Three-year-old Daniela was not having it.

She and her parents, Joseph Loh, 40, and Brenda Tan, 32 were out for lunch in a public place. Daniela refused to do something that her parents asked and began screaming loudly at them instead.

“Please calm down and stop screaming,” Joseph pleaded with Daniela as they made their way to the carpark to return home. He could feel waves of anger and irritation rising up from within him.

When Joseph was much younger, his parents used to hit him to shut him up whenever he cried.

To stop Daniela’s tantrums, Joseph instinctively slapped her on the cheek.  

The slap left a red mark on his daughter’s face. Shocked, Daniela stopped crying for a while and then resumed wailing.

Daniela having fun during their first family vacation to Taiwan.

His wife Brenda reacted immediately: She turned to her husband and slapped him on the face.

“How does it feel being shamed in public?” she asked him.

She was roused because he had not kept his word. They had both agreed not to discipline their children in public but in private to avoid shame. They had promised to never to discipline their children in anger.

A slap for a slap

As a mother, Brenda felt that she had failed to protect her child. She was also triggered by what had happened. Growing up, she was constantly slapped, pinched or yelled at by her parents whose marriage was rocky.

“Wow, my goodness. Did I deserve a slap just because I disciplined my misbehaving daughter?” Joseph thought to himself after his wife’s actions.

He was fuming and unable to swallow his pride.    

When they got into their car, Joseph stepped so hard on the reverse gear that all of them jerked backwards. Then he rammed his foot down on the accelerator and drove off at top speed. Joseph’s mother, who was also sitting in the car, told him to slow down as it was getting dangerous.

Daniela strapped in the car.

Fortunately, all of them returned home safely.

For the next few hours, Joseph withdrew from everyone around him, refusing to speak to anyone.

Brenda was also stewing in her own thoughts. She felt powerless that she could not protect her child from her husband’s reckless driving.

“I kept trying to talk to him about what happened and why he had to react that way,” she told Salt&Light.

“Stonewalling” and “bulldozing” 

However, Joseph continued to shut her out, and busied himself with household chores instead.

The more Brenda felt ignored, the more she persisted in nagging and criticising her husband. It reminded her of the times when her own parents hardly talked to her or responded to her needs.

Whenever Joseph ignored her, she would begin to panic and start attacking him, dredging up past mistakes he had made, which included him shouting at then one-week-old Daniela, and pinching her nose out of frustration at her constant crying at a few weeks of age.

The proud parents with their first newborn, Daniela.

Faced with her tirade, Joseph felt demeaned and did not know how to engage Brenda, so he continued ignoring her.

Unable to get through to him when things got difficult, she felt there was no future in their marriage. While feeding their younger daughter Serah, Brenda texted her husband an ultimatum. 

“Jo, I think we should get an uncontested divorce. I can’t take it already.

“If you don’t change the way you respond when we fight and don’t learn to control your temper, our family would be fractured and our marriage would die a natural death anyway. If you don’t want to change, an uncontested divorce is the next best thing for everyone,” she added.

Is divorce an option? 

Seeing his godly Christian wife bringing up the word “divorce” greatly disturbed Joseph. He did not even understand what “uncontested” meant, and had to search it up on Google.

Both of them did not expect their marriage to break down to such an extent, especially since it was God who gave both of them multiple confirmations before the unlikely pair was willing to obey Him and marry each other despite a lack of physical attraction.

Brenda and Joseph leading worship at their wedding.

Their first night as a couple.

Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against them, the two of them got married and stayed happily married ­– until COVID happened and children came into the picture.

Joseph, who used to be an aircraft engineer, lost his job when the pandemic grounded all planes.

Joseph with fellow graduates from his aircraft maintenance course in Wales.

Joseph used to be an aircraft engineer at SIA Engineering.

Brenda felt stressed at becoming the family’s sole breadwinner: They still had wedding debts to pay, not to mention the mounting expenses for their second new baby.

Though Joseph tried to juggle having both a flexible work arrangement and being a stay-home dad, it did not work out.

His identity as a stay-home dad

The couple realised later that having Joseph stay home while Brenda worked was the best fit for their family, as they preferred to have at least one parent at home with their children.

“As a stay-home dad, I was struggling so much with my worth, value and identity that I slipped into depression,” said Joseph.

With all their expectations of being a typical dual-income Singaporean family upended, Brenda also succumbed to postpartum depression.

Though the situation in their family seemed bleak, Joseph never thought that Brenda would ever consider divorce as an option.

“I thought: This couldn’t be happening to me, it couldn’t be true,” Joseph admitted to Salt&Light.

Brenda felt sad and resigned. Yet she still loved Joseph, hence she presumed that having an uncontested divorce (where assets and custody are all amicably divided and agreed upon between the both of them beforehand instead of battling it out in court) might be the best way forward.   

“Even though God was the one who brought us together, I know that people can also walk away from the blessings that He gives,” said Brenda.  

“We both didn’t know that marriage — especially parenting – would be this straining and difficult because it exposes who we are when we are tired.

“We needed to make a choice to grow with God or continue with our dysfunctional ways of responding,” she added.

Joseph with their second daughter, Serah.

Fortunately, Joseph decided to stand his ground when he confronted Brenda that night.  

“Divorce is not an option because of our faith in God. I promise you that I would work on myself and seek God,” he told her.  

Brenda prayed and felt God telling her not to prematurely force an ending and cause damage to the family, but to let Him continue to write their story.

Doing the hard work 

Both of them resolved to work through the issues in their marriage.

Their issues were wide-ranging, stemming from a host factors including their own childhood baggage, expectations of marriage, differences in conflict resolution and a lack of community support.

Brenda explained: “He’s a stonewaller and can shut himself off for many days. I’m like a bulldozer so I tend to want things to be resolved immediately and I really cannot stand being ignored or stonewalled.”

She has since learnt to give her husband the time and space he needs after a conflict, while he has agreed to initiate communication with her after an agreed period of time has lapsed.  

Both of them also found marriage to be very isolating.

“When I go to others and share about my own struggles, they perceive that it is my wife’s issue and volunteer to help talk to my wife. But they don’t understand that I am reaching out because I need help for my own issues and I am not gossiping about my wife,” said Joseph.

Brenda had similar experiences. She found that she could not bring herself to confide in her close friends as she did not want them to take sides or look at her husband with prejudiced eyes after that.

In the end, she chose to seek therapy, while Joseph found a community of fellow stay-home dads with which he could share about his own journey openly and authentically.

Joseph with a community of stay-at-home dads at Common Ground in Bedok.

They also learnt to actively seek God and lean on Him in order to understand each other better.

“In our cooling down time after a fight, we usually both individually seek Jesus to ask Him what He thought and what we needed to do. Reading the Word regularly also helps us to know what God thinks clearly, instead of relying on our feelings and thoughts that can be clouded by emotions,” said Brenda.

Learning to respond better during conflicts 

There have been times when God would chastise Brenda to lay down her pride and apologise for her accusatory words, and for yelling at or hitting her husband.

When conflicts arise now, she is learning to be gentle and comforting to Joseph while giving him space, while he puts in the effort not to run away but to remain and reassure her of his love.

At other times, God also sent people to speak into their situation.

“God sent a single sister to speak to us about forgiving each other and ourselves for the mistakes we made in marriage and parenting. It melted down our walls and caused both of us to repent and open our hearts again,” recalled Brenda.

The greatest turning point in their marriage came when they both decided to look harder at themselves than the other person.

“Every time I fight with my wife, there’s a voice that says just ignore her or she’s looking down on you, but there is also a voice that says maybe what she says is true about you,” said Joseph.

“Divorce is an option you can take but it deprives you of the chance to confront, not the things about your partner, but the things within you that are brought out by your partner. It’s valuable to take a good look at why you fight because it says just as much about you as it does the other person,” said Brenda.

Brenda and Joseph registered their marriage in March 2019.

They have also learnt to celebrate each other’s small wins.

Brenda celebrated with Joseph the first time he voluntarily came to talk to her after the agreed time, instead of her having to seek him out.

Joseph, who is very particular about laundry and cleanliness, has come round to acknowledging his wife’s efforts in keeping house instead of simply critiquing her competence.

The couple now has three children: Four-year-old Daniela, two-year-old Serah and two-month-old Asriel.

Their third child, Asriel, was born two months ago.

Having children of their own and realising how difficult it is to be a parent have given them a deeper understanding of God’s patience and love to them.

When Joseph and Brenda see their children cry in frustration over something they have yet to learn how to do, they are reminded of how patient and kind God is to them as they learn new things that He already knows.

Their family of five.

“It teaches us not to take a stance of superiority and impatience, which children often experience from adults. God is so incredibly patient despite every stubborn tantrum and mistake we make,” said Joseph.

In turn, God’s patient love spurs them on to see marriage as offering them the opportunity to perfect how they love.

Said Brenda: “Marriage is only to one person and you realise how even with one person, it’s really hard to love well. But the fulfilment and satisfaction from it is just really profound.”

Click to read how God redeemed Brenda and Joseph and brought them together.

RELATED STORIES: 

“God intended marriage to be more than ‘staying for the kids’”: Marc Chong, whose parents divorced and remarried each other

When God joined them as man and wife … twice

“It unstuck our marriage”: Transformed couple hosts retreat here with US speakers who helped them