STEPPING OFF HOME BASE

CREATING YOUR OWN FAMILY

The transition from being single to being married is complicated on so many levels. One of the hardest things is to find your own “normal” as husband and wife. Many struggle to create healthy boundaries with their in-laws and combine their family traditions. My husband and I (Olivia) struggled our first year of marriage with both of these challenges. I often felt that he wasn’t interested in my family or family traditions, and he felt that I wasn’t interested in his. Because we live so far away from our family, most of these issues were able to be swept under the rug for a while. Once our first holiday season as a married couple came, we realized that we should have been talking about these feelings all along. In this lesson, we’ll discuss a few things that Shannon and I have learned in our time as married individuals.

Healthy Boundaries with In-Laws

Healthy boundaries come in many forms. The boundaries that we wanted to discuss in this lesson involve the boundaries you set with your parents and your in-laws. When you decided to get married, you chose your spouse and everything that came with him or her. This includes their family. They did the same for you. Your relationship with your in-laws can be wonderful, but you have to set good boundaries in order for it to be that way. Some good boundaries would include boundaries on personal space, finances, parenting, and the time you and your spouse spend with them. In the video on the right, Christian speaker, Jimmy Evans, shares some stories about having to set boundaries with his in laws and parents, and the boundaries his kids had with him. He says, "If your parents or in laws are intruding.... it will greatly impact your spouse."

So how do you set boundaries regarding your in-laws with your spouse? An important way to set good boundaries is to make sure you speak with your spouse ahead of time. In the same way that you need to discuss how you are going to parent your children, you need to discuss how you will interact with in-laws before you are in their home.

Every couple is different, and the boundaries you set as a couple may be different than the ones your in-laws had with their parents. That's okay. Remember that you need to figure out what is best for your new and blossoming family. In our lesson on communication, we talked about how you should try to understand your spouse's point of view before expressing your own. This applies here as well. Maybe you're comfortable with your parents walking in the door without knocking, but if your spouse isn't you should be as understanding as you can possibly be. In his book, Mark Shields, a retired divorce lawyer, said that one of the most important things to making a marriage last is being as easy to get along with as humanly possible. This is true when it comes to setting healthy boundaries with in-laws. Try to understand your spouse's perspective and be as easy to get along with as possible.

In this portion of the lesson we discussed the importance of boundaries. The next section we're going to talk about creating your own traditions within your new family. When you're first married, you have the amazing opportunity to make your family unique by creating traditions. Both you and your spouse come with different traditions that you each grew up with. While it is good to keep some traditions from both sides of the family, it can also be a joyous experience to make your own!

Creating Your Own Traditions

Creating traditions as husband and wife is so important. You grew up in different families and had many traditions within those families. Now that you're married, those traditions do not need to define your marriage. It is important that you create traditions. In my family (Tyson and Shannon), we love to participate in traditions with our extended family on holidays, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t create our own. I have an uncle that takes his family to Bear Lake, ID every Thanksgiving weekend to cut down a Christmas tree. While this may seem like a small tradition, this is something that their family has done to create their own tradition. The University of Missouri teaches that a tradition includes three elements:

Traditions are repetitive
Traditions are significant
Traditions are coordinated

We are still creating our own traditions as a family of three. One of our weekly traditions includes listening to music together on Sunday mornings. This is so small, but makes such a difference in our family. It brings comfort and peace in our home to have a simple tradition such as that. The University of Illinois says, “Traditions help to bind us together as a family.” To strengthen your new family unit, create traditions.

Be Willing to Make Changes

Just because your family did something one way, does not mean that it is the only way. I (Shannon) am very much my mother’s daughter. I do many things the way she would. Does that make my way the right way or only way? No. We need to understand that our spouses may do something a certain way because that is how they were raised. Instead of tearing each other down when one spouse does something the other does not agree with, work together and create new norms for your family. This is called a paradigm shift. The Webster Dictionary describes a paradigm shift as an “important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.” In marriage there are many opportunities to change your way of thinking to create a new norm within your marriage. Change is good. Change can also strengthen your marriage as you work together.

Conclusion and Challenge

Remember that together you created a new family unit. The families that you came from have made you who you are today. Take the time to create healthy boundaries that unite you and your spouse in word and heart. Create new traditions that will set your new family apart. The challenge for this week is to see where you can take one more step off home base. Maybe there are needed boundaries that should be created. Maybe you want to start a new tradition. Whatever you want to do, talk with your spouse and make a plan of how you are going to strengthen your marriage by stepping off home base.