The fruit of a couple are the children, but most people aren’t really prepared to be parents. All they have is their parents’ examples, and sometimes neighbors, family friends and some other members of the family who probably were not prepared as well. Therefore, their example most likely won’t be the best.
We see generation after generation making the same mistakes over and over again. It seems that most of us are not paying attention. In my classes I teach three very important lessons:
1. Intelligence is learning from our own mistakes: if something bad happens to us, we better take measures the next time.
2. Wisdom is learning from somebody else’s mistakes: we don’t have to hurt ourselves to learn, we see other people’s lives, we reason, we conclude and we apply the conclusions to keep ourselves from getting hurt.
3. Stupidity is not even learning from our own mistakes: never mind from somebody else’s mistake, it means we keep on stumbling on the same stones over and over.
Most of us have a little bit of each; the important thing is to keep changing the percentages until we rid ourselves of all our drawbacks or at least most of it.
Raising a family is not an easy task, one of the many problems I see has to do with how both parents tend to focus on the children and forget one another. What I want to say is, the children should not get all of our attention. When the spouses put the children at the center, that marriage, most likely, is bound for problems, after the children are gone.
Look around us, and we see that most of those couples that centered around the children. After the children grow up, the couple are two perfect strangers for one another. They forgot how to be a couple, and how to care for one another. Most people think that the only reason to get married is to have a family, to procreate. Indeed that’s one of the reasons and a very important one; we have to maintain the human race.
Maybe the following example will help us understand the other reason we get married. We never hear anyone say that’s my ex-son or daughter, or father, or mother. Blood ties are always going to be there - even if for some reason or another we deny our family ties, they cannot be dissolved. But we do listen to, he or she is my ex-husband or wife. We get married to have someone in our lives who’s going to complement us, to help us mature and grow together, to care for one another and to fulfill our destiny as members of a society, a country and the world.
Indeed, God gives us children, and we are obligated to care and provide for them. We cannot be like some egocentric spouses; sometimes both of them that think that their children are pebbles in their shoes, these spouses push their children out their house, as soon as they are old enough. They say they want their freedom back, as if children were chains to our lives.
Nonetheless, the bottom line is we cannot neglect our spouses. When we do so, we are asking for problems. A high percentage of ignored spouses end up being unfaithful or becoming total strangers who share the same roof, but have nothing else in common. Love wasn’t cared for and resentment overtakes our hearts, and what could have been a wonderful life together after the children leave, becomes a nightmare for both spouses.
It is important to remember that our children are going to leave our house some day, just as we did with our parent’s house, and the person who is going to stay is our spouse. The big question is how do we want to spend our lives after our children leave? That’s up to us, and no one else. Let’s make sure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes our previous generations did. We need equilibrium; our children and our spouses need our time, our attention and our love.
