Marriage and Intimacy Tips for Christian Couples: Secrets of Happily Ever After

How to Stay Calm and Connected in the Chaos of Family Life

• Monica Tanner - Marriage and Intimacy Coach for Christian Couples • Season 4 • Episode 324

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When life gets chaotic, maintaining your sanity and your marriage requires intentional practices and clear communication. This episode shares my five-step approach to handling busy seasons with grace while keeping my relationship strong and cooperative.

• Start each day with focused prayer to identify what truly matters that day
• Ask for help confidently, remembering that it allows others the opportunity to serve
• Let your spouse know exactly how they can support you during busy times
• Make specific requests rather than general complaints about lack of help
• Keep "micro-disappointments" from becoming relationship-defining stories
• Create detailed lists and delegate responsibilities to lighten your load
• Practice saying "no" to protect your energy and relationships
• Express appreciation for all help received and prioritize daily connection
• Maintain relationship through daily check-ins, weekly date nights, and annual trips
• Remember that teamwork in chaos comes from intentional communication

Keep prioritizing each other in the chaos, and I'll see you next week, same time, same place. And until then, happy marriaging.


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Speaker 0:

Hello and welcome to the Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast. I'm your host, monica Tanner, and today's episode is a really good quickie episode because I have so much going on right now and people have been asking me, but also complimenting me, on the way I'm handling so much busyness and change, and so I wanted to do a quick episode that would not only give you some tips and tricks to handling some chaos because life can get chaotic at times, for sure but also on how to engender more teamwork, working with your spouse to get it all done. So this month has been extremely busy for our family. It started off on May 3rd when my son got married, so we had a wedding and I was responsible for catering a luncheon for 125 wedding guests not even in my own state, so I had to travel and we stayed in Airbnb and we had my son's wedding and I catered this luncheon, and that was also on my 23rd wedding anniversary, so we also celebrated that on the same day. Then I came home for less than a week and drove my daughter and her friend right back down to Salt Lake for a volleyball tournament all that weekend. Then I came home to my other daughter playing in the state tennis tournament and then I had a whole bunch of family come into town to watch the state tennis tournament as well as my daughter graduating. So she graduated from seminary, which is she did all four years of a church class in high school, and then we have the tennis banquet tonight and then tomorrow she actually graduates from high school with honors and all kinds of other cool cords of things that she has accomplished this year. So we're super proud of her and then my company, that all came into town for her graduation and for state leave.

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And then we're going on a trip and this is a very fun trip. We're taking my entire family of seven now with my daughter-in-law, as well as nine friends for my kids, and we're basically going camping on a lake. So if any of you guys are familiar with Lake Powell, you go on a houseboat and you basically camp or glamp for a week. You have to bring all of your food, all of your bedding, we have to bring boats and life jackets and gas and all the things it is a lot to prepare for, and all of this among my younger kids finishing up school and sports and all kinds of other things happening in the background. So, not to mention the fact that I'm still seeing clients, I'm still recording podcast episodes, I'm still doing interviews and I'm finishing up my book. So it's a lot. And so I wanted to jump on and record an episode about how I handle all the chaos without absolutely losing my mind, cause I have had to, like stop and not only take the compliments my friends are giving me, but also compliment myself like good job, monica, you are crushing this. And so, number one, my number one tip for handling a ton of chaos and doing it with my partner as my teammate and not my adversary, and not like losing my mind and getting grumpy at him for not pulling his weight and all of the things.

Speaker 0:

The first thing I do is, every day, I wake up and I say a prayer. I'm like heavenly father, today's a big day. Help me to know what is the most important things for me to accomplish today. And then I listen for a little bit. Have you ever heard the term pray with a pencil? This is what I do every morning. I pray with a pencil. I either do it in my bed and write in my little notebook next to my bed, or I go into my office where my agenda and my to-do list and my calendar and all the things are, and I just say a little prayer and I'm like Heavenly Father, things are, and I just say a little prayer and I'm like heavenly father, help me be able to sift out the things that are not essential and focus on the things that need to be done today. So that is the first thing that I do to set myself up for success during the day, when there are lots of things going on.

Speaker 0:

And the second thing I do is I ask for help. Now, this is a complicated thing, especially for women. I think we struggle asking for help, like we don't want to be vulnerable, we don't want to put other people out, we don't want to admit that we can't do it all, and I want to say hogwash to all of that. It is so important to know when you need help. Not only that, but it allows other people to serve when they want to help you. Other people love helping.

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Think about if someone were to ask you for some help and it wasn't outside of your abilities, like it was something that you could help with. Doesn't it make you feel so good to be able to help? Not only that, but, I think another common roadblock that we encounter when we go to ask for help is we're like oh, but what if they really can't, or they really don't want to and they can't, they don't like say no to me or whatever, and they feel uncomfortable about it. Here is something I want to bring to your attention. Other people need to be in charge of their own boundaries. So if you ask for some for help and somebody agrees to help you, you can just assume that they are able and that they want to help, and if that's not the case, they need to worry about that. Not you Don't not ask for help because you're trying to protect somebody else. You are giving them the opportunity to exercise their boundaries, like, if they can't do it, they should be able to say no to you. That's something that they should learn, and if they can do it, then they're probably super excited and grateful for the opportunity to help. So either way, you're giving them the opportunity to grow, so you can be happy about that. So asking for help is so important, especially when you're weighed down.

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So I have asked for so much help this month. I had a friend of mine who's really good at planting came over and helped me plant all my flowers, helped me go through my flower beds and pull out this old, dead stuff, and she loves planting and she was so happy to help in that way. I've also asked for loss of crock pots. I've had my sister-in-laws help me. They've come over late into the night and like help me prepare food. My husband has been so extremely helpful and right now this is a cool story.

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So my son and his wife are in town. They've been here for a few days and one of my favorite things is watching when my new daughter-in-law is busy in the kitchen. She'll either be doing the dishes or she was making cookies to help get ready for this trip that we're taking and my son will come up to her in the kitchen, wrap his arms around her and say how can I help? I love watching this. It is so fun, not only because I'm getting to see my son just be an awesome husband, but I was like where did he learn how to do that? And the answer is he learned from watching his dad all these years, his entire life. His dad has always my husband been willing to help me. Now he hasn't always been like wrap his arms around me and ask how can I help? I have partially trained him to do that. Now he is naturally very helpful. His love language is acts of service, so he does love to serve and help.

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But nobody can know all the ways in which you need help. Like he can't read my mind, and so I've had to ask for help in a lot of different ways, in a lot of different circumstances, so that he knows the exact kind of help that I need. So, for example, at the beginning of this month, I knew that sleep was going to be of utmost, super uber importance, because if I don't get enough sleep and I'm burning it at both ends, I can tend to get really really anxious. But as long as I'm sleeping and my brain is functioning properly, I do really really well. So I, at the beginning of this month, when I knew there was going to be so much going on, I said love, will you help me make sure that I'm getting enough sleep? And he was like yes, so sometimes, when there's things going on late at night or the kids are still out on the weekends, or if I'm just like feeling exhausted, he's like you go to bed, I will handle this Right, cause I asked him ahead of time to help me make sure I get enough sleep.

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Another thing I asked him to help me with is getting exercise, because I know when I get busy, the first thing that I get rid of is my exercise, and that's so important for me to stay mentally clear and physically active right. And so I said will you help me make sure I get to the gym? Well, this is easy for my husband because we work out together a lot. He likes to take get me up in the morning to go to the gym. However, this is in direct contrast to me needing sleep. So what we've been doing because he'll try to get me up in the morning and I'm like, nope, I need more sleep as we go on walks at night. So he makes sure that every day I get some exercise, whether it's going to the gym in the morning or getting out for a walk in the evening. He always asks me when he gets home from work have you been able to exercise today? And I will say yes or no, and then we he'll either make me go to the gym with him or we'll go out for a walk or whatever. So the two things I asked my husband explicitly for help at the beginning of the month I knew I was going to need help with is sleep and exercise. And then, you know, eating healthy, which I can take care of, making sure that I'm eating healthy foods and stuff like that Really really, really important. So that in and of itself is just really important.

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Now you might be saying to yourself okay, monica, this is all great, but my husband doesn't help, or my spouse doesn't ask what can I do to help? Here's what you do in that case, because the reality is is your spouse probably does want to help you. They probably are interested in helping with when things get really chaotic and there's lots going on. But sometimes the way we ask isn't beneficial or we tend to complain like, oh, my spouse never helps around the house, they never pitch in, they're so lazy, they just come home from work and they sit on the couch for the rest of the night and they never help. And I do everything, right, we complain about it and that's definitely not going to get us what we want.

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So here are some statements or questions that you can try to get your spouse to be more helpful. So if I'm busy in the kitchen working on something and I noticed that my spouse is sitting down or not like necessarily working on anything. I'll say hey, love, and you can insert any phrase, any like term of endearment, right, like don't say hey, brah, that's what my teenagers do, that's not helpful. But like honey, love, darling, whatever you call each other schnookums, I could really use some help right now. Would you mind dot dot, dot, holding this bag for me, or taking the cookies out of the oven or stirring this while I'm doing that?

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Whatever, if you are really specific and you're kind and you ask for help, most spouses are going to stop what they're doing and want to help you. And if they can't just like we were talking about before they might exercise their boundaries and say I can't do that like we were talking about before, they might exercise their boundaries and say I can't do that right now, I'm unavailable, or something like that. Now here's the key to that If they do refuse to help you or they're unable to help you in that moment, I want you to think of it as a micro disappointment. So make sure you're keeping micro disappointments micro. So if they say I can't do that right now or I'm unavailable, then that's just one instance where they weren't able to help you when you needed it. Not like they never help, not like they're incompetent and lazy and totally unwilling, but if you think of it as just this in this one time they weren't able to help me with this one thing. And then try again and again, and again and keep asking for the things that you need, but don't complain and don't generalize it to your relationship, because then you'll start to resent and you'll stop asking for help and you'll just assume that they're not going to help you. So that is my little soapbox on asking for help. It's really, really important.

Speaker 0:

Now the next thing I do really well when things get chaotic is I make lots of lists and I delegate. So part of being able to ask for help is delegating. So now I told you we're taking nine friends to Lake Powell with us and what I did was I created a list of all the days that we're going to be there and all the meals and snacks that we're going to need, and I made myself in charge of dinners and desserts and then I delegated out all of the other meals to the other moms who are sending their kids, and guess what? They are all happy to help and if, for some reason, one of them couldn't help, then it's their responsibility to say no, I can't do that, but none of them did. They were all very happy to pitch in a lunch or a breakfast for 25 people for us while we were on the boat.

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So I delegated and I made lists and, as they would respond back to my texts, I wrote it down on my list and now I have this beautiful, very organized chicken scratchy list of all of the meals, all of the things I need to bring, all of the things that other people are going to bring, the things that we need to pack and all the things that we need. Like we borrowed some coolers from some friends. That was me asking for help, cause I was like I don't want to go buy all of these coolers that we only are going to need this one time, right? So I asked for help and people were absolutely, if they didn't want to lend us their cooler, they could have said no, but most of them said yes. So and I've asked for crock pots so that I could crock pot things early and get them in the freezer and things like that. Right? So I asked for help and I delegated. So lists are really, really important, especially when things are chaotic, when you've got a whole bunch of things rolling around in your head and you don't get them down on paper. That's trouble, right. So for me, I make lists and even if they're messy and disorganized at the beginning, I usually can get them organized and helpful by the end. All right.

Speaker 0:

Number four I think we're on tip to stay sane, and all of the chaos and feel like a team. When you're doing it is saying no. Often I say no a lot probably not as much as I should, but I do say no. So, for example, if my son texts me from school and says, mom, can you bring me something to eat, I will say no. Next time or tomorrow, you should pack your own thing to eat. If you don't like what's for lunch, right, I am not going to stop all the things that I'm doing, especially if I have appointments or interviews or things that I can't not do to bring you lunch. You should have thought of that beforehand.

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Now he's 13. He doesn't think ahead very well, but this is an opportunity for him to learn that if I don't think ahead and be responsible for my own food, then I'm going to be hungry or I'm not going to like what's for lunch or whatever and my mom might say no. So it's very important to say no. Or there are grad parties and all kinds of other things that are also happening and I haven't been able to either go or contribute to them or whatever. I've had to say no. I can't do that at this time, which because I am good at saying no when I can't take on another thing. I really appreciate it when I ask for help and other people are able to say no. I totally get it Like if you could help, you would, but I appreciate you saying no because it's too much right. So that goes. Asking for help and being able to say no. Sometimes they those go hand in hand.

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And the number five tip to getting a lot of things done and maintaining teamwork in the chaos is appreciation and prioritization. So I am very appreciative to all the help that I get. I write thank you notes whenever I can and I love to make cookies or something to bring to people who have let me borrow their crock pot. Sometimes I bring back their crock pot full of cookies or whatever when I have time not all the time, but whenever I have time to do something like that I do and then prioritizing my re myself. So if I need sleep, I'm going to sleep. When I need to go exercise, I go exercise and I prioritize my relationship. So I make sure that I still make time for Ben and I to go for walks Every day.

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We go through the things that we're working on, the things that we need help with, every single day. We make a little bit of time to connect emotionally and talk about our day. And then we make sure we go on date night every single week. We do something fun. We just scratch all the things that we have going on and we just go and do something fun. And then, at the end of all this chaos, we make sure that we have a trip planned. So those are my three ways to stay emotionally connected. It's daily connections, weekly date nights and yearly trips. So we make sure that, no matter how chaotic and busy that it gets, we're prioritizing those three things for our relationship. All right, so that is five tips or five ways that I maintain my sanity and also my strong relationship and teamwork with my husband when things get crazy chaotic.

Speaker 0:

So just to review number one, I start off every morning with a prayer what is needful today? Number two I ask for help. Don't be afraid to ask people to help you. Number three I make lists. I do brain dumps, I write lists, I organize it as I go, but I live and die by my lists. Number four I say no as often as I can. If something is too much, if I can't do it without being resentful and frustrated about it, I say no. Being resentful and frustrated about it, I say no. And number five appreciation and prioritization. I make sure I say thank you and I make time for the things that are most important to me, especially my relationship. So thank you, guys, so much for spending this time with me. I hope that you guys have a wonderful week and that you keep prioritizing each other in the chaos, and I will see you next week, same time, same place. And until then, happy marriaging.