Reminder Not to be Prideful

The following is the blog entry I wrote a little over 3 years ago.  I had called it "Empowerment."
 
My husband and I just had a baby about a month ago.  There seems to be a healthy kind of empowerment that comes to a woman for giving birth.  It has been said by a mother describing it after giving birth: “You feel like you can do anything.”  Then there’s the unhealthy kind of empowerment where a mother will nag the father or go to extremes in telling him what to do, almost being the head of the house.  The “anything” described by the woman above should be good things, godly things…like the empowerment to love the child, and love the husband more than ever.

Something that keeps the unhealthy empowerment from building is the mother’s ability to overlook or ignore what could build pride, such as all the work she did in labor.  When you do something good, it is better to see it as something overlooked, rather than to keep thinking about how wonderful it was what you did.  If you can overlook it, it calms down your pride and is quite freeing from the unhealthy type of empowerment.

A mother after giving birth who can still think of others beyond herself is a valuable lady.  It is quite unselfish of her to think of her husband, who didn’t do the birth labor and who didn’t have the amazing experience from pregnancy to birth in a day or however long the labor is.  It is easy to overlook all others when pride could sneak in after a great accomplishment.  But something that could help you in your relationship with your husband in such a situation is to imagine switching the roles for a minute but in a different situation that can be used to understand.  You have a normal week.  You do the things you normally do on each day.  Your husband has a normal week, too.  He has been busy…but one of those days, he has a chance to go to the gym after work or spend time on your family’s exercise machine for a good hour.  He is so proud of his worked up muscles and wants you to say something about it.  How it is for a husband after the wife goes through labor is the normal week as far as she went through the labor, but he didn’t.  You can put yourself in your husband’s shoes about your labor experiences.  Do not expect him to almost “put you on a pedestal” for your amazing work… and you can keep from expecting it by realizing it’s easy to overlook.  Realize that the pride and what could lead to negative empowerment could be overlooked if you just think about others.  

And my update:

This concept has taken us well over the just over three years.  The baby who was born then is going to be four (wow) this July.  I've thought over the concept, trying not to be prideful in the labor I've done.  If I can not be prideful, life does so well for me.  And just reminding myself that my husband will always remember the cheerful person that I was before I became his wife, before I gave birth.  (It's not obsolete.  I like to show that part of myself to him...)