Archive for Wives of Professional Athletes Series
Wives of Professional Athletes: Is Being “Too Tired” a Cop Out?
Posted by: | CommentsBefore I continue on in the article, I have been thinking about a comment that my fellows basket wife, Maria, made about part three. She offered a lot of alternative insights and thoughts to some of mine. I always appreciate the way her comments stimulate my thinking more. In regards to our husbands being too tired, she concluded with:
I am not saying that this issues are impossible to overcome, but to say that our husbands are too tired, at least in my family, is a cop out– especially when kids are involved.
As Maria said, this is for her family. But it got me thinking more about how we deal with the physical tiredness of Joe in our home. This is an area that I have struggled and thought through over the past 7 seasons and one that I have heard other basket wives speak of often. It is difficult to address because not only is it an issue that each family must figure out for themselves, but there are a lot of factors that come into play.
Here are some factors we consider for our family (I am only speaking of how we think about this issue, not how everyone must) and to take into account when we look at dividing up the family and household responsibilities:
1. We consider how my role in our home is defined. We definite my role largely by Titus 2:3-5, which says:
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
I know some people may not like this and I am in no way stating it as a rule, but for our family, we see my main role as being the worker at home. This isn’t to say that I would never work outside of the home, but my first priority is in our home, caring for Joe, the kids and our house. Obviously, our circumstances could change some day. If Joe were to get hurt or one of our kids had some medical issues where I would have to work, we would have to re-evaluate. But at this point, we are wiling to do whatever we can to have me at home as worker primarily. Because of that conviction, I see caring for the kids and work around the house as my job. This in no way means Joe doesn’t help out with the kids or around the house. Joe does plenty with the kids and in helping me. I have to guard against expecting him to do things, like chores around the house, instead of seeing them as a way he is serving and loving me. Again, this is not law, but just our conviction. Your overall conviction in this area will make a difference in how much you may expect your husband to do.
2. We consider the role Joe plays on a team. Right now he is usually playing somewhere between 33-40 minutes a game. Not only that but he is typically the focus of the other team’s defense with other players actually telling him that they are sent in simply to hack him and tire him out. He is going to be a whole lot more tired that the guys who are sitting the bench and only playing 5 minutes a game. Plus at practice he has to play against the guys who barely play and are bringing their full energy at him.
3. We consider what part of the season Joe is in. There are certain times are are much more tiring than others. I shudder to remember what preseason felt like, so I know that is a tough time for him. And at this point in the year, he has been playing now for 8 months, with the longest break being 4 days.
4. We consider what his training schedule entails. There is a lot of overtaining that goes on in Europe. This really wears on professional athletes when a job that is already physically tiring is made even harder because they simply practice too much, too long or too hard. There are a lot of symptoms of overtraining, but one that Joe really experiences is insomnia. So not only is he tired from all the work, but when you find it hard to sleep at night, it is tougher to feel refreshed and recovered.
5. We consider the overall attitude we want to bring to one another in our marriage. We are both aiming to serve and love one another, as well as be truthful and trusting. If my overall attitude towards Joe is that he is lazy and inconsiderate, I may see his “tiredness” in a different lens than I do if I view him as a loving husband who works hard to provide for his family and to love me as Christ loves the church. My aim is to trust Joe and believe the best (1 Corinthians 13:7). He is a great help in countless ways and a leader in many non-physical ways, so that I trust that if I am asking him to do something extra and he really is not up to it, he means it.
Those are things I try to keep in mind when Joe and I communicate on how much he is doing around the house.
In general, I don’t feel that most wives have an appreciation for the amount of physical work that goes into our husband’s job. I am thankful that I played soccer at a high caliber division 1 level, just so I have some point of reference to understand the physical stress on the body of a professional athlete. For Joe just to take a jump shot, when he lands he is putting 4x his body weight on his joints. The pounding of the body they go through every day just with the regular demands of the sport, plus the physical aspect of a contact sport (which intensifies things in certain sports) is more than our body was created to endure.
Do I think that there are times when the “I am tired” is an excuse, yes I do. But I know there are times I ask him to do something because I am being lazy myself. I am not always gracious when he tells me he is “too tired” to do something. Being a work in progress and still having sin reside in me, it is often a battle in my heart, but in the end I want to err towards the side of serving my husband and believing the best.
Wives of Professional Athletes, Part Five
Posted by: | CommentsContinuing on in our series…
Occupational uncertainty
1. Occupational uncertainty is inherent in different kinds of stressful occupational events, but perhaps the “waiting games” and “setbacks” in the husband’s career are two of the more difficult for a wife to cope with. In fact, these events are also very difficult for the husband to cope with because he is highly dependent on his career. Therefore, when they occur he will often shift his dependency from his career to his wife, and overemphasize his dependency on her.
In general, our lifestyle is not very certain. Even in the case of our husbands signing long term deals, those are never certain. You live from season to season (and often just from month to month), so that is enough of an inconsistency to begin with. When you add in the waiting periods, which is typically the summer months for basketball players, and setback, such as early releases from a team, the stress levels often rise even higher. We have experienced two longer waiting periods in our marriage, during the fall of 2006 and 2007, so those will be the times I will refer to in how some of these specific issues affected our family.
Both of those times were tough on Joe, as any period of unemployment usually is on the provider of the home. For those of you who read Joe’s interviews though, you know Joe went through a life transforming time after his sophomore year of college where God moved in his heart to replace the ultimate love and identity of basketball, with a love and identity in Jesus Christ. So although those times we hard on him because he struggled with 1) not providing for his family and 2) not being able to use the gifts God had entrusted him with, there did not seem to be an identity issue in those times.
I don’t know that I can say his dependency on me increased, since I don’t bring in a second income for our family. There were definitely times that he needed a bit more encouragement and the promises of God spoken to him by me. I think that it also helped to have constant reassurance that I still believed in his career and was content to wait and see what God brought about.
2. In addition to the increased dependency of their husbands, they disrupt the seasonal routines of the wives, which serve as ways of stabilizing family/marital life in an unpredictable occupational world.
The hardest part for me in those times was the interruption of the rhythm of life we had gotten into. I was used to being home in the summer and then gone by mid-fall, at the latest. I was used to scheduling summer activities, but once the fall rolled around, it was tough to know how far ahead we could commit to things. Usually when we were asked to do something, the acceptance came with a big “Lord-willing” surrounding it.
Waiting games
3. Contributing to a wife’s stress during the lockout was the presence of her husband in their home, because he “should be” at spring training and not at home–not “underfoot.”
It was interesting for me that after the summer time ended, an almost automatic switch turned on that said, “Joe should not be around this much anymore”. I found it really unnerving the way I had to fight against wanting to just tell him to go do something! He was still working out, doing things around the house, playing with the kids, but all of the sudden it felt weird that he didn’t have a job. The summer time never felt that way, but it was strange the way it changed when the fall time rolled around.
4. In discussing her ways of coping she told me, “I’d go to the bar a lot. I’d escape. I had my job, shopping, rearranging the house, and traveling to visit friends I don’t get to see very often. But all the time you worry. You don’t really ever enjoy anything.”
I can’t say I experienced a need to escape in those waiting times, but I can totally relate to things not being quite as enjoyable as I would have liked them to be. Being home for Thanksgiving and Christmas was nice, but it didn’t feel right and never brought the enjoyment one would have expected. People would constantly be saying to me, “Well, at least you get to be home for _____.” And while I was glad that we were, it still felt odd. It was almost like I was living in someone else’s life and it just didn’t fit right.
5. As another common way of coping with such stress, through her “domestic” control work, a wife will try to manage her constant worry about the uncontrollable outcome by distracting or distancing herself from the stressful occupational event (overfocusing on the care of the children, household tasks, or family responsibilities). Still another commonly used coping strategy is to block the situation out of her mind, and domestic control work helps her to do this. As forms of denial, such survival strategies may be effective when they are used for short periods of time. However, when they are relied on for long periods of time, serious consequences may result.
Distraction can be a deadly coping mechanism. It is something that all human beings do though and is not specific to only professional athletes wives. The difference is that we often have more opportunities to use it in stressful situations. Plus we can make it look acceptable. Even though we may not feel that people do not understand our stress in these times, sharing and being real about it is always more freeing than pretending it is not there. When we don’t deal with the root problem, we may get the weed above the surface, but the roots will grow deeper and have hold of you more.
Wives of Professional Athletes, Quote
Posted by: | Comments“Most fans, think that the player’s lives are glamorous, and that players, wives, and families do not have any problems that non-public families face; which is not true. In fact, we face more physical, emotional, financial, divorce, and stressful situations simultaneously that money can not solve than most people face in a lifetime.”
– Gena Pitts, married for 23 years to former NFL defensive lineman, Mike Pitts, who played for the Atlanta Falcons, Philadelphia Eagles, and New England Patriots, and Founder and Publisher of The Professional Sports Wives Magazine
