endure to the end

I'm feeling very reflective today on ones ability to control ones life. I was at the park today with some friends from church and we began discussing challenges we have or are facing. All of us have husbands that are in school or are looking for work. It actually struck me as odd that we all had so much in common. Even though we had individual struggles we all had the same ultimate one which is it can be hard being the wife and supporting your spouse as they find there way in this life. There is a fine line we have to walk to gently guide them and be supportive while they are going to school or looking for work. If we say too much we are being nagging or controlling and if we don't say enough then we are not being supportive. I am by no means saying that a man's role is easy either, common they have to put up with our hormones, and they have to be the one that is suppose to support the family. I guess right now I find it humbling that no matter how different our lives are there are many things that most LDS women have in common. I will hopefully never know how hard it is to have the pressure of having to do well in school so I can get a job to support my family. But like wise our husbands will never know how much we have to do to hold it altogether so that we add no more pressure to them. Sometimes I forget that while I'm waiting for this period to be over ,so that we can truly get on with our life, I realize that our life was really going all along. If you miss the opportunities to cling to one another while things are tough you will never really realize how great things are when things are easy. Being a wife can be even more challenging when the end destination is the same but the road you travel to get there on is different. It can be tough to decide whether you should give up your road, especially when you know it's the right one:) or nag them over to yours, it doesn't matter how you say it they will take it as nagging. Somehow all marriages come to these roads and while some women are content to never budge from there roads it really isn't any worse then those that never acknowledge there is any other roads but there husbands. Hopefully our husbands married us for our brains and not just our perfect bodies, otherwise they are in for a surprise to see what's left after 5 babies! We just have to be better about our approach It can just be so tough to sit and watch there choices affect our lives even when they make the right ones. I am lucky my husband values my opinion, for the most part anyway as you might have noticed I have an overabundance of them, He trust me and I trust him that no matter what road we choose to walk down, we do it together. We can only truly control a few things in this life and one of them is our attitude no matter the situation we can chose to be happy and positive. The most life changing book I have ever read , other than scriptures, was Dr. Phil's Life Strategies. I wish that everyone could read it. I recommend it to everyone who has ever struggled, will ever struggled or has ever been born! We all have similar struggles we couldn't all be alone otherwise during the atonement Jesus would have been there forever enduring each individual unique pain we each would have, he'd still be in there, so with each new struggle we can take comfort that even when we don't know anyone personally with the same struggles there have been many and are many that have endured this and isn't it always amazing how quickly the struggles are forgotten once they're over