HAPPY FIRST

I created Pioneering Again to focus on various issues women face as WIVES in an age where it feels like we are starting over again in a new world as we:  

~Seek to honor our husbands.

 

~Learn what respecting them actually looks like.

~How to focus on being the best self we can be.

~Brining goodness to our marriage in the way we are designed to.   HINT: it's about us being happy first. 

I have created different spaces for mothers to discuss child rearing, as those principles and processes are very different than focusing on wife-dom.   This post crosses over, delving into details about BOTH of these roles.  

There is a third crossover too, since we have each also been daughter to a woman who might not have been able to meet certain needs when we were young.  

What follows is actually a triple crossover post for 

WIVES.      MOTHERS.       & DAUGHTERS.

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Knowing what I need can sometimes feel like a herculean feat.  

Mothers are supposed to attune to baby in the first 9 months before baby can intentionally articulate.  

Then in toddlerhood, we are designed to learn how to verbalize, and appropriately express needs in order to be socially congruent as well as stay in harmony with ourselves and our mother.  

For some who didn't have the chance to learn these things, attempting to attain these skills later in life can be embarrassing, frustrating, and just plain challenging.  

In the good stories within our culture, one hardly sees examples of mothers properly working with their babies and toddlers during those epic times of much needed tender attention and time, and it can feel like a faux pas to discuss such things in polite company.  

In our day, mothers are often pressured into being seen and not heard in society in general, and as a whole.   

It's a mothers' role to train toddlers how to properly articulate needs, and learn how to regulate emotions.   

How does this impact wives, and marriages, families and society?  

There is a lot to cover.  For today, I want to point out that from where I stand, it looks like the lack of being well mothered seems to be a cause of severe unhappiness for wives!!!  

Due to my own background of generations of marriages gone amok, I have been on a long journey to understand what is going on in marriages that causes so many women to be unhappy.  I could probably write a short book about it (great idea!), but in the mean time, I am convinced after years of observation, research, and personally wrestling with dozens of concepts related to all this, as well as working with other women who also had lack in the early years with their own mothers: 

WOMEN who become WIVES who we were not properly nurtured as DAUGHTERS can struggle terribly to be happy in their marriage.  

Our culture and societal histories have prevented us from being able to identify our own God-given female needs, and instead has succeeded in shifting our thoughts to feel it is the man's single responsibility to make us happy, rather than it being our work first, and then something we invite them into participating with.

Even so, I am happy to say I have seen that within the realm of God's wisdom (His principles), there are ANSWERS.  

I'll say here that of course men have their own issues.  This is not a place for that topic, though it will be covered elsewhere.  

Receiving what we need as women is an entirely world-shaking and culture-worthy endeavor.  Learning skills to attune to our own feelings with emotionally & spiritually grounded women helps us develop into PERSON, which needed to happen in our girl-hood years.  It's a very important series of processes that cannot be skipped once one is in the role of wife.  

If we attempt to be wife when we never really developed fully as a girl, or as a woman, these deficits can strain the marriage.  Without wisdom's help, it can look like our spouse is the culprit.  

If we learned to ignore our needs, or belittle them, we can have a bit of a chip on our shoulder, while our needs remain in our blind spot.

Too, we might know we have needs which we want our husbands to meet, but if we lack the skills to communicate in a purely feminine way, we can express our need to him in a way which turns off his innate care-for-us super strength, making us feel unloved and isolated.  

There are skills which can be learned, and within the context of wholesome, nurturing relationships with grounded women who see each other as God does, we can learn to know what we need, meet the needs we can, and then learn how to articulate to the men around us in a way that is helpful.  

If this interests you, this podcast featuring Jim Wilder might be right up your alley.  

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/worthy-celebrating-the-value-of-women/id1497732229?i=1000731582279

If not, but you want to follow me on this journey into expressing what I've learned, please feel free to follow this page, and stay tuned. 

 

The Man Whisperer

This post contains affiliate links to resources recommended.  Using my links costs you nothing extra, while I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

As a girl raised in a home without an active father, I had many missing concepts to know what men were basically like, other than the myriad of ridiculous examples I'd seen portrayed in pop culture media during the 1980's.  

One day when waiting for our Osteopath to see our baby son Andrew, who ended up getting a prescription for an ear infection, a certain book stood out to me, nearly glowing on the turntable shelf in the sunfilled waiting room of the doctors' office.

Much earlier in my life as a new Christian, I had wrestled with the concepts of having felt like an orphan for so much of my growing-up life.  Sure, I lived with a mother, and had a father who doted on me occasionally like a rich Uncle might... but the day-in and day-out realities most people considered normal were not a part of my everyday life.  My Mother was eventually diagnosed with severe mental (emotional) illness, which helped me better understand the lacks and pains of that aspect of my life.

What are men like?  

This book gave me a great foundation onto which I was able to hold steady, and stand firm during some tumultuous seasons within our marriage.  It also helped me as I worked to raise five sons!!!!!  

As time allows, I hope to share more what I learned, and how I applied it (and even still recall to mind regularly!).   

For now, I leave you with a link to the book, so that in case you are interested, you can take a gander into its contents as well. 

The Man Whisperer: Speaking Your Man's Language to Bring Out His Best
by
Rick Johnson

You can find it here on amazon.

Meeting Needs ~A Visionary Concept

In order to succeed in marriage, there are several basics which need to be mastered.  First, and possibly most simply, is knowing our own needs and being able to articulate the ones we want others to meet.

How dare I say such things?

I know, right?  It seems anathema to some of us that someone isn't doting on our every whim, knowing precisely what we need and delivering with panache as we know they are so capable.  

But wait...how does the fairy tale fit into reality?

From our studies, we've learned it's the Mother's job to meet our every need without any effort made on our part.  We need only BE, and Mother comes to help us with whatever it is we need.  We don't even need to know our own needs!!  She is the queen and matriarch of all that goes well in our little kingdom world.  Whether we need warmth, food, affection, good smells, help with gas, sleep, diapering or any other sort of attention, Mother is the one to do all this for us without so much as an official outburst from us!

When does this happen, and when does it end?

According to the Life Model team, Mother meets all the needs from birth to about 9 months of age.  Around then, we can be taught how to express our needs in a more sophisticated manner.

So Mother begins to meet our needs for safety and nourishment without her knowledge, and that carries on for about ten months.  Then we're brought into this world, and we get another set of months for her to help us with her knowledge, skills, and maturity.  Then we learn to express our needs through visuals and words.

This is what happens in an ideal situation.

Okay, so what is going on then in SO many marriages where wives feel their husbands should meet all their wifely needs without expressly communicating them?

From what I've observed, the breakdown in marriages these days seems to have at its roots the breakdown of learning to receive nurturing in the first year of life.  We are supposed to transition from infancy to toddlerhood learning how to say what we need, use our words, and receive it as love from a Mother.  

Sadly, the notion of "spoiling" an infant, and leaving them to cry it out, has created generations of women who often not only do not know their own needs, they are going around (unknowingly) expecting men to know what they need.

When a good man has no idea what her unspoken needs are, she then assumes it means she has married the wrong man.  

I would like to suggest she take some time inside of her marriage to take a break from looking to HIM for being her need-meeter, and instead to look within at what she indeed needs.  What needs does she actually have?  What needs is she able to meet herself, with friends and family, etc which do not require his attention?  

For those of us on this tumultuous and often embarrassing journey going back into the needs of our childhood (and before), we've come across many resources which have helped us get a grasp on ourselves.  If you have a vision of being a great wife to your good man, yet find yourself feeling pulled into bouts of fits because you feel like you have NO idea how to be vulnerable with him (he should KNOW what I need without me telling him!!!), you are in the right place.  

Over time, and as grace and life permit, we will share more here via podcasts and videos, articles and stories in order to help you get a grasp of what's missing, so you can begin to build into your own self all that you are capable of doing.  

On this journey you will likely face deep fears, horrible inadequacies within yourself, and discover longings and dreams which really just might come true once you learn how to put on your big girl pants and mature beyond childhood.  

Learning the skills to care for yourself, as a person, and as a woman, are THE most important thing you can for your self, your marriage, family, neighborhood, community and society.  There is a warning though, and that is that you MUST be balanced.  You have work on these things while also tending to all those things within your Responsibility Sphere.  

You're not alone.  You can do this.  

If you want support, you can join our group over on Facebook for those who are daring to Pioneer Again...to brave into those waters of relational intimacy where we are open, honest and able to lean on others in a wholesome way, where community is precious and marriage is sacred. 

Click here to join now.  We'll learn together! 

"When Queens Ride By" by Agnes Sligh Turnbull

 If you're like me, and find yourself in the midst of living as a wife after having been inundated by the culture's saturating nastiness, you might find this story a refreshing help in order to build up your inner woman Wifely Superpowers.  I'll create a whole list of items which helped me do so.  In the mean time, you can find the story from various bloggers here.

The Marriage Bed

This post contains affiliate links to resources recommended.  Using my links costs you nothing extra, while I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

I love Hebrews 13:4a.  No matter the translation I find, it upholds the concept of keeping the marriage bed undefiled and pure.  "Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled..."

SO, if God already declared it sin, then it has no place in the marriage bed.  Otherwise...have fun!

We both read a lot in order to help us get situated from a whole lot of defilement we'd endured and experienced before we were married.   Below are some resources we think and feel you might like as you engage in biblical marriage*.

*We recommend NOT going into these materials before marriage.  

1st and foremost is the Old Testament book the Song of Solomon.  Whew!  It's spicy!!  

    A quick note:  At this writing, we hear AI (artificial intelligence) is seeking to rewrite the Bible, so we highly recommend getting a physical copy in your own hands.  Free bibles are made available by many places, so maybe a google search with "Free bibles in my area" will give you ideas of places you can get your hands on one fast.  Too, almost all stores like Walmart carry the good book.  It is after all, or so we have heard, the greatest selling book of all time.  If you want to order it online and have it delivered, any major book store will have numerous copies.  We personally like our trusty old, thick paged NKJV study bible from Nelson Publishing.  It works great for taking notes, and has handled well my rugged hauling of it all over the country for many decades.  You can find something similar here.  Our friend Christian Jewish friend in Jerusalem recommends the NET.  You might like knowing we have had the KJV audio playing quietly 24/7 in our home for more than 15 years.  

Continually asking the Holy Spirit, and trusting Him for your marriage bed life is our number one suggestion.  I am certain that without any other materials other than the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Spirit, your marriage can be fully aflame and wonderful!!  

Below are materials I/we used in order to help get our minds around the concepts of wholesomeness after sexual sins.

Please note:  a plethora of troubles come to a society where a God-centered marriage bed is not one of the central focuses of life.   We can wax eloquent elsewhere in our other blogs about such things.  Below are some recommendations for knowledge, fun, and to understand, first for those who are coming to marriage with a pure heart and body, and then followed by resources for those who might need to repair and restore due to the second part of that Hebrews verse.

Holy Sex
by
Michael Pearl
I loved this book so much!  I have my copy waiting to give to my daughter on her wedding day!!  I highly recommend this for new couples!!  You can find it here on amazon.

Biblical Lovemaking: A Study of the Song of Solomon
by
Dr Arnold G Fruchtenbaum

I recommend this book to couples!!  You can find I there on amazon.  

I (Kate) found a lot of great info on a site which used to be called Christian Nymphos, the idea being that a healthy desire for sexual intimacy with husband is a godly, holy thing.  I am not sure the site is still up (oh, that would be sad if it's gone!).  Here is a link to an interview with them (the authors of the site); as I recall at least one of them was a pastors' wife.  As of this writing on October 27, 2025 it looks like the site is sadly no longer active.  I did find this referring to it....and please take that with a grain of salt, as I have not looked at all at the rest of that site which gives a good mention of the women who started the original blog.  Their original site was SO helpful to me...  if you are looking for them too, feel free to email me at exuberantforlife@gmail.com and I'll see if we can put our heads together to find out how we can get their info!  It was truly wonderful!