Getting my priorities straight

I was cruising the headlines on Yahoo! and I found this article, Loving the Husband More Than the Kids is Key to Good Life.  I am a sucker for relationship-related articles, and this obviously piqued my interest.  The author supports putting your husband ahead of your kids as crucial to a happy family.  Often, women feel that they must put their children ahead of their spouses (and themselves) to prove to the judgmental world of other women/mothers that they have their priorities "straight."  It's all supposed to be about the kids, right??  She says that if women put their marriage ahead of their children, the whole family will be happier in the long run. 

As a mother/teacher/human being, it's been driven into me that the kids (my students, the starving children of Africa, my own child, etc.) have to come first or I will be a bad person.  Obviously, my child is important; I'd do pretty much anything if I knew that it would help her.  Most of us probably feel that way, right?  DUH!  I'm not promoting leaving your kid to cry in his/her crib in a dirty diaper so that you and your husband can have a quiet dinner, but I do think that creating couple time is essential to a happy family.

As much as I believe that, M and I have been doing a pretty poor job lately.  Before Evie was born, I thought that our first year of marriage was the most difficult.  And it was difficult.  We had lived together before we got married, but something about making it legal changed things for us.  We weren't always very considerate of each other, and we had to find our groove.

About a month after our first anniversary, we were out for dinner one night, and we were laughing and having a great time.  I looked at him and it hit me that we had gotten past the rocky, newlywed period.  I said, "Being married to you is really fun."  He said that he thought so too, and from then on, it was the two of us: married and loving it!!

Of course, we both knew that having a baby would change our relationship, but I didn't think it would take us this long to find our groove again.  I still love being married to M.  He is my best friend, my biggest supporter, the only person I want to talk to about my biggest dreams, and my biggest fears.  After Evie is grown up and living her own life, he's the one I still want to be with. 

Reading that article really made think.  Who have I been putting first?  Have I been giving so much to Evie that I don't have anything left for M?  How must that make him feel???  I showed him the article, and we had a long talk about it.  I hope that it changes the way we think about our family.  I want Evie to learn what a loving marriage looks like, and I want to start putting M first.