How many minutes per week do you manage to spend alone with your husband? In order not to run anywhere, not to look at the phones - to be together, not to be? Our columnist Anna Miller - the wife and mother of two teenage girls - knows exactly what she's writing about.
Anna Miller
Children's writer, journalist
Adults - mom and dad, husband and wife, he and she - should be together.
Despite the number of children.
Despite the very important work.
Despite the fatigue and renovation.
Together.
Regular and obligatory.
Just walk.
Eat while chatting.
Chat without being distracted by the phone, TV, tablet.
Chat while listening.
Read to each other out loud.
Lie around.
This is more important than drinking vitamins or feeding your daughters soup.
This is more important than visiting relatives and buying laundry detergents.
Being together is just as important as being good parents. And we often choose in favor of parenthood, thinking that we ourselves have no right to be happy and carefree, without bringing happiness to them, children, every second.
We usually choose affairs, responsibilities, work, duty …
And we must at least sometimes choose ourselves, without thinking and not saying "this will not go anywhere" (STILL HOW IT IS GOING!), Without falling into a feeling of guilt (well, what walks along the embankments when children alone will be sad), realizing that this is necessary for the strength and reliability of the walls of the kingdom that we are creating.
And if we talk about children … children need to see that mom and dad are TWO, this is a force that strengthens each other, this is a wall and a fortress, this is "I want it the same way when I grow up", and not a service that feeds, carries, washes …
Children can and should see how mom and dad are holding hands.
How mom puts the cutlet first to dad, how dad kisses mom first when he comes home. They need to know that parents are for each other. Then it will be calmer, and no double standards.
They need to know, respect and not try to violate - the space of mom and dad, their time, their hugs, their conversations.
He and she should be together. Without this, everything will become dim, indistinct, it will cool down, the thing that started it all will be lost. Lost here is YOURS, around which you built the kingdom.
Your movies, your jokes, your gossip, your alleyways, your dreams of a house by the sea, your very strange lavender pancakes, and even your grumbling and bone-washing of acquaintances.
To be together.
Listen.
Talk.
Hear.
To make it interesting.
To hug and stand like this, and not run away on business and not fall asleep in mid-sentence.
Call just to hear and say that you are bored, and not to agree on who is leading to training.
Write "liu", not "toilet paper, cheese for soup, cucumbers, Borodino bread" … ask "you how", because it is important for you how. Even after the silver wedding is important.
Do not remove wedding rings.
Buy gifts for each other.
Feel the heel of the heel in a dream.
To know that it is important to be alone, to hold this only thread of yours.
Take and tell the children: we need to be together (they, of course, will be stupid to joke).
Tell parents: we need to be alone (they, of course, will be offended that without them).
Tell friends: we need to be alone (they, of course, will understand, because they need it too) …
