Think about the most ideal family you know. What are the characteristics you see in their actions that lead you to that conclusion? Do they live in harmony? Is everyone nice to one another? Loving, kind, generous, and patient? Do you find yourself longing for a husband as attentive as the other lady's? A wife as humble and sweet-spirited as your friend's? Children as obedient as another family?
I grew up in, what "experts" call, a dysfunctional home. Mother abandoned my two elder brothers, myself, and Daddy, when I was just 3 years old. Daddy married my step-mother when I was 5 and a half. She brought two boys into the marriage from two previous marriages of her own. Life was a hodge-podge. It was hardly "ideal". I often looked at some friends I had that had the "perfect" family. I determined in my mind that I would have "their" kind of family when I grew up. I believed it was possible to live without the heartache, turmoil, divisiveness, arguments, favoritism and jealousy that I grew up with. *Ironically, the family I believed represented the most "ideal" in attaining this possibility was Pastor James Weaver's at the First Baptist Church in Triangle, Virginia. I would sit in the back of the church, Sunday after Sunday, and watch them. Their mother was so attentive to them, and they were always dressed so perfectly. After church, I'd watch them skip happily across the street and enter the little brick parsonage and imagine how wonderful their lives must be.
These idealistic musings played a role in the difficulties I had in the earlier portion of my marriage. According to FAMILIES OF THE BIBLE: How They Coped With Today's Problems), the "ideal" we imagine can be quite troublesome.
"The ideal home in which everything is harmonious and always pleasant is an exercise in deceit. No two people can agree on everything. When people live in close proximity--as they do in a family--strong feelings emerge. Some means is needed to deal with them." p. 24.
The "deceit" I think I exercised with this "ideal" view of homelife was that all is always as perfect as the picture I had in my mind--all the time. I left no wiggle-room in my mind for differences in taste, in dreams, in goals, in the traditions of extended families. Nor did I take into account that I would not always like everything my husband did, or enjoy every aspect of homemaking. I did not take into account that I could get tired, be pressured, and be sick. I didn't allow for the fact that I, myself, could be disagreeable, rude, angry and apathetic at times. The bliss of the "ideal" met with the brutal honesty of reality. And as a young wife and mother, I was unprepared to "deal" with it.
It took many years for me to come to terms with this--and the history of a dysfunctional childhood peppered with imperfections. Even after I understood the role Scripture played in guiding me and my husband and children, I had a tough time admitting it was not always going to be blissful. After all, I was not perfect, nor could I ever be. I was a work in progress--and so was every single person within my immediate and extended family.
How about you? Do you struggle with perfecting your family and making everyone fit into that perfection? Do you know someone finding it difficult to accept the "ideal" is just that--an ideal? If so, they might benefit from the book I've listed below. selahV
* "Ironically" because I later became a minister's wife.
