an Anglican from BC, and had some sort of association with Regent (student? staff? parking guy? I don't remember), so I'm fairly certain he would have had the academic wherewithal to leave a credit. I assume that at the time I read the book, I was young and in love, so I never checked the footnotes :^)

What intrigued me about the book in the first place was skimming the forward by J.I. Packer. First Packer was wry enough to write that he is often asked to endorse books in certain circles, as "Packer's nihil obstat is prized by some."

Second, Packer's review was wholeheartedly positive.

Another phrase I recall from the book (or at least quoted in it) goes something like this:
marriage is not the joining of two worlds; it is the abandoning of two worlds so that a new one can be formed.

ps - there's also a great read by Gary Thorne, a short article enititled Friendship and Marriage:

http://www.anglican.ca/primate/ptc/june06.htm