Some people may approach marriage thinking that everything is going to be roses and butterflies, but I think most of us understand that life can be hard and there will be some bumps and bruises along the way. Unfortunately, we don’t know what those trials will be, or how long they will last. We may not even know how to cope with them when they come. I don’t know about anyone else, but the adversity that came to me and my husband is not what we expected.
We knew that we weren’t going to be wealthy, and that we would probably struggle financially a good deal of our lives. We expected we might have a few arguments over kid stuff. We even figured we might struggle over how to live our religion. Those things turned out to be the least of our worries.
Since my husband is 12 years older than I am, we decided to have children right away. I should have known from family history that the women in our family don’t do pregnancy well. We were married on December 18th, and I’m pretty sure I conceived on New Year’s Eve. It was a very difficult pregnancy (as were all of my pregnancies), and our daughter was born the following October. My husband is a saint for putting up with me during my pregnancies—but then again, that’s what good husbands do.
When you are expecting a baby, you picture this lovely little package will be delivered to you all wrapped up in a receiving blanket complete with pink or blue ribbons, as appropriate. Nobody prepares you for the possibility of your baby being born ill. Things are a bit different now than they were back then. Modern technology can sometimes predict these things during pregnancy—which may be good or bad, depending on your perspective. Back in 1977, there was no way of knowing what we were about to face.
Throughout the pregnancy I was very ill. My daughter would kick me until it hurt so bad I would double over. It was my first child, and I didn’t know that wasn’t normal. I won’t go into the long details of that pregnancy, because it isn’t necessary, and frankly, it brings back bad memories. Suffice it to say that it was pretty miserable. It was also a difficult birth. We should have been thrilled to have it over with and our daughter in our arms—except she wasn’t in our arms. She was lying on a table in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. She had two major operations before she was 12 hours old, followed by months being a non-thriving child and years of recovery. It is a miracle she is alive.
Daughter number two was healthier, but she was also a non-thriving child. They almost lost me during labor. I then had a miscarriage. A year later, our son was born—more health issues. After deciding we wanted one more child, we ran into a fertility problem that had not previously existed. Our last daughter was born through the miracle of fertility drugs—born with pneumonia. We almost lost her.
None of these things were expected. There was no way to plan for them. We couldn’t prepare ourselves to handle these situations. We just had to buckle down and tackle each day as it came. If you go into a marriage thinking that every day is going to be easy, you will be sorely disappointed. Marriage is life, and life is hard.
The pediatrician for our oldest child told us that the only way she would ever have full lung capacity is if she exercised her lung. We needed to let her grow up like every other little girl on the block—doing all the things they did, even if it was hard for her. We were told to teach her how to swim because swimming is great exercise for lungs. We couldn’t tell the swimming instructor she had a lung problem, because he would have let her off easy. He took her to the deep end of the pool. I stood clear outside the fence at the shallow end of the pool. I could hear my daughter struggling for air. I walked back about 40 feet and stood behind a tree to cry, all the while hearing my daughter gasp for air. No one prepares you for those moments.
To read all of Tudie Rose’s article on marriage, click the picture.
The only thing that got us through the really tough days was the fact that we had each other. When the unexpected things happen, you can do two things: a) pull apart; or b) pull together. We chose to pull together. We chose our marriage and family. We chose to attack each problem as it came and endure to the end.
If we are patient in our afflictions, endure them well, and wait upon the Lord to learn the lessons of mortality, the Lord will be with us to strengthen us unto the end of our days.
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We learn to endure to the end by learning to finish our current responsibilities, and we simply continue doing it all of our lives. We cannot expect to learn endurance in our later years if we have developed the habit of quitting when things get difficult now (Elder Robert D. Hales, Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, General Conference (Apr. 1998), “Behold, We Count Them Happy Which Endure”).
Handling the unexpected in marriage requires faith, stamina, love, endurance, and work. There’s an old saying, “When things get tough, the tough get going.” That statement has been attributed to both Joseph P. Kennedy (father of President John F. Kennedy) and football coach Knute Rockne. That’s the way I feel about marriage. The only way marriage works is if both partners face adversity together and “get going.” You can’t really prepare for the unexpected, but you can pull together and tackle it—together.
Tudie Rose is a mother of four and grandmother of ten in Sacramento, California. You can find her on Twitter as @TudieRose. She blogs as Tudie Rose at http://potrackrose.wordpress.com. She has written articles for Familius. You will find a Tudie Rose essay in Lessons from My Parents, Michele Robbins, Familius 2013, at http://www.familius.com/lessons-from-my-parents.
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