“My son at 7 seemed fine – he was articulate, self-assured, and mature beyond his years. In the classroom his frustration and anxiety would build. His preschool teacher had commented on his anxiety. His kind teacher wondered whether his hearing had been tested. By first grade he started hating himself for not being able to do what a bright boy should. When my son became more and more anxious, I knew there was an underlying cause. A developmental pediatrician congratulated me on being so astute. My son had a sub-type of ADHD. When he started medication the difference was astounding. At 3pm he’d jump into the car and actually had a spring in his step, instead of the exhausted slump. On medication, he’d jump into the car and ask how I was! Then he would animatedly chat about his day and share all the wonderful and interesting happenings of the day with me. It was astonishing. His reading rate increased by 2 years within 6 months, and then another 2 the next 6 months. My little boy was transformed from a sad, despondent, anxious little boy to a positive, enthusiastic, confident little man. Three psychologists and one GP said my son did not have ADHD but my gut feeling told me otherwise.”
Therapy (counseling, family therapy, individual therapy) works best when…..
Take UP your life - it is an act of LOVE
2. You are motivated to see change in your life and understand that it could mean an increase in your discomfort and some disruption to your relationships.
3. You are willing to recognize your sacred cows even if you are initially unwilling to lead them to the slaughterhouse.
4. You read widely about ordinary people who have done extraordinary things with their lives.
5. You are willing to see the fruitlessness of blaming others (parents, boss, your ex, the economy, and politicians) for what you are facing.
6. You are willing to shift your focus off the behavior of others and be fully responsible for your own behavior.
7. You are willing to understand that others can only entangle (trap, manipulate, bother) you to the degree you allow.
8. You understand your therapist is a person just like you – but for his or her training. Elevating your therapist will prove to be unhelpful to you and it will obstruct the very process you wish to assist you.
9. You understand that all desired and healthy growth requires some loss, pain, and grief.
10. Your goal is to grow up and to fully live your own life – no matter what your age.
An army of unseen mothers at Mothers Day
Mothers who have chosen adoption for their babies are often ignored on Mothers Day.
How their hearts must ache.
This weekend an unseen army of brave women will quietly witness families rightfully celebrating Mothers Day – and find no place at the tables with the children whom they generously offered to families eager to rear their babies.
I admit, my awareness of birth mothers is acute.
These women, women who are often shamed, labeled as irresponsible, hard, or uncaring, have radically shifted my life. Each of my boys’ mothers fought untold difficulties while carrying her child to full term, in full knowledge that other options existed.
Despite abandonment, derision from family members, financial difficulties, and who knows what other social pressures, each delivered a beautiful baby and made the hard choice to forever enrich my life by allowing me, a single man, to adopt her infant son.
I know you are not forgotten – not on Mothers Day weekend or any other day.
You are so deeply etched into their individual psyches and into our family experience that you are regularly part of our awareness and conversation.
So deep is their desire for you, so deep is the urge for a mother that my boys call me “mom” sometimes.
I have never stopped them.
I let it go because I think I know what it’s about. It’s a primal urge. It expresses a heartfelt longing.
To stop them, when each was first learning to talk, seemed unwise, as if I were stopping something deep, powerful within each.
I knew each boy was boy looking for the mother he had never known.
Of course it has gotten us a few strange glances at times. A five-year-old yelling, “Mom, zip me up,” at the urinal in an international airport can turn heads when it’s (of course) the men’s room. When my older boy, now 13, expresses his frustration while standing at his locker at school over something we’ve both mislaid, his loud, “But Mom, it must be here,” addressed at me can get some quizzical stares from his peers.
“Mama” or “mom” and even “mother” seemed to come as easily as rolling over, as cooing, as first steps, and as all those things that come with early development – and so I let it go.
It seemed as if “mother” and all forms of Her names were buried within to emerge and be attached to the nearest, warmest person no matter what his or her gender.
Yes, the woman waiting your table at your Mothers Day lunch, the teacher whom your child adores, the woman co-worker who goes silent for no identifiable reason or who appears to be sometimes lost in another world when the conversation turns to babies or showers or Mother’s Day, just may be a member of that unseen army of birth-mothers.
She may be one of the gracious, brave women who have made Mother’s Day complete for countless women around the world and given a man like me the unique pleasure of sometimes being called “mom.”
I want you to speak to my group…..
I want you to speak to my group (church, school, class, retreat, company) how do I do it?
Sometimes I bring the boys, sometimes I don't.
I do not arrive and “dump” my routine on you or try to sell you or your audience anything. I tailor every event to the perceived needs of the church, group, company, or training event.
I look forward to hearing from you. I have lectured an taught in over 30 countries to groups from 5 people to 5000. I can speak for 40 minutes or for 10 days at 6 hours a day.
My seminars (workshops) are highly interactive and usually result in participants wanting to live more powerful and complete lives.
Write to me. I look forward to hearing from you. Yes – I will travel anywhere in the world, or drive to your event if it is possible.
Rod Smith
Is it okay to hate my mother
Is it okay to hate my mother? She is loud, inappropriate, pushy, and demanding. I know I can’t change her but I must be able to change how guilty I feel about not being happy to see her. She barges into our house. She talks crudely to my children. She is mocking of any attempts to talk on any meaningful level. I am a single mother of two teenagers.
Hate is an emotional toxic spill
As long as you are able and willing to face the consequences, you can do anything you want.
Of course, not everything you are able to do is helpful, wise, or accompanied by helpful outcomes. This is something we are repeatedly told as children and sometimes fail to learn even as adults.
So – yes, you are free to hate your mother. The consequences of doing so are unlikely to be helpful to you. Hating anyone is usually harmful to the one who does the hating, but hating a parent, is especially personally damaging.
Hating a parent erodes essential, vital, invisible connections that help us all to remain somewhat sane.
Hating anyone allows the hate to do a number on our insides. It distorts our responses, reactions, perceptions, and attitudes to ALL other people, and not only our relationship with the person whom we have chosen to hate.
The hate may be targeted; the results are generic. Hate is an emotional toxic spill. It ruins the host more than the victim.
While your mother’s repertoire is jam packed with unattractive themes, hating her will ultimately destroy you, burn your house down (figuratively, of course) and alienate you from your own adult children.
You will move toward greater, and real love for her if you increase your capacity to be rejected by her and stand up to her and refuse to be her victim. Do not give your mother free passage to pollute your family yet, at the same time, offer her some manner in which to remain connected with you on terms that are acceptable to you.
Yes, hate is an option, but it is not an option that will result in the kind of growth (not all “growth” is helpful) within you that will be helpful.
Walking powerfully toward her (initiating, defining, declaring, welcoming, clarifying) will empower you with ALL other people.
You are no longer a child. Use your adult voice and do not allow her to manipulate, dominate, or intimidate you. Strive for an equal, mutual, respectful relationship with your mother so that she will learn how to behave herself when she is with you and your family.
I know this is a tall order, but the results, of even failed attempts on your terms, will result in the kind of empowering and growth you want, rather than lead you ever deeper into the shame you are already feeling.
Rejecting her will diminish you. It will rob you of your voice. It will enlarge her power to dominate and control you.
If you hate your mother she won’t have to barge into your house to upset you, she’ll be living in your head, even if you never see her or have nothing to do with her.
Children and happiness
“I see my first responsibility, as a parent, is to make my children have a happy childhood so they can have a happy life. Please comment.”
Good luck. While it is a nice ideal you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Your children’s happiness is ultimately their responsibility and not yours. The sooner they assume it the better.
If you, the parent, work hard at your own life and make the very best of your skills and talents it is more likely that you will have children who will do the same.
If you focus all of your attention on your children and on trying to make them happy it is likely you will create insatiable, demanding, and entitled men and women who are more than a challenge to all who know them.
Of course I am not suggesting parents ought to intentionally create tough lives in order to amplify challenge – this would be ridiculous.
I’d suggest you focus on providing a loving and challenging platform for your children to achieve well in all areas of their lives and get out of their way as much as possible.
Success, and reaching for success, is what results in fulfillment. I’d take “fulfillment” or “useful” or “purposeful” over the illusive state called “happiness” anytime.
How do you explain suicide to a child?
“I struggle with what I told the little one’s in my family of the death of their young and vibrant ‘Aunt L.’ She had been really sick and took her own life in the end. I just could not tell these little one’s that she committed suicide – how would they understand, ranging in age from 9 to 2 years old. I just told them she got sick and she died – her body and her spirit were tired. I am so afraid of them finding out the truth one day. We all have continued to grieve our loss. All of the children attended the funeral and memorial services and we all take an active role in remembering her life. But how do you explain suicide of a very close loved one to a child?”
Your chidren will understand
Achieving MUCH with YOUR life is a profound act of mothering
1. Enriched is the woman who does not lose herself to her marriage or motherhood. She has a strong spirit of independence while being a loving wife and mother.
2. Enriched is the woman who does not accommodate poor manners (being taken for granted or being victimized) from anyone (not husband, children, in-laws, siblings, or her parents).
3. Enriched is the woman who lives above manipulation, domination, and intimidation. Her relationships are pure and open; her boundaries are defined, secure, and strong.
4. Enriched is the woman who does not participate in unwanted sexual activity. She honors her body as her private temple and shares it, even in marriage, only by her own deliberate choice.
5. Enriched is the woman who has developed a strong, clear, identity. She regularly articulates who she is, what she wants, and what she will and will not do. She is unafraid of defining herself.
6. Enriched is the woman who knows that pursuing her dreams to be educated, to work, to accomplish much, to expect much from her life, are profound acts of partnership in marriage and profound acts of mothering. She knows that the woman who “takes up her life” does more for herself, her husband, and her children than the one who surrenders it.
It really is a myth that women are the only ones who can serve as a ‘primary’ caregiver to a child…
Dear Rod Smith
I want to write this letter anonymously to protect the identify of my son.
I read your column of 26 January 2011 in The Mercury with great interest and really wish to comment.
It really is a myth that women are the only ones who can serve as a ‘primary’ caregiver to a child. Its ‘first prize’ if both parents are available and share the parenting responsibilities (even though they themselves might not be joined in a romantic or marital relationship). I am, in the same way as you, living testimony that men are totally able to provide for all the caring needs of an infant child. I reconciled with my son’s mother two days after he was born. He is not my biological son (although none of the family is aware of this) and since we took him home from the hospital, I have provided for virtually all his needs (material, emotional, developmental). His mother struggled to bond with him after his birth and with my support we worked through this period and I did my best to ensure that its effects on him are minimal. During this time, and even to now, I play the most significant parenting role in his life (and this does not mean his mom does not have a wonderful and loving relationship with him).
I believe that the myth that men are not capable or competent to nurture young children is institutionalised by views such as those expressed by the writer of the letter to you and this is as a child which leads to men being denied the opportunity to build strong and meaningful relationships with both their children and the mothers of their children. On the other hand I do feel that race can have its own dynamics, but need not necessarily be an impediment to good parenting.
Durban Dad
He was once a toddler…..
I watch my two-year-old son bending at the hip, one foot raised and turning until he falls gloriously to the floor in convulsive laughter. A momentary pain lights somewhere so deep inside me I can hardly tell in which of my internal galaxies it sits. It is swift and pointed, like the touch of a darting and determined fly set loose in my emotional innards.
Then the pain is forgotten, swamped in the exceeding happiness of watching him attack life’s toddler challenges. He’s hungrily learning a language now, having conquered walking and running, and expressing his brand new heart sweetly in partial, ill-formed words and sentences which tumble, jumbled and joyed up all over the house.
Sometimes he runs, singing at the top of his voice like an emergency vehicle out of control. With siren blaring, he sprawls across the floor and careens into a heap of toddler chaos. Recovering, he mounts the coffee table against my flagging will and “hee haas” astride his horse, a precocious knowing smile flashing from his distant meadow.
In all of this activity and fun he eases his way further into my being, a steel pylon thrust securely into waiting, willing ground.
Rod’s road-post from DROID.
difficultrelationships.com 