Knowing my husband "has my back"!

As a child I had one main dream, to have a family.  I wanted a husband and I wanted children.  It was that simple.

In my early 20's I was passionate about my career.  I studied and worked the long hours in order to succeed.  However, my ultimate dream never really left my mind.  I always knew when I met the right man I wanted to settle down, get married and have kids.

I use to say "I got lucky", I found the perfect man relatively young, we were married and we now have two beautiful children.  However, my psychologist says I'm not lucky, I worked hard to get what I want.

It always gets me thinking, is it luck? Or is it hard work to secure your dream?

Looking back we had a rocky start due to some cultural differences.  My husband has an Eastern European background and I'm Australian.  Although at the time the drama of it all was stressful I am thankful I went through that and fought for what I wanted.

So I guess my psychologist was right, in the early days I did work hard to keep my dream alive.

Once things settled down and we were in a "serious" relationship things did seem to be easy for us.  We were extremely happy and were living very blessed lives.

If I'm being honest even marriage and our first child didn't put much strain on our relationship.  We had some minor ups and downs, nothing that wasn't sorted out quickly.

It was after our second that things changed.  Things got a little difficult.

At the time we were living with my parents whilst we were building our home.  It was cramped and certainly not ideal with our toddler and newborn.  Despite this we worked as a team.  We looked out for each other and we "had each others back".

I was diagnosed with PND and even still we stood strong and united.

The time finally came for us to move into our own home.  We were so excited and I thought at the time that this would be the answer to our prayers.  We would go back to being us again.  That didn't happen.

I think finally being out on our own, the stress of PND, the stress of building, our employment struggles, our severe sleep deprivation, it just all caught up to us.

We became room mates instead of husband and wife.  We argued about silly things.  We didn't look out for each other.  Eventually we were just two people living in the same house.

I knew in my heart that something had to change and we needed to get our relationship back on track.  One thing we did do was communicate.  Yet even though we communicated our problems, we still could not seem to come up with a solution.

One huge change which definitely shifted things in the right direction was when James started to sleep through the night.  Once we had some sleep we then had the energy to engage each other.  To talk, to go out and enjoy our lives again.  Things were looking up.

I have to say though, it was very recently that I realised how much I still love this man.

Our entire family was struck down with a tummy bug.  First it was our 2 year old son.  Watching Chris take care of him whilst I did all the cleaning pulled on my heart strings.  A fathers love for his child is a very touching emotion to witness. 

Once James was better I was hit next.  I was lucky enough to be sick on daycare day so the kids were out of the house and I was able to rest.

It was this one tiny, insignificant text from Chris that really made me think.  He wrote "Don't worry about the kids, don't worry about anything, I've got it covered.  Love you".

Of course with my deep thinking mind it had my thoughts wondering around.  I came to the conclusion then that it isn't all about overseas holidays and fancy dinners (although I certainly wouldn't knock either of them back).  It's about the simple gestures we do for each other.

I think long term romance is about taking care of each other and knowing that no matter what he "has my back".

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure these conclusions have been struck by people many of times before and I'm simply writing about a topic you already know.  However, when they rung true to me last week it was a nice and refreshing feeling.

We have only been married five years this year, so here is to another five and may we stand and jump over all of the hurdles together.

My darling, I've got ya back!