It's All About the Cleaving!

“President Spencer W. Kimball, referring to Genesis 2:24, said: ‘She, the woman, occupies the first place. She is preeminent, who are so deal to all of us. Even the children must take their proper but significant place. I have seen some women who give their children that spot, that preeminence, in their affection and crowd out the father. That is a serious mistake.’ We might add that it is a serious mistake for newly married sons or daughters to put their parents in that first place and crowd out the new husband or wife.”

-James M. Harper and Susanne Frost Olsen

I recently had a discussion with someone close to me about some choices they had made in previous relationships. This person explained to me that in their previous marriage, the mother was so involved with her children and their lives, that she left little/no time to be a wife. She was an A+ mother, daughter, employee and friend, but was really failing her marriage. The father was doing very well in his job, in his calling and as a friend, but was also failing as a spouse. He felt that she was putting the kids above him, and she felt that he was always working, so she had to. Eventually choices were made that ended the marriage.

I knew this part of the story already. But what I didn’t know was how nervous the mother was to hurt or leave her children. Her husband wanted to go on trips alone together, but she was always too scared to leave the kids. He wanted date nights, but she couldn’t handle the thought of a babysitter. She loved her kids so much, that she wanted to do the best she could as a mom. After discussing it, her advice to me was to put my husband first.

Genesis 2:24 reads, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

I remember the bishop from my teen years telling us a story about his dad. He said that one night at Sunday dinner, the kids asked the father if all of his family were drowning in the pool, who would he save first? His reply was: “I would step on every one of your heads to save your mother.” Obviously this is a dramatic example and supposed to be kind of morbidly comical, but it has always stuck with me. Spouses come first….always. It’s all about the cleaving!

It can be very easy for us to break the order of priorities. We should put God at the top, then our spouses, then our children, and so on… If this order is broken, things are not working properly. Things don’t feel right, and actually feel really bad when the order has been changed.

When I put my husband in his rightful, and preeminent place in my priorities, things are better. We still struggle with life’s fun puzzles, but we do it together. The best gift that I could ever give my husband is to put his needs and wants above all else. My children are some of my greatest treasures and blessings, but my husband is my companion throughout eternity. He is the one who will stand by my side forever as my best friend. My parents and family are still some of my favorite people and mean the world to me, but they have their proper order in my priorities and they respect that! They are cleaving to spouses, too!

I am grateful for the peace that comes to my soul, to my marriage and to my home when priorities are in their proper order. I am grateful for a spouse that always puts me first, and for kids that see him do it. When the order is followed, we all benefit!

Cookies!

When my husband and I were in engaged, just a few weeks before we were married, I experienced my most memorable lesson about learning from a [future] spouse. We were driving on the backroads of our little farm town, talking about the plans for the wedding reception. Some of his family, who were not yet used to thinking of us as adults, were struggling to come-to-terms with some of the plans. As a natural people-pleaser, this was really hard for me. I remember they wanted to change things I had picked out, and even though I had had my heart set on them, I was contemplating the change. I just couldn’t handle the thought of them being upset by me!

My sweet and amazing husband, then just my fiancé, put his foot down. He explained to me that if people have a problem with something that I love, that it is their problem. If I was kind and didn’t do anything wrong, then I shouldn’t feel bad. And if they still were annoyed, then it was their fault for choosing to be annoyed.

This was just so entirely different than anything that I had ever believed. My husband called these people and told them no, that they were stressing me out and to leave me alone about it all. And they did! And they didn’t hate me! Weird!

I remember this occasion not just for the lesson that he taught me about how to handle my people-pleasing tendencies, but for how different we were. For the first time I really understood that we were distinctive people, who reacted differently, but that we worked together.

This is perfectly explained by Elder Henry B. Eyring, at the end of his talk “That We May Be One:”

“A man and his wife learn to be one by using their similarities to understand each other and their differences to complement each other in serving one another and those around them.”

Since then, we have obviously had more differences pop up. I think they really work together to balance us out. I am a bit more bossy, while my husband usually has an along-for-the-ride attitude. I love to bake, and my husband loves to eat cookies. I stress about people seeing our house when it looks messy, while my husband doesn’t care if guests know that people actually live in our house. Those things can sometimes cause a little friction, but usually they work to even out our craziness to normal levels. And isn’t that balance what it is really all about? Finding what makes us one?

Being “one,” doesn’t necessarily mean being the same. It means that we are united. You can be united in purpose, in love, in goals...in so many things without being exactly the same. My husband and I work to be united, and because of that, our home can feel united. We work together to raise our children, to perform our callings, to be with our families, to love our neighborhood neighbors and to get through school. It starts in our marriage and works its way into everything that we do. The opposite thing happens, unfortunately, when we are not as united as we should be.

I am grateful for our differences, and I love our similarities. I love that both parts of our relationship work to bring us together as “one.” We fit each other. And…it is kind of nice that he is there to make sure no cookies go to waste.