Yes, you’re a parent, but you’re also a sexy mama! Ways to keep spice in your marriage. . .and why it’s important to model a healthy marriage in front of your kids.
Shelia Wray Gregorie, author of The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex, brings her fun and witty thoughts to the subject on the second Wednesday of each month starting in February, 2012.
Sheila Wray Gregoire is a syndicated parenting columnist and a popular speaker. The author of four books, including The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex. She loves encouraging women to forget about the dust bunnies under their beds and keep their focus on Jesus! She also has a passion for family, and together with her husband Keith speaks at Family Life marriage conferences around the nation. You can usually find her in Belleville, Ontario, where she homeschools her two daughters and knits. Preferably simultaneously.
You can find out more about Shelia on her website.
It’s probably the prayer Christian parents pray the most: “Please, God, help my child to grow up to love you.” Sure, we want them to get a good job, a good spouse, a good home. But mostly we just want them to follow God.
And yet all too many of my friends and acquaintances who are parenting teens spend their evenings checking out their children on Facebook, looking at pictures of drinking binges or statuses that they wouldn’t even recognize as their own children, now that those kids have left for college.
These kids who used to go to youth group, and who used to seem so innocent, aren’t seeking out a church. They’re not finding Christian friends. Intsead, they’re letting other kids pull them down.
That’s not unusual. In fact, that’s par for the course today. Most teens raised in a Christian home will not go on to live as Christians themselves when they’re adults. That’s the awful truth. I’ve seen statistics that say only about 18% of churched kids who went to public schools will still love God as an adult.
So what do you do? Whether your kids are 5 or 15, these are good things to start looking at now:
1.… continue reading
Messages in bottles have been the stuff of folklore for centuries. Dying, desperate sailors have hurled them. Curious children have launched them. Nicholas Sparks wrote a novel based on them, but don’t read it—or watch the movie—unless you already have a prescription for antidepressants.
The story I find most interesting about such bottles, though, comes from an experiment when two bottles were dropped off the Brazilian coast simultaneously. One drifted east, washing up one hundred and thirty days later off the coast of Africa. The other drifted northwest, landing in Nicaragua one hundred and ninety days later. They started in exactly the same place. They ended up half a world away from each other.
Something similar is at play with our relationships. We can never drift together; we can only ever drift apart. When you’re not paying attention to your relationship, you won’t end up closer. You’ll only end up separate. If you want to go through life in tandem with someone, you have to be intentional about it.
And I believe that there is no more important time to be intentional in your marriage than when you have teenagers. My family spent last Saturday shopping for apartments for our oldest daughter, who will be leaving home and heading off to university in the fall.… continue reading
I’m addicted to Diet Pepsi. I don’t drink a lot of it: usually only a can a day, and I make myself wait until 11:30 before popping it open. But that urge hits me by 10:45.
I turn to Diet Pepsi because I’m not a coffee person. Nevertheless, I’m a big fan of caffeine. And so I drink Diet Pepsi, knowing that caffeine and aspartame are bad for me, because I figure the pick me up outweighs the potential dangers.
I know what I need to do: I need to sleep more so I don’t need the caffeine. That, however, requires effort. And so I turn to the quick fix.
How often do we do that in our marriage?
When we need to lose weight we watch what we eat. We exercise. And we know it will take time. If we want a new job, we go back to school. We take extra training.
But when our marriage is blah, what do we do? Often we take the Diet Pepsi approach—we have this need for intimacy and connection and fun that we should meet through our marriage. When that doesn’t happen, we throw ourselves into something else, like hobbies, or homemaking, or church activities, or our kids. We take the easy way out.… continue reading
It isn’t the Kardashians of the world, or the starlets that grace our magazine covers. It’s the married women who have put in over a decade with their men, who had borne children and balanced checkbooks and navigated mother-in-law issues. When I did my surveys for the Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, I found that it was those married 16-20 years who report the best sex. That’s when we hit our sexual stride.
Now, society has long known that women often feel “sexier” in their late thirties and early forties than they did in their early twenties. We’re more confident. We often have more money to create a better image. We’ve more at peace with our bodies.
But just because society gets the timing right doesn’t mean that it understands women well. Instead of showing women that have hit their sexual stride in marriage, they turn to the Sex and the City phenomenon, or the “cougar” stereotype: in both cases, older, more mature women on the hunt for anyone to go to bed with. Reaching one’s sexual prime, where one is the most confident and the most “in the mood”, is seen as synonymous with throwing off the shackles of convention and having fun!… continue reading
The problem with teenagers is that they go to bed really late.
Once you hit that almost-middle-aged phase, though, you start to decide between two possible activities based on which one will get you to sleep the fastest. We like hitting the sack early.
This poses a rather tricky problem when teens naturally stay up until midnight and you want to be in bed by 10. How do you keep love with your husband alive when your kids are night owls?
1. Encourage Regular Activities
When my oldest daughter got her driver’s license, we rejoiced, and not just because now she could be the one running out to get that last minute quart of milk. We rejoiced because now she could be the one to drive her and her sister to youth group. That gave us four hours straight with both kids out of the house every week! It became our date night. We’d go out for dinner–or else cook something simple. We’d watch a movie. And then we’d have time to get affectionate before the kids were home. And we could be as loud as we wanted!
If you have younger children as well as teens, let those younger ones use “youth group night” as their evening a week to watch a special DVD.… continue reading
The panic sets in right around the time you’re putting sixteen candles on the birthday cake. You never experienced it before, but it hits you like a ton of bricks. Who is my child going to marry?
When children are small, we just assume everything will turn out well. But when they get old enough that we start to realize they just may be meeting that “special someone” any day now, we look around their social circle and realize the pickings are slim indeed.
Whether it’s because teenage boys don’t have goals in life, or because teenage girls are too pushy and—how shall I say this delicately—provocative, we begin to worry that there is no one out there for our little angel.
But as I’ve been driven to my knees lately praying for my teen girls, God spoke to my heart about my attitude. I’ve been praying that my girls will find good husbands, because that’s the desire of my heart. But what I’ve realized is that it’s more important for them to learn to rely on God. If He has a plan for them that involves singleness, they’re still going to have an amazing life serving Him! So instead, I gave over my dream of them marrying, and I said, “Lord, help prepare my girls for whatever way they can best serve you.… continue reading
“I just keep telling her, finish school before you have a baby!” my friend declared. We were talking about our teenage daughters, and she was very worried that one, especially, may find herself pregnant soon.
“And get married,” I added. “Don’t forget marriage!”
But my friend, no matter how much she may genuinely want her girls to marry well, doesn’t actually have faith that they will. You see, she made some mistakes when she was younger, and those actions have changed the course of her life. While she desperately wants her children to choose another path, she’s not confident they will.
When I was researching The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, I surveyed 2,000 women. And one thing I learned was that only 40% of women who are now Christian were actually virgins on their wedding night. Most Christian women had not waited.
Thus, most Christian moms of teenage girls didn’t wait, either. And now they’re wondering, how do I encourage my daughter to do what’s right and what’s best if I didn’t do so myself? I needed boys to make me feel special and wanted; likely she will, too. And we become fatalistic, like my friend is.
Or, perhaps we moms go in the other direction, so scared that our kids will mess up that we give them no freedom, in the hopes that they will wait because they won’t have a choice.… continue reading
By the time my youngest daughter hit 12, I officially was the female with the smallest chest in the family. Of course, that’s not saying much. As someone who was so thrilled to be breastfeeding because I finally made it into a “C” cup—albeit very temporarily—being ultra curvy has never been part of my identity.
It is a strange thing when one’s children enter those years when others will be “checking them out”. When our kids reach their “sexual prime”, or whatever you want to call it, we moms can tend to feel like frumps. We’re the outdated ones now.
It’s not that we necessarily want to go back to being seventeen—I have recurring nightmares of being back in high school—we just remember what it was to polish off a whole bag of chips ourselves and still have a flat stomach. We remember when we could try anything on in the store and still look gorgeous. And so we feel like we’ve passed a baton we were rather eager to hold on to.
That’s a natural feeling, but it’s not a healthy one, for us or for our kids. I’ve seen moms react in two extremes: some moms try to become the “fun moms”, dressing like teens and trying to befriend all their kids’ friends.… continue reading
The vast majority of messages that kids hear about sex go something like: “Don’t even think about it!” As I researched my new book, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, I came across woman after woman who relayed something like this:
Sex was never talked about in my home except to say “don’t do it”. I spent my whole pre-married life avoiding sex and trying so hard not to think about it. It was something bad. Then I got married and the switch was really hard to make. I’m still very embarrassed about sex in general.
Every youth rally I’ve ever been to included a talk on purity. Parents are worried about purity. Pastors are worried about purity. But if we’re not giving kids the other side of the equation–that when you do make love in a committed relationship, it is AWESOME!–then they can easily develop almost an abhorrence of sex.
… continue reading
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of the “if only” trap? I have. It started when I was in the sixth grade and sometimes I still get in this trap as a 37 year old wife and mother. Here are some of the “if only’s” that have gone through my mind over the years: If only I… [read more]
The Purity Movement By Sherri Wilson Johnson Talking about abstinence and purity is something I love. I have personally benefited from remaining pure until I married and, therefore, can share about the benefits of doing so with others. Because I have friends who did not remain pure and who… [read more]
Without Fear by @LauraKurk The post you’re reading right now was written in April. A week and a half after the Boston Marathon bombings and a week after the tragic explosion in West, Texas (one hour north of me). At the moment, our nation is still reeling. Maybe by the time this post goes l… [read more]
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