“The biggest hinderance to honest communication is time,” my friend said, and I thoughtfully nodded in agreement, my mind flitting back to the early years of our marriage. 

We began well. Communication seemed effortless as we talked and shared hearts that seemed to connect with little effort. We thought alike on so many points; we worked together nearly every day, and spent hours talking as we drove to and from work.

Three years into our marriage, when our first baby was still young, God brought an addition to our family in the form of a young girl who needed a home. This brought on new challenges, but also many blessings as we learned to live and work together, and slowly became friends. 

She moved out a year later, got married, and started her own home. It was rewarding watching her prosper, but close on her heels came the second girl. 

Years passed, and our family expanded as the Lord blessed us with three more children and two additional “bonus girls.” I loved our girls with all my heart and they were an incredible blessing to us, that I never want to take for granted, but being thrown into the “teen parenting era” three years into our marriage created challenges in our communication that we were unprepared to navigate. Add an autism diagnosis and a busy, pastor husband to the mix, and you know we were headed for trouble as our lives veered into polar opposite directions. I was floundering in the world of autism, caught up in a whirl of intense motherhood, and he was busy preaching, pastoring and trying to support us financially. Little by little the intimacy we had enjoyed, eroded. I was too exhausted to be the fun, engaging girl he used to know and he was too busy to notice. This created ample opportunity for misunderstandings and feelings of abandonment, things I would have readily communicated about whenever we drove somewhere…. except for the little fact that there were generally ears in the backseat, a phenomenon any of us with teens of our own, fully understand. We love them, but they make instant communication more difficult. When this happens in the natural course of life, we are usually 10-12 years into building a healthy, solid marriage and are less vulnerable to insecurity and misunderstandings. Jumping into it up to your armpits while simultaneously learning how to parent your own little ones is a bit jarring. 

I can’t count how often some little thing came up that I wanted to talk to Joseph about as we drove away from our house, but not wanting to drag our marriage into my relationship with our girls, or dishonour my husband by speaking up in front of them, I was quiet. “We’ll talk about it on our next date,” I would promise myself, but date night rolled around and the incident felt far away and insignificant. I wanted to relax and enjoy my husband, and didn’t feel like spoiling our time together by forcing a hard conversation. And so the misunderstandings piled up, one little hurt and difficult pregnancy at a time until they became a mountain in my mind. I loved my husband with all my heart, but I began doubting his love for me, because I was interpreting love through the filter of my own expectations. 

You may wonder why we didn’t talk other than when we went out on dates or while driving somewhere, and well you may ask. However, I assume by the very fact that you did ask, that you do not have experience with a child on the autism spectrum who slept very little and needed to be watched and engaged with every waking minute of his day and night. There was no such thing as sitting in the living room talking after the children were in bed because by the time the little man was asleep, we were half dead on our feet. 

 A month after our daughter’s 2nd birthday our second baby boy was born after a labor that was technically 1.5 hours, but which I jokingly told my friend had been at least ten weeks long. He was four weeks early and spent the first eight days of his life in the NICU healing from a pneumothorax. It was hard. Canadian hospitals are not the comfortable spaces I had been accustomed to in the Untied States. I couldn’t hold my baby. I had a hard chair to sit on in a sterile little space surrounded by beeping machines and bright lights. I held his little hand and sang and talked to him.  And I talked to the Lord, thanking him for my Mom who had come to stay with us for a week, and for Caitlyn, one of our bonus girls. I knew they were taking good care of both our other children while I was gone. 

Life wasn’t easy but I was strong. I threw my heart into being the best mom I could be and worked even harder to unravel the mysteries of autism. Yet somehow, all these layers of hard things were messing with my sense of what I thought I believed about God.  Why did it feel as though He didn’t care? Why the silence? Why did it seem as though every time I prayed for something, the exact opposite came to pass?

Joseph and I were so far behind in communication, I didn’t know where to begin, so I internalized rather than communicated. I couldn’t seem to wade through the things that needed to be addressed and the things that could be set aside, and I was too tired to try. I also assumed that if it wasn’t important to him, then I had no right to make it important to me.

My fourth pregnancy broke me. It was miserable from conception to birth which ended at 36 weeks with another week long stay in the NICU. I kept asking God what was wrong. Why did I feel so distant from Him when I was so richly blessed? I was grateful for my life and yet couldn’t shake the cloud of hopelessness that seemed to drain me of strength faster than Christ could fill me.  The disconnect between my husband and I felt colossal and insurmountable. Where did one even begin rebuilding intimacy when my whole life, including our marriage, felt like a public display for all and sundry? How was one date every two months supposed to be enough for me to live on, particularly since 90% of the time I was so exhausted I couldn’t string two coherent thoughts together? 

And then one day the Lord hit me broadside with the realization that I not only questioned my husband’s love for me; I was also doubtful of Lord’s goodness toward me, personally. I can’t say exactly what happened, only that I was at the very end of my endurance crying to God for faith to believe that He loved me, and suddenly my eyes were opened to the lies I had believed about Him. I spent days and weeks weeping, repenting and singing my way through Psalm 139.

“Lord, You have searched me, and known me!” (He knows all the details of my heart)

“You are acquainted with all my ways.” (He knows every idiosyncrasy and habit of my life)

“Even before I speak, you know my thoughts.” (He knows every thought that crosses my mind)

“You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” (He surrounds me with Himself. He leads me. He’s got my back. His hand is on my shoulder as He speaks to me through His Word. “This is the way.  Walk in it!”)

God healed my insecurities during those weeks, and gave me a foothold for regaining the confidence I had felt in the early years of our marriage.  As my perspective of God’s goodness changed, so did my capacity for letting go of my expectations of my husband. He was busier than ever, but I found that I didn’t need him in order to be happy.  Embracing the wonder of being fully satisfied with Jesus alone gave me the freedom to love my husband with confidence and delight, rather than gaging my success as a wife on my ability to serve him, or on the health of our communication. I let go of what I thought love looked like, and began appreciating the ways my husband showed his love for me.  And as I did, something healed deep within me for I found that what he had told me from the beginning was still true. He wanted me to be happy more than anything else. He loved me deeply, fiercely, and loyally, but he couldn’t read my mind. 

And so, my dear young friend, learn from the mistakes I made, for if I could have a conversation with my younger self I would tell her these ten things. Yes, there were factors the younger version of myself couldn’t control; circumstances that couldn’t be changed. Autism and the challenges thereof were not something she could run away from, but these ten things would have helped her deal with the hard seasons of exhaustion and strain. 

1. Never lose sight of the fact that God loves you deeply, intimately, and personally; that no matter the difficulty, God is good, good, good! 
2. Remember that God is your source. Run to Him and let him fill you until you have no need that is not fully satisfied in Him. My husband makes me ridiculously happy, but he is not my source of joy. 
3. Tell God about the things that hurt you. Write them down, not so you can pull up a petty list of grievances toward your husband when you finally have time to talk, but so you can process which ones need to be addressed and which ones need to be let go of forever.
4. Be confident in your relationship with your husband. If he is a good man, your happiness matters deeply to him, and your honest communication gives him a window into your soul. When you begin responding out of insecurity and give in to feelings of worthlessness, you rob your marriage of intimacy. 
5. When circumstances defy communication, let the peace of God guide your thoughts about your husband. Refuse the temptation to interpret his actions (or lack thereof) through the lens of, “if he loved me, wouldn’t he notice….?” 
6. Remember that hard seasons are just that, seasons. If you’ve had a few months of very little communication, by all means try to change that, but don’t panic and feel like your marriage is falling apart because there are a list of 27 things you haven’t had time to communicate about. Twenty year old marriages aren’t built in a year. Learn to look at the trajectory of where your marriage is headed rather than hyper focussing on the strain during a difficult period of repeated separation or added stress. Life keeps moving and before you know it, you’ll be one of those couples who can read each others’ thoughts at a glance. 
7. Laugh often. Laughter saved our marriage when we were too exhausted to communicate properly. We laughed until we cried at the irony of life and it’s unpredictable nuances. We still do. 
8. Believe the best in each other. My husband has ever been my biggest fan and best cheerleader. He believed in my good intentions even when I messed up miserably. In the same vein, though my own insecurities made me doubt my husband’s love, I never doubted his good will. In a reasonably healthy marriage, we are more often hurt by the motives we assign to our spouse than by the things they do or say. 
9. Make the moments count. For us, this is much easier since Dustin is older, and I get more sleep. It is truly amazing how easy it is to be a Christian when one does not live in a perpetual state of years’ worth of exhaustion. 
10. Don’t underestimate the power of engaging in a light-hearted activity you both enjoy. Deep communication is wonderful and necessary, but when one or both of you are too tired to think deeply, it is better to go play mini golf than start a hard conversation. You are not wasting your precious date time. You are making the best of a hard season. 

And maybe the one, single piece of advice I would give that younger version of me, is to remember that while the devil does his level best to destroy good marriages before they have a proper foothold, God is bigger and He is on our side. Difficult circumstances may hinder communication for a season, but if we are firmly rooted in the Lord Jesus, we have nothing to fear. The grace of God is big enough and wide enough to get us through the challenges and make our marriages deeper and stronger than they would have been without the extra difficulties.