Sheila Wray Gregoire's Blog, page 267

Great Expectations? Do We Expect our Kids to Fail?

“I just keep telling her, finish school before you have a baby!” my friend declared. We were talking about our teenage daughters, and she was very worried that one, especially, may find herself pregnant soon.

“And get married,” I added. “Don’t forget marriage!”

But my friend, no matter how much she may genuinely want her girls to marry well, doesn’t actually have faith that they will. You see, she made some mistakes when she was younger, and those actions have changed the course of her life. While she desperately wants her children to choose another path, she’s not confident they will.

When I was researching The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, I surveyed 2,000 women. And one thing I learned was that only 40% of women who are now Christian were actually virgins on their wedding night. Most Christian women had not waited.

Thus, most Christian moms of teenage girls didn’t wait, either. And now they’re wondering, how do I encourage my daughter to do what’s right and what’s best if I didn’t do so myself? I needed boys to make me feel special and wanted; likely she will, too. And we become fatalistic, like my friend is.

Or, perhaps we moms go in the other direction, so scared that our kids will mess up that we give them no freedom, in the hopes that they will wait because they won’t have a choice.

We moms need to give ourselves a break and realize two important things:

1. God forgives us for what happened in our past, and sees us as new creations; and

2. Our children will make their own decisions

If we are trying to “make up” for what we did by clamping down on our kids, we could push them away. Or if we feel so much shame for what we did that we transfer that shame on our daughters, they can start to get the message that they are expected to mess up.

How about a new way of looking at it? No matter what you did in the past, those mistakes were yours. But they aren’t anymore. Jesus paid for them, and if we beat ourselves up about it, or beat our children up about it, it’s as if we’re saying that Jesus didn’t do enough. So these mistakes are gone.

But your daughter (or your son) is not a second chance for you to do things right. Your child is simply someone that God has given to you to raise, but who will ultimately make her own decisions. So what should our attitude be? Expect the best. Kids tend to live up to expectations, and while 60% of women did not wait until marriage, 40% did. It is not impossible. And those who do wait also have stronger marriages and better sex lives. It is best for your daughters to wait.

When my girls were 5 and 7, I was enjoying lunch with a mentor and comparing parenting notes. I talked about how wonderful parenting was then, but how I was dreading the teen years. The media portrays the teen years as so horrible, and so I figured they would be. But this man turned to me and said, “The teen years are the best we’ve ever had parenting. We’re having so much fun. They’re interesting now, and wonderful to talk to.”

And so I began to look forward to the teen years. And they have been wonderful! Yes, some kids will make serious mistakes, but God is there to forgive those mistakes, just like He forgives yours. But kids will not necessarily mess up. In fact, there’s no reason to expect that they will. Let your kids know you expect the best, but that you’re always there no matter what they do. After all, that’s what God does with us.

What do you think? Did you have difficult teen years, and do you struggle with what your children will face? Let’s talk!

Related posts:

Allowing Kids to Fail
Praying for Our Kids’ Marriages
The Curse of Low Expectations for Teens

Reader Question of the Week: Is it Trust or Accountability?

Every weekend I like to throw up a question someone sends in and let you readers have a go at it. This week’s question is about trust in marriage and accountability.

I have noticed a lot of discussion among my friends for years about how much “keeping an eye” on your spouse is “normal” or healthy. One of my friends thinks that if you don’t go thru emails, text messages, and even the finances looking for odd dinners, etc. then you are just naive and stupid. Another friend says it shows lack of trust to check up on your spouse. But what do you and your readers think? Where does healthy accountability end and paranoid spying begin?

What do you think?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Don’t forget this summer: The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex makes a great gift for any woman about to get married!

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Reader Question of the Week: What Should This Frustrated Husband Do?
Reader Question of the Week: Ready for the Wedding Night

A Spry Grandma

Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario and Saskatchewan. Here’s this week’s on raising our kids to be prepared, ready and settled young adults. It will make a world of difference!

My grandparents were 61 and 62 when I was born. My earliest clear memories of them take place after they had already turned 70.  One of my grandfathers had suffered a massive stroke. My surviving grandmother was already showing signs of dementia.

My mother, on the other hand, was only 51 when she became a grandmother. My husband’s parents were younger still. And so my children have great relationships with their active and healthy grandparents.  Their grandparents baby-sat them, and played with them, and vacationed with them in ways much harder to do when health concerns have already hit—or when that generational gap becomes much wider.

That is not to say that older grandparents cannot be close to their grandchildren; seventy is the new sixty, and people are often living quite healthy and energetic lives far longer than they used to. But all things being said, I still think it’s easier to become an active grandparent when you’re in your fifties than when you’re in your seventies. Unfortunately, that’s a little outside of your control, since adult children have a habit of living their lives by their own timetable rather than yours, but the fact still remains that spry grandparents can be an awfully big advantage!

In 1976, the average age for becoming a first-time mother in Canada was 23. Today it’s 28. That means a lot of not-so-spry Grandmas. If your youngest child, for instance, doesn’t start having children until she’s well into her thirties, and then she goes on to have three, chances are you will be well past your seventieth birthday before your last grandchild is born. Many people are now facing the teen years with their kids at the same time as the nursing home years with their parents. Talk about the sandwich generation.

I know not everybody can have a child at 25. You want to finish school. You want to find a good job. You want to lay up a nest egg. Most of all, you want to find that special someone, and quite often that takes a while. And no one should ever rush to have a child when they don’t really want to.

Yet at the same time I wonder if Mother Nature has a point. We’re ready to have children biologically far sooner than we are socially, emotionally and practically. Personally, I think society would be much better off if we started stressing the benefits of marriage and family far earlier, and started raising teens to take on responsibility at a far younger age, instead of encouraging teens and twenty-somethings to launch a fifteen year quest to “find yourself”. Sure it’s great to have fun and be responsibility-free at 26, but if you have kids younger, you’ll be younger when they leave home, too. And at 46, you have a whole lot more money to have fun with.

Not everyone can be a young parent, but most of us would be better off if we were able to settle down faster and have children sooner. Our parents could help more. We’d have more energy, and they’d have more energy. And we’d have longer before elderly parents started needing our help. So perhaps we should get back to the days when we prepared kids to be adults at 21. That wasn’t ancient history; it was just a generation ago. That’s what I’m aiming for, because I really want to be a grandparent before my knees give out, and given how lousy my right knee already is, I figure I only have a few decades left.

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Warrior Wives, Euphemisms, and The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex

Good Girls Have More Fun!

Do Christians talk too much in euphemisms?

A while ago I published links to a few reviews from readers of The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, but I recently read a wonderful one from Warrior Wives which raised a great point. She writes:

Sheila Gregoire has taken the same topic and written a great book that covers a wide range of women in a wide range of circumstances.  If you are preparing for marriage – virgin or non-virgin – this book is for you.  If you are a newlywed wife, this book is for you.  And if you’ve been married for a while and sex has gotten ordinary and mundane, this book is also for you.

One thing that bothers me about how Christian women frequently discuss sex is that they tend to talk in euphemisms.  I remember Dave and I attending one marriage conference where the men and women were split up for the “sex session”.  At the beginning of the session, the female speaker declared that we were going to be open! honest! direct! no beating around the bush about sex!  And then for the rest of the session, she proceeded to refer to sex as “special physical time with your husband”.  I get that we live in an over-sexualized society and that we should be discreet, however, there is a point at which total and direct honesty about it is necessary and helpful.  I’m not gonna lie, this book is very straightforward.  After challenging the unbiblical mindsets that many women have towards sex, Sheila presents the godly ways in which we should approach sex.  And then she moves on to the nuts and bolts.  Whoa. I do think my eyebrows went up a few times as I thought, Wow, we’re going “there”!!   It would have answered every single question I had before I got married.  Every single one.  What exactly happens during sex?  Does it hurt? What positions do people use?  What does it feel like?  What happens afterwards?  What are the options for birth control?  Why does he want sex all the time?

But read the whole thing! It’s great! She also says,

When I first started reading this book, I thought I was just reading it so that I could review it on this blog.  I kind of skimmed the first part of it which was directed more to engaged women/newlyweds thinking that I wouldn’t gain anything from it.  I was so wrong.  I needed to read this book.

If that’s you–you’ve been wondering about getting the book, but you haven’t yet–you can get your copy of The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex right here! And hey, in a way, it makes a great Father’s Day gift. I’m sure he’ll be glad you bought it!

But let me ask: Do you think we talk too much in euphemisms in the church? And how do we get beyond that? Especially when talking to our own kids. Let’s talk about it in the comments!

 

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Reader Reviews of The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex and More!

Wifey Wednesday: What Lens Do You See Your Husband Through?

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for a marriage post and link-up party! I’ll write a post about marriage, and then you all can link up one of your own below! I’ve been a little busy speaking lately, so I’m going to post an older Wifey Wednesday from 2009 that I think most of you missed.

Quite often we don’t see people how they really are. We look at them with our own biases.

For instance, before we get married we tend to see our husbands (then our fiances) through rose-coloured glasses. We may notice that they do annoying things, but we think of these as “cute quirks” that they will likely grow out of.

Then, once we’re married, those glasses often fall off and we start noticing all the things that are wrong with our husbands.

But we have other lenses, too, and we need to be aware of them so that we can make sure we’re not being unfair to our husbands.

1. The Father Lens. Did you have a close, loving, supportive father? If you didn’t, that likely left a hole in you. My father, for instance, left me when I was two, and I’ve always had rejection issues. For the first few years we were married, whenever we were feeling particularly close and snuggling, I would find “you’re not going to leave me, are you?” coming out of my mouth instead of “I love you.” I was programmed to assume that this relationship wasn’t going to last.

And that can lead to a lack of trust in your relationship, which makes transparency hard, intimacy tricky, and happiness difficult. What we tend to do is to push our husbands away before they push us away. We get defensive, and believe that everything that they bring up that is negative means they’re going to leave us–as opposed to the fact that they just want to work on something.

So we assume the worst. We think that when he’s being insensitive it means he genuinely doesn’t care, as opposed to maybe he’s just being lazy or preoccupied. And so we start attacking him and accusing him of things that he has no intention of doing and aren’t even on his radar screen. And yet what’s happened is not that he’s doing anything in particular; it’s that we have read too much into things because of our own prejudices.

2. The Bad Relationship Lens. Often our lack of trust is magnified if we’ve had really bad romantic relationships or marriages in the past. I have a friend who was abused in her first marriage, and is now married to someone who loves her dearly. But she has a hard time believing it. He says that he often has a nightmare where he’s lying in his coffin, about to be lowered into the ground, and she’s standing above it, saying, “See! I told you you’d leave me!”. That’s the only way that argument can end, because he can never prove to her that he is going to stay.

3. The Pathetic Man Lens. In our culture men are thought of as incompetent when it comes to relationship stuff, housework stuff, and parenting stuff. We are the wise ones; they are the dolts that we put up with for some reason. And it becomes in vogue to make fun of men for how they can’t share their feelings, or can’t do laundry, or can’t play with a baby.

The problem is that many men CAN share their feelings, CAN do laundry, and CAN play with babies. They just may do it differently than we do. But because our lens tells us that he is pathetic, we assume that when he launches into his version of it that it’s wrong, and we berate him for it. Not a good way to build intimacy!

4. The He’s Always Right Lens. This one perhaps is not as common as it used to be, but it’s still out there, and it goes something like this. God has called me to submit to this man, and He has made this man head over our marriage. Therefore, what my husband says I must obey, because my husband is right. Nope. God is your final authority; not your husband. We must submit, yes. But God never asks us to do that without thinking for ourselves. And if your husband isn’t close to God, and isn’t leading your family close to God, then you need to pick up the slack and do those things on your own.

If your husband asks you to do something in the bedroom that you feel is wrong, you don’t have to do it. If your husband is addicted to pornography, it’s okay to confront him on it. Submitting does not mean letting go of our wisdom or our discernment.

5. My Kids Are My Main Concern Right Now. The other lens we often use is to see everything in terms of the kids. If our husbands want a night away with us, we wonder how that will affect the kids, and why doesn’t he love the kids as much as I do? Our children are our main priority, and we give them the majority of our time and attention, and we wonder why our husbands don’t seem to do the same thing. We assume that we must love the children more. Actually, our husbands might have the right idea. What children need is to feel that their parents have a stable relationship; if you put the children first, you’re sacrificing their stability.

6. The Men are Evil University Lens. For several years after I was released from my indoctrination program at university, I believed that all men were evil to a certain extent, and women were superior. This isn’t the same as believing all men are buffoons; it’s actually more harmful. We learned that “all sex is rape”, for instance, and that makes it very hard to figure out how to handle intimacy in a marriage.

So those are the different lenses that we can see our husband through, and assume things about him that he hasn’t done at all. So here’s my assignment for you this week: figure out what lens, or lenses, you have. If we can see what our biases are, it’s easier to identify them. And then, next time you find yourself getting upset with your husband, or ticked off about something, ask yourself this question:

“Is he really doing something very wrong? Or am I assuming something about the situation?”

 

That’s a good practice to get into in marriage: start with yourself when there’s a conflict. And you just might find that those conflicts magically disappear!

Now, do you have any advice for us today? Or what do you think about how we can encourage each others’ marriages? Just link up a marriage post in the linky tools below! And be sure to link back here so others can read some great marriage advice, too!

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Wifey Wednesday: How to Forgive Your Husband

Letting Men Be Men

On Sunday, Father’s Day, Keith decided that what he really wanted to do was go bird watching. He and I have recently taken up the hobby, and it is fun! We’re learning to take better pictures, and we’re learning to identify birds, but best of all we get out in nature and just get to go for walks and hikes together.

So it was that we headed to Presqu’ile Provincial Park, one of the best birding areas on the continent if you want to see water fowl. And we did! We saw our first Egret, and our first Tern, and some other birds.

On one particular hour long trail, though, birds were not the only wildlife present. In fact, they weren’t even the most common. That honour belongs to the mosquito. I had to keep my hands in my pockets because every time I tried to lift the binoculars to my eyes mosquitoes would swarm my thumbs, the one place I forgot to put bug spray. There were so many it was like walking through a haze.

And about halfway through this trail I felt nature calling.

There I was, a female, on a public trail, desperately having to go to the bathroom, with visions of a million mosquitoes reacting gleefully to my exposed bug-spray-free nether regions.

We eventually found a lookout near the water which had far fewer mosquitoes, and which was off the beaten path. So as Keith stood guard, I peed the fastest I have ever peed in my life, crouched over several weeds, begging God that they not be poison ivy.

Then Keith had to go to the bathroom. He wandered into a bush, did his business, and he was done.

There are certain times when being a man is of great advantage.

Monday morning I turned on my computer and was greeted to this story:

Men who work for the county council in the Swedish province of Sormland could be required to sit down while urinating, if a motion put forward by the Left Party passes.

The party is taking a stand against men standing up to urinate for two reasons: the first is hygiene, the second is medical research they say shows men empty their bladders more efficiently when seated, The Local newspaper reports.

The seated-urination motion applies to toilets in the office bathrooms at the Sormland County Council and the Left Party proposed that, as a first step, dedicated standing toilets be labelled as such for men who refuse to sit while they pee, The Local reported.

One of the blessed things about being a man is that you can pee standing up. I am insanely jealous of this. And yet even this is now being taken away from men. Peeing while standing is apparently unhygienic (the splashing and all that) and unhealthy, since men supposedly empty their bladders better while sitting. So acting like a man in one of the most fundamental and basic ways is now being labelled inferior.

If I were a guy, I’d be a little ticked. Everywhere you go you’re told that being a man is substandard. Women are the good ones, because we understand relationships. Men, on the other hand, are base, because they don’t understand feelings. Men like dumb things, like competition, too much, and so we have to take it out of the schools to make everything fairer. Schools outlaw playing tag or British bulldog because it makes some kids uncomfortable. Instead, you’re supposed to play cooperative games.

Men are not allowed to be men.

And then we wonder why there’s a crisis in passivity for men. A while back a woman sent in a Reader Question of the Week: what do I do when my husband refuses to work, and wants to just do nothing? The passive male is becoming far more common, and is one of the reasons that male sex drives are plummeting.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, because our culture is the one telling men that they are wrong to be masculine. They should think and feel like women. They should stop competing and start cooperating. They should stop wanting to be the best, and instead should choose to just share. They should even pee like women, because women are better.

And many men just tune out.

How about we just let men be men? Women are not superior; we’re just different.

Often we marry a man because he’s different from us, and it’s that difference that attracts us. But as soon as we marry him we try to turn him into a woman. We start trying to domesticate him, and reward him when he does female type things and ignore him or ostracize him when he acts like a guy. And then we’re surprised 15 years later when he’s become a shadow of his former self, and we find him boring.

Let’s let men be men. As for me, I’m glad my husband pees standing up. What about you?

Related posts:

Wifey Wednesday: Letting Men Be Men
Letting Go of the Fairytale

Do You Have a Mixed Up Marriage Message?

Welcome to today’s radio listeners! You can find The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex here, and here’s my 29 Days to Great Sex! Feel free to stay and look around a bit, too!

Today’s guest post is from Dr. Ann of The Marriage Checklist.

Did you start off your marriage really knowing which way to go?

If you did, that is great.  You had a wise and wonderful head-start that many people don’t have when starting off.

And I was one of those many people!

My confusion actually started at the proposal.

Here’s what happened:

After just under a year of dating, my then-boyfriend-now-husband proposed to me out of the blue.

His proposal caught me completely off guard.  He started off by saying my name so seriously that I was sure it meant that I was about to be bitten by a huge, stinging insect.  I was not expecting a marriage proposal at all!

Because I was so surprised, there was not much time to process or filter this new information.  Two knee jerk responses popped immediately into my head.

The first was what I call the Passionate Message.  It sounded something like this:  “Go for it!  You know all you need to know, and all you need is love!  Which way to get to the chapel?”

The second was what I call the Practical Message.  To me, it sounded like this: “Stop right there!  How long have you known this person?  You need to carefully weigh the pros and cons – go to the bathroom and stall for time!”

That’s why from the outside, all he could see was a blank,confused look  on my face. I didn’t say anything right away because I was stuck in the middle of these two internal conversations. My husband says it was one of the few times since he’s met me that I was actually at a loss for words.

I was torn between the two messages of the practical marriage and the passionate marriage.

I think the practical view puts too little hope in love.  We were ultimately created for love and relationship, so the practical marriage runs dry.  It falls far short of what our hearts were made for.

Yet the passionate view puts too much hope in love. The chills and thrills of new love inevitably calm down.  And so the passionate marriage struggles under the weight of unrealistic expectations for excitement, fireworks, and non-stop romance.

Well.

What’s a bride to do?

Here’s where we can look to what the Bible has to say about marriage.

The Biblical marriage message says that marriage does not exist so that we can geteither our practical or passionate needs met.

Instead, God wants us to first come to Him to get all of our deepest needs met.  Our needs for security, for meaning, and yes, for love.

Once we are filled by Him, we can turn to our spouses looking to fill their lives. God asks us to give of ourselves fully to our spouses: emotionally, physically, fiscally, legally, culturally.   A whole lot of -ally’s.

He wants us to live out, with our spouses, the same kind of love He has for us!

It’s a tall order.

It involves daily work, effort, and purposefulness.

A friend of mine and fellow psychiatrist puts it this way:  “I work to create my marriage every day.”

There are many different ways this plays out, and your marriage will be unique.  That’s the beauty of it.

I’ve found that within my own marriage, the way that I give and fill my spouse’s life changes as the seasons of our lives change.

I am not saying that I have this all nailed down – I most certainly do not!

But knowing what God’s mission is for my marriage makes a big difference in how I approach it.

Not on my own strength, but instead fueled by Christ’s love for me!

It’s a lifelong process and journey, but through God’s grace, every day I am able to take steps forward.

It’s something that everyone has available to them.  It’s something that everyone can do!

Question :  What about you? What marriage messages have you heard?  Or which do you find yourself following?

Warmly,

* * *

The best way we learn is from each other.  You have a unique wisdom and insight that can truly bless others!  So jump in and add your voice.  I love to read what you share.

 Dr. Ann is a Christian M.D., wife to her wonderful husband, and mom to a terrific gang of three.  At  The Marriage Checklist  Ann blogs about marriage, motherhood, and more!  She is syndicated on  Crosswalk.com , and has been featured on BlogHer.com ,  MichaelHyatt.com ,  Fox New s, and  Good Morning America .  

You can read more from Dr. Ann at  TheMarriageChecklist.com , on  Facebook ,  or on  Twitter .

For the easiest way to get her latest posts,  sign-up here  and get them sent directly to your email inbox.

Copyright Dr. Ann 2012

(photo credit: FreeDigitalphotos.net)

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It’s a Dad Life: Father’s Day Video

For your Father’s Day pleasure…

And, as always, I know your guy would love it if you picked up The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex…for Father’s Day!

Now go cuddle with your guy!

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Reader Question of the Week: Mom needs help with sons!

Every weekend I like to throw up a question someone sends in and let you readers have a go at it. This week’s question is one I don’t feel equipped to answer…

We have been dealing with a soon to be 4 year old who definitely is attracted to women. His eyes linger when a woman walks by in too little. I’ve caught him looking at the swimsuit sections of my magazines. My husband and I are trying to teach him how to deal with a world of woman who don’t hold the same standards as we do in our house or I hold when I get dressed.  But I as his mom struggle with this showing of a sex drive at such a young age and frankly am grossed out by it. My husband assures me its normal but I also am freaked out.

My husband and I have a great relationship in the bedroom–no porn or anything extra, either. And my husband and I are both involved in ministry and love mentoring people, so this has all come as a shock to me. Any thoughts?

What would you recommend?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Don’t forget this summer: The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex makes a great gift for any woman about to get married!

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Friends of Convenience

Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario and Saskatchewan. Here’s this week’s on friendship and mutual understanding.  Let’s be intentional here.

Erika and Johanna were my saviours in high school. We ate lunch together. We talked between classes. We smiled at each other and had each other’s backs. But we were not bosom buddies. We were really only Friends of Convenience.

School can be an intimidating social maze. Cliques abound, insecurity is paramount, and if you’re on your own you’re a target. Every student quickly learns that you must establish yourself in a group if you want to get through those years relatively unscathed. And so I found my group, and we clung to each other out of necessity. But as soon as school was over, I left and never looked back, as did they.

This doesn’t mean I didn’t like them, or that they didn’t like me. We found each other friendly, interesting, and kind. It’s just that we didn’t share passions or interests. We weren’t kindred spirits.

At different stages of our lives we need these Friends of Convenience. Maybe you meet them in high school, or the workplace cafeteria, or the neighbourhood playgroup. Friends of Convenience make life easier and more bearable during difficult stages. You make do with what you have, and you find joy and laughter in a group of people that you may not have paid attention to otherwise.

My husband didn’t have many Friends of Convenience in high school. He had true friends, and even today keeps in contact with many of his high school buddies. I, on the other hand, would likely not recognize my old friends if I passed them on the street. I saw high school as something to get through so that my real life could begin; he saw high school as something to savour.

In a way I envy my husband his good memories of high school days, yet I think my experience is probably closer to the norm. Schools throw together kids based solely on their neighbourhood and their year of birth. We don’t stick kids together by personalities or interests or passions; we stick them together based on arbitrary things. No wonder schools become so stressful! In school, one establishes one’s identity among a sea of very similar kids by putting others down. And so schools adopt pecking orders. That’s scary for a child, and even worse for a teen when hormones are raging and when one is trying to figure out one’s identity and one’s future plans.

As many students stand now on the cusp of graduation, what I would say, after looking back over my years, is not to bemoan yourself if you feel as if you only had Friends of Convenience, and never really had people who understood and loved you. You’ve done the best you can with a challenging situation, and that’s a trait that will serve you well in the future.

As that future opens up, you’ll be able to hang out with people who live in different neighbourhoods, and who were born in different years. You’ll find people that you can talk to, who respect you, and who aren’t trying to pull you down. The future will likely be much brighter than the past.

So if, at graduation, you look around at the sea of faces and despondently wonder if you will ever talk to any of them again, don’t beat yourself up. You have lived through a past you didn’t choose; you now have the opportunity to live a future you will choose. Choose well, and that future will give you many friends of far more than just convenience.

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