Have you stopped to consider that you might be the only emotional “bandage” , but oh how difficult that can be when one of the two spouses is low.
Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in how difficult things are for us. Sometimes, because we don’t see the day through the eyes of our spouse, we are challenged to understand their stressors. (Heaven forbid we actually should be one of our spouse’s stressors.)
I remember working at a large corporation. The beautiful thing about that was that my husband worked there also. We were beginning new jobs in the work force, having just completed college. As a result, we’d both found jobs in the customer service department of this large company.
If you’ve never worked customer service before, just know that people rarely call because they’re head over heals in love with your product. Noooo, usually the calls come from frustrated individuals in a panic and with a deadline. Thus, the calls are rarely pleasant. It takes great skill and personality to be able to pull the individuals down from the spiky trees of emotion and get them going on their way again.
By the end of the day, at least most days, as a customer service rep you’re pretty well rung out emotionally. It takes great discipline not to yell back at those who are yelling at you – since they’re angry with your product and now see you as the instigator of their problem.
Needless to say, leaving work each day could be quite the pleasure, yet the frustration from those heated calls still stung.
The great thing for my husband and myself was that we both understood that frustration and pressure because daily we were working in it! Driving home from the job each day was great, because we could vent together. We would chat: “Wow, you’re right. That call must have been hard, kind of like the one I got . . . ” and so on. Having someone to bandage your soul at the end of each challenging day was beautiful. By the time we would arrive at our newlywed apartment, we were ready and able to leave the rigors of work behind – and simply enjoy each other’s company.
During that time, I’d often thought, “What if one of us didn’t work in this field? Could either of us truly understand how hard it is?” I was grateful we didn’t have to find out. Because we knew the difficulty, we knew how to bandage each other’s emotional “scabs” from the day.
The next time your spouse comes home after a long hard day at work, wrung dry emotionally, check to see what your emotional response is. I still forget this, now that I’m a stay-at-home mommy. But the reality is still there – life at times can feel like a cheese grater that continues to grind away at us. As spouses, do we bandage each other’s wounds . . . or make them worse? And what would the Lord have us do?
I’m still learning this, and am oh so grateful for that customer rep opportunity I shared with my husband, because it taught me deeply the importance of bandaging each other after the long and hard days this sometimes-cheese-grater world rubs our way.
