Concentrating on Us

By Jeremy Schneider, MFT

Remember the game concentration? Where you turn over one card and then have to remember where the other card is to create a match because if you forget you lose your turn? I feel like my wife and I play that
game all the time. Every time we pick up a card with a picture of our children, we always find the other
match. But when we pick up a picture of our relationship, we almost never remember where the other card is and lose our turn. We've been doing a much better job at being parents than we have at being married.

This is what drove us to finally to get away for a weekend without our two two-year (26 month) olds. We've done this once or twice before, but this time I was so nervous, my stomach was bubbling. It felt like a complex concoction of emotions coming to boil.

My wife and I desperately needed the time. The last two years of our marriage have been the hardest in the almost fourteen years we have been together. The first year was absolutely atrocious and the second year was definitely an improvement, but we both knew we were still not where we wanted to be and we had so many problems we were facing. Our husband and wife roles had been crushed by our roles as father and mother. This was a big reason we could never remember where the other relationship card was. All we could remember were the matching cards for our children.

The past few months were the first time since our children had been born where the good stretches in our
relationship have outnumbered the bad ones. Building on this positive momentum, two weeks ago we had one of those groundbreaking talks where we were completely honest with each other about how we feel and what we want and it went incredibly well. There was a lot riding on our getaway weekend. It would either solidify the progress we have made or demonstrate the weaknesses in the foundation we are trying to rebuild.

But that by no means was the only thing contributing to the chemical experiment that was being conducted in my stomach. As much as I know my wife and I need to get away, I don't want to leave my children. I work full-time and see them for such a small percentage of their waking hours during the week. Weekends are when I try to catch up on some of what I've missed during the week. It is why I wake up when they wake up in the morning, so I can have breakfast with them - just the three of us. I'm torn because getting special time with my wife means losing out on special time with my children. This is one of the major reasons we don't take more time for ourselves. I feel so selfish leaving them. I know my wife and I need to focus on our relationship so we won't keep forgetting where the matching relationship card is. I just wish it didn't have to abandon my children to do it.

After we put them down to bed that Friday night, we got into the car and started off. I think we both felt
a collective sigh. We really were doing this, taking time away to be alone. I showed her a new playlist I
made for her on my iPod and we began listening to it. The fact that we were driving to our weekend away, we knew, was such a good sign. This was how my wife and I fell in love in the first place.

We met in college, in a small school in western New York State, called Alfred University. Frankly, there
just isn't much to do up there and my wife and I would often hop into the car, put on our favorite music and drive. We would pick a direction and see where it took us. On these drives, we would talk and talk and talk. Especially at night, on quiet, dark roads, there is an intimacy to being in the car. The sense that we were the only ones in the world at that moment in time. That sense allowed us to truly get to know each other, hear the stories that made us who we were and what we believed. This sharing created our own sense of history, though we had no idea that's what we were doing at the time.

We were thinking about all of this as we got onto the highway and I could feel the connection between us
reestablishing, like the tentacles of two octopi reaching out and finding each other. As we listened to
the playlist I made her, we held hands.

We didn't get to the hotel until late Friday night and we went right to sleep after we checked in. On
Saturday morning Giokazta woke up very concerned about our children, while I had not even really thought of them. She called her mother who was taking care of them and found out they had slept well and were doing great. Afterwards she felt better, more relaxed, while I felt more tense. Was there something wrong with me that I hadn't been thinking about them? And now that I learned they were fine, I felt kind of jolted out of my state of being with my wife. It was almost as if I had jumped back into the husband role so completely that forgotten my other role as father. It took some time before I could readjust.

The only problem that developed was this low level anxious hum I felt starting Sunday morning. I was
feeling pretty good and I knew that my wife and I were doing really well. But that was the problem. Of course we can reestablish our connection without our children around, but what were we going to do once we returned home? I was almost too afraid of how hard it would be when we got back to enjoy the time we were actually having. My wife and I talked about, but didn't really come up with real concrete suggestions. The main things we promised to try and do is to get away more and to make more of an effort to communicate with each other when we're starting to experience a problem before it gets to big to handle. When it was time to head back to our home and children, it was again with a mixture of emotions. We wanted to go back to see them, but we didn't want to lose what we had regained while we had been away from them. The balance of our spousal and parent roles felt very fragile.

Our children were so excited to see us when we arrived, jumping up and down and giving us big hugs.
It felt great to be home, but soon there was dinner to worry about and getting them ready for bed which is
always a battle against time and two tired two-year olds. My wife and I quickly switched into parent mode
and I already felt myself beginning to forget the things we had promised each other about maintaining
our connection.

Just before bedtime, we all got on the couch and started reading their books in preparation for putting
them into their cribs. Jordyn was sitting on my lap, Elijah was sitting on Giokazta's lap and my wife and I
were sitting right next to each other, touching shoulders and legs. I looked over at her while our children were completely absorbed by one of the books we were reading and she looked right at me. Her smile was dazzling and their was a little twinkle in her eye, a look that said, in all this craziness, she loved me. I tried to give her the same look back without even realizing the low level anxious hum had disappeared. We had found the matching relationship card and it was our turn once again.

Jeremy Schneider, MFT, earned his master's in marriage and family therapy from Hahnemann University in Philadelphia. Mr. Schneider was founder and executive director of Empowering Children and Families, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization fostering the confidence in individuals to create stronger
families from 1994 - 1998. He currently sees clients in Manhattan and has written a series of articles on
his experiences as a father of twins born in December 2002. He lives in Long Island with his wife, Giokazta (pronounced Jo-casta), and their boy-girl twins, Elijah and Jordyn. To contact him directly, email him at jeremygs@jgs.net.