Renewal for You and Your Marriage

You disagree about consequences. You disagree about money. You disagree about how much help is too much. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you stopped feeling like teammates and started feeling like roommates who happen to share a kid.

Maybe you're carrying it alone. Maybe you feel criticized. Too soft, too harsh, never quite right. And you're doing all of this in the same season your own body is staging a revolt.

Erica gets honest about what parenting stress does to a marriage, and why your husband is grieving this too, even when he shows it differently than you do. She shares the night her husband of 25 years broke down in a restaurant booth, and what it taught her about the silent weight men carry in this season.

You'll hear why the enemy targets these exact moments, what research actually says about empty nest improving marriages, and the one pledge that has to come before you make another decision about your child.

Your marriage took the hits this season. It doesn't have to take the loss.

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Transcript

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Parenting stress can quietly erode marriage. In this final episode of the series, we explore how raising teens and adult children impacts marital connection and what research says about renewal in the emptiness transition and how God faithfully restores what feels worn or thin. Somewhere between carpools, late night worry, and hard decisions, you may have lost sight of each other. You're still married, but not always connected. Today we're talking about how to build unity and hope even after years of strain. Stress may have shaped this season, but it doesn't get to define your future. Welcome to the Momentum Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Wiggenhorn. Parenting teens and adults can drain emotional reserves and they create spouse conflict. You disagree about rules, consequences, money, boundaries, and sometimes you can just feel like roommates with no emotional connection. Sometimes moms feel alone in decision making because they're the ones who do a lot of the heavy lifting while dad is busy at work. Or maybe you feel caught between your spouse and your child, or maybe you feel caught between two of your children. Moms describe this season as exhaustion and you feel like you have nothing left to give to your spouse. Or maybe you feel criticized by your spouse. They think that I'm too soft or they think that I'm too harsh. Maybe somewhere along the way you stopped feeling like a team. Let's be honest. Many of us are going through this season of parenting at the same time we're going through paramonic menopause or full-blown menopause. It's one of the hardest seasons of our lives physically and emotionally. And we've got hormonal changes along with household changes, and many days our minds cannot wrap around which end is even up. So, mom, be gracious with yourself here. You have a lot going on in your life right now. You may feel like you have brain fog, you may feel like you're not sleeping well, you may have hot flashes, you all sorts of things. And in the midst of all of that hormonal wackiness, you have the hardest parenting season. But here's the reality, mom. So does your husband. I remember the day that we dropped our daughter off for school. She was going to school uh across the country. We live in Arizona. She was gonna go to school on the other side of the country. And uh we were there and we dropped her off for for college and we hugged her goodbye, and there were lots of tears. And then, you know, the college basically said, Okay, parents, like it's time to let them go, pack up, get off, get off campus. Uh, they've got it, leave. And uh, so we went for we went from there uh to go out to dinner. And we sat down in the booth and the waiter came up to the table. He was maybe, I don't know if he was probably in college. He couldn't have been a day over 22. Uh, and he said, Well, hello, sir, how's your day going? And my husband completely broke down. He grabbed his napkin, put it over his face, and started sobbing. Now, my husband and I at this point had been married over 25 years, and never once, not one time, had I ever seen him cry like that. The reality of Eliana being off and launched and out of our home just ripped his heart in two. Uh, so our spouses, they're going through their own hard emotions in this season, too. Uh, so be gracious to them. No, they don't have menopause, but they have other hard things. Uh, so here's the thing when emotions are running high and that is spilling over into your marriage, uh, outside help can really help stabilize things. Uh, I mentioned in a previous episode how I used to volunteer with a prison ministry. And a friend that I met through that experience, uh, she's got a lot of experience, uh, you know, setting boundaries, setting clear expectations, walking people through healing after traumatic situations. And that friend became a godsend when my husband and I could not always agree on the best course of action when it came to a parenting decision. Let me say that again. After almost 30 years of being married, happily, I might add, my husband and I had times when we could not seem to arrive at an agreement of what the best course of action was. I tell you that, because the enemy wants nothing more than to rip your family apart, and he will slip lies into these hard moments like your spouse doesn't listen to you. They don't care what you think, they only care about themselves. They're selfish. You're the only one fighting for your family. And the reality is that your spouse probably has a different coping mechanism for the stress in your family dynamics than you do. Remember the four common reactions we mentioned in our very first episode? Go back and catch that episode if you missed it, because chances are your spouse defaults to a different reaction than you do. And in episode three, we talked about how this season of parenting is actually a grieving process, emphasis on process. So you and your spouse might be in different stages of a grief process. When I wrote the book, Loving Your Wayward Child, we walked through the steps of grief and how they play out in our parenting journeys. And most likely you and your spouse are in different spots in that grief process. But we don't have to respond in the same way to a situation. We can have some different opinions, we can still listen to how the other person feels and ask them what they need, especially from us. And we need to give space for each spouse to process in the way that they need to at the time. But when one or both of us are consistently falling into default reactions rather than inviting divine intervention, inviting God into the conversation, outside help can be just the reset that you need. So in our situation, when we find ourselves struggling to agree, or the conversation starts getting heated, or one or the other is growing increasingly frustrated, uh, we invite Debbie into our decision making because she's counseled and coached countless individuals with similar struggles to our son. And she helps us separate ourselves from his choices, which really helps us in making beneficial decisions because we're not emotionally reacting, we're deliberately choosing things that will ultimately serve his best interest and help preserve our marriage. And here's the pledge that you and your spouse can make right now. You will not, you absolutely will not allow the strife in your parenting season to spill over into strife in your marriage. Your marriage will come first, as well as your intent to persevere it and to preserve it. Now, some of you might be listening and thinking, too late. We're already constantly at odds over our child and what to do. I'm so sorry. I truly am sorry because we've been there and the feelings of overwhelm and aloneness are exponentially greater when you feel like you are fighting against your spouse in order to fight for your family. But before you make any additional decisions about your child, you first need to set that strife aside and decide to make the most important decision for your family. Your marriage is going to come first. I'm not a therapist, I'm not gonna pretend to be, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the strife in your marriage may come from your husband feeling like you're putting your child or your children ahead of him. And he's feeling both disrespected and slighted. And if you have a rebellious child who disrespects and slights him, he's very quickly going to run out of grace for them. So it's important for your spouse to know and to understand how important the preservation of your marriage is to you. And this is another reason why bringing in some outside help can be so beneficial because it can give each spouse a chance to speak their feelings and their perceptions over the situation with someone there to help keep you both calm and the conversation directed toward healing and understanding each other. It doesn't mean that you still won't get mad at each other sometimes and wondering how in the world your spouse would think that way or feel that way when in your heart it is completely untrue and off base. But the best way to prove to them that you do care is to be willing to graciously listen and then remind them how much they mean to you and that you want to understand them. The U.S. Surgeon General released a report called Parents Under Pressure, and it talks in that report that 40%, 40% of US parents describe their parenting experience as extremely stressful to the point that they feel that it adversely affects their mental or physical health and their everyday life. That says something about it, doesn't it? 40%. If you would describe parenting as extremely stressful, you're definitely not alone, friend. In another report from the Center for Biblical Engagement, they researched over a hundred thousand people across 10 years, and they found that daily Bible reading decreased feelings of bitterness and resentment by 40%. Feeling like they need to suppress their needs or hide their emotions decreased by 30%. Discouragement and loneliness decreased by over 30%. These are just some of the statistics that I describe in my book, Loving Your Wayward Child, and the results that Dr. Murphy found in his parenting under pressure report, and the statistics from the Center for Biblical Engagement. What's my point? If we're struggling in our marriages due to parenting stress, daily time in God's Word is one of our greatest resources to help us deal with the strife and open doors of communication between spouses. Research tells us that marital stress leaves parents emotionally depleted. And this makes supportive parenting decisions harder. But here's good news because research also says that empty nest is often a reset, especially for women. Most women, when they reach the empty nest season, report an improvement in their marital satisfaction. Now that kind of surprised me because I feel like as a recent empty nester and having a lot of friends in that season, a lot of women initially express great feelings of sadness at the arrival of this empty nest stage. But now that I've been a couple years into the empty nest stage, I can tell you that myself and many of my friends express a greater marital satisfaction now that we have lived our lives with just the two of us under our roof for a season. So that means the next chapter can genuinely be better. This is a also maybe a little impetus. So if you are in a season where you have adult children that are still living under your roof, even though they may have reached some level of independence, there probably is still a level of stress and strife that they're bringing to the marriage. And it is especially important when we have these adult children still living with us, uh, even if by and large it's a good situation that we need to be prioritizing our marriage and spending time just the two of us as husband and wife. But maybe you feel really lonely in your marriage. And maybe you're at an empty nest stage, you're at an empty nest stage, but it feels like you're actually drifting further apart and you miss the times that your children were under your roof. And I want to gently suggest something. It's not your children's job to fill your emotional tank, and it's not your husband's job to keep your emotions regulated and you feeling happy. It's God's job to fill you. And it's your job to seek God for your true happiness because no human is ever going to be enough to fulfill us. Our hearts have a God-sized hole that only He can fill and that He was meant to fill. And expecting another person to do that for us only sets them up for failure and sets us up for disappointment. Just like having a strong faith is required to build bids of connection with your child, a strong faith is required to build bids towards connection with our spouses. We have to first seek God and find our strength and our significance and our satisfaction in our relationship with Him. And then we'll be able to connect with our family members in meaningful ways. Friend, fear can drive how we react to our spouses exactly as it drives how we react to our children. And if you missed episode two in Taming Fear, be sure and go back and listen to that episode. In part two of this episode, we're going to talk about some practical steps to move toward our spouse when there's been some emotional separation due to strife and parenting decisions. But before next week's show drops, I want you to spend some time in God's Word. The companion journal for this podcast series from Despair to Repair, provide some weekly scriptures to read through and some prayers to pray over your own heart, your marriage, and your family. Remember, momentum is all about moving closer to Jesus and families closer together. Let me pray one of those passages you'll find in your companion journal over you right now. 1 Corinthians 1, 7 through 9 from the Living Bible. Now you have every grace and blessing, every spiritual gift and power for doing his will are yours during this time of waiting for the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. And he guarantees right up to the end that you will be counted free from all sin and guilt on that day when he returns. God will surely do this for you, for he always does just what he says. And he is the one who invited you into this wonderful friendship with his son, even Christ our Lord. Friend, God is able to give us what we need to restore our marriages. God thank you for being faithful to restore weary hearts and relationships. Help us turn toward one another with grace and patience. Renew our strength, and remind us that you are not finished with our families or our marriages. In Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for visiting me today on this week's episode of the Momentum Podcast, where we talk about moving closer to Jesus and our families closer together, and specifically in the topic of marriage. And next week we're going to get really practical in finding each other again. Your marriage may be taking hits, but God is still at work. Hold on to hope, friend, and thank you for joining us this week on Momentum.