The Happiest Mommy You Know by Genevieve Shaw Brown

Author:Genevieve Shaw Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

The Brown Family Rules

Be kind

Be grateful

Be nice to others

Be proud

Say please

Say thank you

Keep your promises

Listen to each other

Tell the truth

Say I love you

Laugh

Know how much you are loved

I had a lot of these nailed, at least outside of my own marriage. I could definitely be a little more grateful toward Ryan. I could definitely stand to say please and thank you more.

But the one that stuck out to me somehow is “know how much you are loved.” Because that week, deep in the trenches, Ryan nowhere to be found, I was definitely not feeling loved.

It was a sentiment I should express more in order to make Ryan feel more loved, and it was something I could benefit from feeling, too. Think about it for a minute. Do you ever stop to consider how much your spouse must love you in order to have decided to spend his life with you? My love for Ryan feels so natural, so strong. Every day, every decision I make, everything I do—I am thinking about him. But does he know that? Does he know how much I worry about his happiness? How much I wonder if I’m enough? How sometimes I think that he sold himself short by marrying me—that he could have done much better?

Certainly, he could have married someone easier. That’s actually something we’ve joked about in the past. He had a tendency to date people pleasers before he dated me. Or, at the very least, people who didn’t rock the proverbial boat much. But then, for some reason, he inexplicably chose me.

Of all the things I am—loyal, hardworking, quick to laugh, optimistic—there is one thing I’m not. And that’s easy. No one in my life would ever say that their relationship with me is an easy one. And since no one is closer to me than Ryan, it stands to reason that out of all the people whose lives I make more difficult simply by being in it, I make his the most difficult.

Because those positive traits I listed are just as easily countered by not-so-positive ones: inflexible, emotional, impatient, and demanding.

And yet. He’s still here. It doesn’t appear that he has any desire to be anywhere else. Is it possible that despite all my crazy, he loves me just as much as I love him? That the decisions he makes every day are made with me in mind? That he worries about my happiness, too?

If I accept this, and frame our interactions with that belief in mind, what happens?

I decided to try. And once I did, and stopped looking for things to criticize and started looking for things to appreciate, as Gottman suggested, there was a lot less tension, especially in those crazy morning hours. Because I began to notice how Ryan loaded the dishwasher every night after I went to bed, how he arranged for the laundry

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