Peaceful family life! Having a peaceful family life (our family theme) is one of our important goals.
As a couple, we believe it is essential to have simple, common, yet integral goals for your marriage, and family.
We decided that having a peaceful family and a calm and inviting home was our top goal for the kind of life we would like to have and raise our children in.
A peacfeul family is what we want to be known for.
Check out this post about how to create a peaceful home environment for your marriage.
How do we have a peaceful family life?
Communication, hand in hand partnership, working together as a team not against each other, agreeing on finances, and lots of patience are just some of the skills we use to make this happen.
We decided on this peaceful family theme for our peaceful home because of our future goals and past experiences. More importantly, we did not want to repeat some of our family or origin traumas or have our children have to go through them.
We quickly realized the best option moving forward was to identify what our past was, what our present is, and what we want our future to be. We both had different upbringing hence by identifying these, we were able to choose our family theme; peaceful family.
Ash’s take
Due to my upbringing, I didn’t know how to properly “disagree”, was very quick tempered, and had no patience the first year we were married.
Slowly and painfully, I swallowed my pride and took the steps required to work on these things, as well as the insecurities that popped up.
What helped us survive our first year of marriage was my husband being incredibly patient and understanding to me.
I had to learn how to love myself and heal that inner child that was still so wounded from the home I grew up in. I had to learn how to reparent myself, understand that my reactions were survival skills that were once needed, but now act as a prevention from connecting to others, becoming vulnerable, and are ultimately harmful to my relationships.
By learning how to respond rather than react, I’ve become a new person. And our home life is peaceful and loving as a result. – Ashley
Marcus’s take
I had to learn to understand where Ash was coming from. I needed to loosen up, listen attentively to her needs and not be rigid due to my vastly different upbringing.
Whenever we talk about our first year of marriage, I tell Ash, honestly, if she hadn’t changed, thus improved herself, we would probably be divorced because neither of us wants to LIVE an unhappy life.
And she agrees as we both have done a lot of growing and changing.
When it came to parenting, I had a lot more challenges that brought me way out of my comfort zone. In my family and culture, kids do as their told, and disrespect of any kind was not tolerated. As my wife showed me research upon research of how peaceful parenting, attachment parenting, and overall conscious parenting seemed like the best fit for us to raise emotionally intelligent children; it was really hard to let go of some of the beliefs I held on to and the rigidity.
With the information Ash passed on, our discussions, her support, and a whole lot of working together, we’ve come so far. – Marcus
Why you need to do it together
By working together as a team, trusting each other, listening to each other’s healthy critiques, planning, sharing duties and responsibilities, organizing our home to prevent clutter (As much as possible anyways with two kiddos), we were able to build a solid foundation for our marriage.
To help keep a peaceful family life, we have joint bank accounts, budget every month, we plan our goals for the year and break it down on the calendar.
We agree on child upbringing, respect each other, read at least one marriage or family book together each year.
Plan trips and fun family activities to help make lasting memories together. We enjoy every moment of our daily family time together. Which is a lot because we work together from home, and switch off who’s taking care of our daughters whom we homeschool/unschool.
We’re always together, which can seem impossible for some couples, but we love it.
We keep a positive outlook that everything will work out one way or the other; this helps us not to stress so much.
Final thoughts
Choosing a family theme has enabled us to grow together over the past few years in our marriage while nurturing our peaceful family.
We believe you can have a peaceful family life too, especially if that’s the theme for your family.
Check out this post on choosing a family theme if you do not already have one for your family.
Your turn:
What is your family theme?
How are you living it daily?
Image courtesy GubGib /FreeDigitalPhotos.net
