“Dude, You had ONE job.”
My kids and I all have ADHD. Our house is in complete chaos most of the time. It wasn’t always that way but I definitely started to slip after my third son was born. It’s a lot harder to schedule babies’ lives down to the minute when one legit laughs at your plans and the baby is totally content to nurse on demand and only take naps on your chest. So our family welcomed the chaos when he was a baby and since our only girl arrived, well, it’s nuts. Oh well. Thankfully, I am usually too distracted to stress about it for long. But in the midst of our brains bouncing from one thing to another, we forget A LOT. I forget why I came into the kitchen and spend 3 minutes staring in the fridge for the hot chocolate sitting on my desk. My son goes to get a towel upstairs because he needs to sweep the floor. My daughter attempts to fill the sink when she is supposed to be cleaning her room. Yep. All of that is TOTALLY normal. At least in our house. (Pray for us!! Ya girl is going bananas!) But we have a running joke in our house when we do something that is just downright laughable.
“Dude! You had ONE job!!”
It lightens the tension when the mistake would otherwise make someone angry or anxious for breaking something. It makes us laugh. It calms nerves. It gives us a second to reset and focus. It’s silly in that moment, but it hasn’t always landed that way in my mind.
I was 17 when I was baptized the second time. This time I had been taught that THIS was the only church and that my other baptism wasn’t “right”. I spent months learning from a Bible teacher who would drive my (then) boyfriend and me to service from our college campus. He and his wife welcomed us into their home for dinner often. We loved their son like a little brother. They were our family away from home and were in our wedding years later. But I remember the conversation we had at their house one night. He asked me a bunch of questions with the goal of “proving” that my previous baptism was invalid. According to the little bit of scripture that I knew and the vast knowledge he seemed to have, it made sense. If I had been taught the “truth,” why would it result in me being a BAPTIST? Lord knows I wish I knew 20 years ago what I know now about my baptisms, myself, my relationship with God, and the impact of teaching like that! Blog post for another day! But I was 17. I was young and I had been taught to respect those who were older than me. So I did.
That church taught that younger women were to learn from older women so I latched on to the women of that church. I admired them for their patience and wisdom and astonishingly calm demeanor. My parents were divorced. So as much as I loved my mom, I was trying to get marriage advice from people who were still married in addition to the lessons that she had learned through her life. One quality that I have always had was a thirst for knowledge and I love getting a plethora of perspectives. And I listened even more once we got engaged.
“Make sure the house is clean when he gets home from work.” 🤨
“Put on something nice, so he feels appreciated when he gets home.”😐
“Oh, girl! If you go shopping and spend too much, just leave it in your trunk and bring it out a little at a time. He won’t notice.”😮
But there was one that stayed with me. And it was definitely said by more than one woman. It was a wise principle that had been spread for generations.
“Don’t let him go more than 2-3 days without…you know.” 😦
I laughed at first. Then I realized that she was serious. They all were. They rattled off scriptures and reasons, but the message was simple:
You do this or that because it’s YOUR JOB to keep him from sinning.
But like I said I was 17, so I was like, “Oh. I guess these are the secrets that aren’t discussed openly but are holding marriages together. They all seemed ok with it. They all seemed happy in their marriages and obviously not forced into anything. Their husbands are nice and seemed to love them, so ok.” And for the first 9 years of my marriage, I had that advice echoing in my mind almost daily. I thought about it when I was pregnant and the nausea was overwhelming my body. I was weak from puking all day and thinking, “2-3 days? Yeah, right? But…” I thought about it when he was going out of town and no matter what I was feeling, I had to “send him off right.” I thought about it when I was drowning in post partum depression and hated my body. “He has needs.” I thought about it when our son was nursing ALL DAY and ALL NIGHT from an undiagnosed tongue tie. “We’re both tired, but it’s been weeks, Uwem. Men have needs and what is he supposed to do?”
Then I thought about it when he told me he had struggled with a 20-year addiction to pornography.
“You had one job, Uwem.”
I wish I could say that I could laugh it off like I do with my kids and use the lightness to recalibrate, but I couldn’t. No one said it to me of course. That would be heartless. But the seeds had been scattered for 9 years, so I said it to myself.
“You had ONE job, Uwem.”
How else would I explain the devastation that had just invaded my externally great marriage?
“We were fine! How was I not enough for you?!”
He didn’t know then all of the sources of the rage I was spewing at the beginning of our healing journey. But it was from years of coaching myself to “always be available…don’t tell him, ‘no.’” Yeah, that was another piece of advice that I got. It was all of the times that I did what he needed and ignored what my body needed. It was the years of not even having the mental space to know IF I EVEN HAD ANY needs, particularly sexual ones. I gave so much more than I had and in that already depleted state, a porn addiction?!
That was when the F-bombs came back. I hadn’t said or even thought “spicy words” in years but somewhere in that foggy haze around D-day (Disclosure Day, but also known as Discovery Day in sex addiction/recovery circles), I couldn’t stop myself from playing and replaying, “WTF!” in my head all day.
“You had one job, Uwem.”
Meet all of his sexual needs so he doesn’t have to go elsewhere. WTF?!
Be available so he has the strength to be faithful to you. WTF?!
Get lots of lube, so it doesn’t hurt. WTEAF? (because Entire Actual just hit the right spot.)
**Dude! The #churchpeople are gonna crucify me for this one!! oh. well. SIDE NOTE: The fact that me alluding to profanity is more of a problem than 60% of men in church leader positions being addicted to porn and having a pornographic style of relating to women is worthy of all the f-bombs! No wonder a spaghetti strap sends them into a tailspin. It’s called OBJECTIFICATION. Here, read this. Stop, Uwem. Focus…**
So naturally, as I was confronting the devastation in my marriage, I was PISSED about that insane pressure that was put on me as a young wife, but thanks to 15 years in a church that elevated misogyny over Jesus’s true character, the worst of it was now coming from the inside. The guilt! I knew what all of those women had taught me, so my first distinguishable emotion was humiliation and fear. “What will they think of me?”
Now, I need to pause and interject a few thoughts from current, #HolyHotHead Uwem 2.0 for those of you who need to hear this RIGHT NOW. His addiction…his behavior…his issues are NOT your fault. My husband’s struggle with lust and pornography began when he was 12 years old. Way before we ever met. And despite the nauseating amount of TRASH books out there, there is nothing that a loving wife can do to prevent her husband from making crappy and damaging decisions. Nothing. Whether it is emotional abuse, sexual abuse/coercion, financial abuse, or physical assault, his choices are his own. And how he hurts you is not your fault.
But I didn’t know that then. So I wounded myself even more by believing that it was my fault. We had kids too fast, so I didn’t recover fast enough. My body is just screwed up. I mean look at me. Who wouldn’t want to look at porn with THIS to come home to? I shouldn’t have changed my hair. WHY CAN’T I LOSE WEIGHT?!? The internal war was raging and toxic and so loud! But on the outside, I was a homeschooling mom, Bible-quoting preacher’s wife, babywearing instructor, homebirth advocate, and all-around Susie Homemaker. I made homemade freaking chicken nuggets, y’all!! But inside, I was shattered.
When I shared what we were going through, only one friend stayed. She called. She sent texts. But everyone else gradually distanced themselves from our family. And in my already shattered heart, it was almost as if they were shaking their heads at me saying, “You must have done something.”
“Uwem, you had ONE job.”
But did I?
Clearly, I already jumped to the end with the interjection above. I couldn’t let you sit in that state for too long. It was miserable living it, so if that’s where you are, I understand. But my passion and purpose in life are to make sure that YOU know that you deserve to be loved, cherished, and appreciated. Men AND women have sexual desires, but our God did not create us with insatiable sexual urges that make us manipulate others out of an actual NEED. No!! That comes out of the insatiable nature of SIN. Not a need. The entire point of fasting is to remind us that we have the ability and the duty to bring our bodies into alignment with God’s will and His plan. We need food to survive, right? But we can choose to commit ourselves to fasting and prayer to get closer to God. So I am absolutely certain that men do not need sex more than Jesus needed food in the wilderness.
As years went by, I learned what the women who counseled me early on went through to maintain the image they projected on Sundays. I became them. The weight was heavy and the journey out of that was not what I expected. We are 6 years into a very different marriage. I am cherished. I am loved. I have sex WHEN and BECAUSE I want to. I am authentic with my needs, wants, and emotions. I do not carry the weight of his sexual and spiritual sobriety. (And he doesn’t either! Hello, Jesus! Meet us at We Are The Refuge if you don’t know THAT Jesus.) He seeks to show me love in the way that my heart craves. He listens to my words and the emotions behind them. He is not white-knuckling his journey either. He takes ownership over how his choices impacted me AND he acknowledges the internal struggles that led him down a path he wishes he hadn’t found. He is committed to his relationship with God, himself, and me. We strive every moment of every day to reflect the Triangle, the beautiful relationship when husband and wife are united in their pursuit of a faith-filled union with God. More on that in our marriage program, Marriage Made Well. We are both head over heels in love with the God who gave us more than we ever could have imagined. A healthy marriage and intimacy with God and each other.
And no, sis.
The weight of ALL of that was NEVER our job.
“Jireh…You are enough.” -Maverick City Music
If you are ready to engage with other women who are stepping into healing, join us as we #LoveBetterHealTogether and redefine #SquadGoals. Enrollments are open for the next “safe space” within the All Made Well community. Enroll NOW!!
…because yeah…it’s not our job.
