A Family and Infertility

It can be so hard to see the blessings when going through infertility. It can feel at times that nothing is working out and you really have to be patient. It feels like you are waiting and waiting and there is no light at the end of that tunnel. But there are so many things that we can learn as we are waiting and being patient.  It can be a blessing to know that it is going to take some time to get all the medical things lined up before having a baby. This time gives you the chance to prepare. We can prepare in many ways. One way is preparing our living space. We make tentative arrangements are brainstorm ideas of where we would put a baby.  The next things that we can do is prepare our relationship. Most people know that a relationship changes a lot after having a baby. You are exhausted and emotionally drained often that it can be difficult to do things for yourself and your relationship after having a baby. Some people observe that marital satisfaction is highest in the "honeym

Dating in Marriage? What? You mean to tell me that after you have gone through all the work to date and get to know someone and then eventually marry them, you still have to date them?  Yep! That is exactly what I mean. What does dating even mean and why is it important? There are many ways to define a date. In today's world it has become very common to just hang out. This often takes the pressure off, and you feel like you can be more yourself.  But are there drawbacks to this? Yes! When you are going dates with someone you are often paired off. This allows you to have conversations one on one with this person. This often doesn't happen with hanging out because you have other people around to bounce conversation off. When you are paired off that person becomes responsible for you for that time, and it can show you how they would take care of you if you were in a defined relationship. This also means that you are responsible for that person as a relationship goes both ways.

Men. Women. Are we really all that different? If we are, or aren't, why does it even matter? We have all heard the sayings that male and female brains are wired differently. This is in fact true. Men have more gray matter in their brains and women have more white matter. Gray matter helps the men to be able to hyper focus on one task at a time and the white matter helps women to move between many tasks very quickly at a time. This can cause complications in a marriage. Men's mind are storages for boxes, and everything has a box and they can only open and look at one box at a time. Women are often compared to a ball of wire where everything is connected to everything, and they can go back and forth between everything without putting something else away. This difference in thinking can cause a husband and a wife to argue and become frustrated with one another. This can make it difficult to communicate about how you are feeling and knowing that you are being understood. When a cou

Money, money, money.  Its quite an important thing but can cause such heartache at the same time. Money in a family can really change the way a family functions and interacts within itself. We often assume that families who do not have a lot of money struggle more than families who do have a lot of money. This is true in many cases.  Typically families who have a low SES, or socioeconomic status, are more at risk for certain things than others. Low income families typically do not have access to same opportunities than high income families. This can mean better opportunity for schooling and education or maybe even more connections to people to help you climb up that ladder of success.  Money truly does dictate many things in our lives and can almost make or break us.  When wanting to start a family a lot of people will consider their financial state and they will make a decision on whether they think they can afford to have a child so that they can insure that the child gets the best p

Boundaries. What are they and why do they matter? Salvador Minuchin developed a way of communicating what he was observing about families. He created symbols and a way of drawing out the relationships between families. He observed mainly three types of boundaries. The first one was rigid boundaries where little was shared between systems. The next type that he observed was Permeable or clear. This is where a healthy amount of information sharing is going on between the systems. And the last one is poor or unclear boundaries where too much information is shared between systems.  This can be explained by this picture of houses.  The house with the blue walls up around it represents the rigid boundaries. Not much can get in or out of those boundaries. The house in the middle represents the unclear boundaries where information can freely leave and there is really no containing it. The house with the green boundaries represents the clear boundaries and this is where some information can go