Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.

Philippians 2:3-4 New Living Translation

For a majority of our parenting journey, I woke up with the kids, and Afa went to sleep with them.

I am thoroughly a morning person, and I struggle to imagine why anyone would want to be awake after 11pm. But I can wake up at 5am with no problem, which is approximately when toddlers believe the day should start. Even when the kids were newborns, I would nurse them around 10pm and immediately fall asleep. If I could get four hours of sleep, by 2am I was ready to do whatever they needed, but those four hours were irreplaceable.

For the six years we lived in San Francisco, Afa’s job started much later in the morning than mine did, so I would head to bed at 10pm and take whichever kids were nursing with me. When did Afa and the other children go to sleep? I have no idea. I never asked because it was completely irrelevant to my life. I didn’t need to control anything about the time that he spent with the kids because I trusted him to love his children.

When we moved to Los Angeles, life shifted a bit. Both of our jobs started a little earlier, and Afa began to wake up in the mornings to go on a prayer walk before work. We also started eating healthier and trying to spend less, so Afa would take a packed lunch instead of buying food out. All of these changes meant that I was getting up at 4:30am, and he was getting up at 5am. 

But ten years into marriage, we have learned to love one another deeply – especially in acts of service. It is imperative that I get some time alone in the morning before the kids wake up. If I want my day to be successful, I need to have a quiet time in the Bible, work out, and sign in for work all in the still of the early morning. In order to facilitate this, we let our kids stay up later than most chidren their age do. They usually go to bed between 10pm-11pm, which allows us time to be out doing things during the week without changing their bed times constantly and allows them to sleep in long enough to let me start my mornings.

“Ay, there’s the rub.”

A new problem appeared when Afa started waking up between 5-6am rather than 7-8am. He was no longer to pull the night duties with the kids that he had done for years. We would get close to 10pm, and both of us were dragging. When we would put the kids to bed earlier so that we could go to sleep earlier, they then woke up earlier in the morning. As previously stated, I don’t do well if I can’t get through my morning routine before they wake up. I should probably be able to; alas, here we are. I am a better mom when I can set my day up for success. Ergo, one of us had to stay awake to put the kids to bed. 

Our nightly routine became one of trying to one up each other on who got to sleep more – I would volunteer to stay up so he could sleep, and he would volunteer to stay up so that I could sleep. The one who appeared more awake usually won out, and the winner frequently volleyed between us as supported one another through a new stage in life. It took me a little while to recognize it, but it brought me back to a conversation we had had early in our marriage with a couple who had been married for more than 20 years. They told us that if we had to argue, we should argue over who could serve the other. That seemed so unrealistic to me.

Afa and I have always been happily married, a fact I am eternally grateful for, but when we were first married, I had no idea how to have healthy conflict. I would often escalate fights quickly to yelling and screaming because I had no other tools to handle all those big emotions. So we were not arguing over who would serve one another; we were arguing over the dirty dishes or money or cars or any other inconsequential thing we could find to argue about. As I have matured emotionally and we have learned to read each other in a different way, we rarely ever have big arguments anymore – except about who can serve whom. 

We trade off going to bed early so that everyone is getting enough rest. We trade off making smoothies and packing lunches so that we both get our morning and afternoon needs met, and I have learned to switch off without keeping a schedule or keeping score. We meet each other where we are at in the moment. I try to be conscious of what a gift I have in a mutually respectful and kind marriage, and I think what a miracle it is compared to where we were when we first got married.

And my greatest lesson in this has been that it all starts with humility. If I am humble enough to choose his needs over mine and he does the same, all of our needs are fulfilled. If I dig my heels in the dirt and refuse to bend my pride until my needs are met, then none of our needs will be filled. Instead there will be constant conflict brewing beneath the surface. I need to hold tight to Philippians 2 and remember the example I have there.