...Or a lack thereof. Strangely
enough, weekends have been one of the biggest adjustments in the
transition to married life. I anticipated the on-call weekends being
busy, and barely having the chance to see Gil, but I figured the
“off” ones would be more, well, weekend-y. You see, as a
bureaucrat working in Ottawa, my weeks generally went like this:
Monday – Go to work doped up on
coffee, grumbling about the work week starting.
Tuesday to Thursday – Trek through
the reeds, all the while counting down the days 'til the weekend.
Friday – Hot dog! Happy times are
here again! Get through 8 hours of work and then the time is all
mine! (Okay, technically I know that it is God's time, but I still acted as though it was mine.)
Saturday to Sunday – Don't work.
Ever.*
I don't think I realized until just now
how much that cycle of building up to a weekend, then being
disappointed at its brevity had made an imprint on me over five or so
years. While I did like my job, I hung on to the guarantee that my
weekends were for my own enjoyment, and also for getting all the
stuff done that is put off when you are working full-time and busy
with ministry and social activities during the week.
Even in the best of times, Gil has a
tenuous grasp on weekends. He tends to spend a lot of Saturday
catching up on sleep (something I am incapable of doing), and even
when he's NOT on call, like last Saturday, he often goes in to check
on patients. Even on Sundays, people call him to ask all kind of
questions, and sometimes he is called in for urgent issues. To be
honest, this was starting to bother me. Where was my weekend? I
thought we were supposed to use these early months of our marriage to
build memories and such. Now you're napping and I'm making Mandarin
flashcards! Argh!
What I'm realizing more and more is
that this is a problem of expectations. Namely, it is one thing for
me to ask Gil to spend some time with me when he has days off, but it
is another to ask him to ignore his needs to catch up on sleep as
well as his work responsibilities. I certainly cannot expect him to
know what I want to do and magically provide fun times just because
he is not at work. If I continue to expect him to awake early-ish on
Saturdays feeling well-rested and delighted to to go hit up museums
or go furniture shopping, I will continue to be disappointed.
Marriage is often about adjusting expectations to what God
realistically has for us, so if weekends packed with crazy
adventures are an idol based on a Hollywood movie, perhaps it is time
to love the new normal and to settle in for the quieter joys of a
Godly marriage.
Postlude: Interestingly, when this
post was half-finished, I read
this article, which really convicted
me to examine my unrealistic expectations. I encourage you to go
check it out!
*Okay, I'm slightly exaggerating. In
truth, on many occasions I was on-call to go into work should a
situation arise, but I never actually had to work.
