For Better Or Worse

When you tie the knot on your wedding day, you focus on the positives and look at the future with rose tinted glasses. When you want to marry so bad, you tell yourself that there is nothing that life can throw at you that you can’t cope with. You tell yourself that you are ready. But are you really ready? Are you ready to die to self and look after another at their weakest?

For the year or so that I’ve been married, we’ve had multiple hospital visits and surgery. Nothing prepared me to be on the receiving end of being looked after by my husband after having surgery. On that lovely spring day in April when I got married, I certainly wasn’t thinking my next year would look like it did. I didn’t think I would be needing surgery at some point in the near future. In fact, I thought I would be going to hospital only for antenatal clinics not gynaecological and oncology checks. But that hasn’t been the case yet.

Instead I have had multiple hospital visits, been jabbed multiple times (I hate needles!), been seen by 2 different consultants and then had my abdominal area cut open in surgery. I now know why that area is called your core! Lord, did my core hurt! During that time, my hubby looked after me, fed me in bed, wrapped my abdomen so I could have a proper shower and then stood there to ensure I didn’t hurt myself. And then to crown it off, after I start getting better, my hubby hurts himself during football enough that the roles are reversed and I am now nurse.

Why this whole insight into my past year? Because it’s time to take off the rose tinted glasses and accept that marriage is really for better for worse. It’s time to realise what we mean when we say those vows. It’s time to know what we’ve signed up for and make up our minds that the ‘for worse’ bit is part of the package.

You don’t have to do it on your own. You have God on your side to help you through those ‘for worse’ days. If we’ve made it thus far, so can you too. But be ready for it.