ROD’S RESPONSE: Pure generosity (no strings, hooks, secret agendas, or hidden motives) is enriching for both the she who gives, and she who receives. Go ahead. I’d suggest you arrange a private lunch with your sister and slip her a card in which you have placed your generous cheque or a bundle of cash. Write something like, “Please accept this gift. All you have to do in return is enjoy it!”
February 13, 2007
We want to help my single-mother-sister with a financial gift….
February 12, 2007
Teen suicide attempt. How can we know this will not happen again?
READER: Our daughter (16) attempted suicide. She wants more freedom, more trust, less supervision and less “intrusion” from us. My husband and I are devastated. How can we know this will not happen again?
ROD: Never take suicide threats lightly. Even the suggestion of suicide must be met head on with the full arm of whatever resources are available. Avoid “deal-making” with your daughter (“we will do this if you will do that”). Teen suicide, I believe is a family affair, be sure to see a therapist who will see the whole family together at least some of the time.
The act of writing to me for help indicates that you have it within you to find the professional assistance you need. Ask your doctor, friends, anyone who might know and find the best resources available in the greater Durban and KWA-Zulu area to help suicidal children.
If you, reading this, are a professional mental health worker dealing with adolescent suicide, kindly email me your contact details, and a brief sketch your work and training. I will forward this information to the parents of this young woman that they might choose a suitable therapist for the family.
February 11, 2007
I have been allowing this man to depend on me for his life….
READER: I read your column about “Women Who Lose Themselves In Relationships” and I do not agree with you. I am dating a man who is coming who is out of a marriage. He lacks any sense of who he is. Obviously his state is fluid and therefore I have been empathetic. I have been encouraging him to rebuild a life finding and developing new friendships, interests, hobbies, and just to take time alone. I have found myself being too empathetic, and losing myself in the drama of his impending divorce. I am a very independent person, however do have a nurturing side. My problem is not the lack of my own life, but it has been allowing this man to depend on me too much for ‘his life’. (Edited)
ROD RESPONDS: While each of you may feel you are being very helpful and empathetic – in the face of his many needs – you are still mothering a man who is not your child. Your “empathy” will short-circuit his necessary and solitary journey, toward or away from his wife. Men (and women) who are “coming out of a marriage” are not healthy material for deep relationships. Please don’t assume “nurturing” requires some degree of dependency. You are being sucked into a situation it is likely you will regret.
February 7, 2007
Who will speak up for broken-hearted, innocent young men?
Notes from a conversation…
“I read and hear a lot of warnings to young men about how to behave with and respect women. I see almost nothing about how young men can also be hurt by women who almost always seem to cast themselves as the victims,” says David (26)
“Tell me more,” I respond.
“More than once I have dated a woman and been very honest and very faithful – while the woman I am seeing is cheating on me behind my back. Then, when it comes out, she assumes a kind of ‘victim mode’ where the man was predatory and she did not know what to do. Then I find out it is not the first time.”
“Why do you think this is not addressed, David?”
“Because it is not cool or manly to admit you have been hurt by a woman. It is not manly to say you were a victim and innocent and felt a lot of pain from what your girlfriend did to you. I wish someone would write and speak about how young men feel after they have been hurt by a woman when they have been innocent and trying to do the right thing.”
(Reconstructed with permission).
February 7, 2007
Husband will not use a name for his wife…….
ROD’S RESPONSE: I am sure there are mental health professional who will “unpack” or interpret your husband’s behavior and what it might have been that has led you to be nameless in the eyes of your closest companion. I’d tend to ask you what it is about you that you have permitted yourself to be nameless for so long!
Ask your husband to call you by name and ignore him when he talks to you as if you do not have one.
Enabled behaviors tend to persist. Be nice about it and simply tell him what you’d prefer. I’d take this route before I’d suggest you go on a hunt through his potentially fragile inner-being.
February 2, 2007
A personal note….
I am speaking in Amsterdam for a week (Feb 3 – Feb 10) and will post from there………. this means, because of time differences, that I will post later in the day (for those who read the column in the USA).
Peace,
Rod
February 2, 2007
He’s lost all interest in sex…..
“Please help me! I’m so confused, hurt, depressed and sick to my stomach. My husband and I just had this emotional break down. I cried. He cried. For months I have been trying to get him to tell me what was wrong. We haven’t been making love like we used to. We were all over eachother. We have been married for four years and have a 4 year old daughter. I expected some decline in our sex but not this much. I would talk to him and he would say he was tired and would try harder. He never did. This went on for a good couple of months. Until just this morning we were talking. He broke down in tears. He finally said, ‘You don’t turn me on anymore.’ UGH! Dagger in my heart and my ego. He doesn’t want a divorce. He still loves me with all his heart but how do we stay together and exist together if I don’t turn him on?” (Letter shortened)
Divorce? This is no reason for a divorce. You have a daughter and many years ahead of you to work this out. Methinks you are too close. Some space between you (not separation) would do you both some good.
February 2, 2007
Her son is oppositional and ruining our relationship…
“My partner and I live in a home we bought together in July 05, with her little girl of 9 at the time. A year later her 13 year old son, now 14 who has been living with his father for the last five years, asked if he could move in with us because he was failing school and wanted our help. What a mistake. He ADHD with what I would consider oppositional defiant behaviors. He passive aggressively challenges me when I call him on his nonsense. He stares at me as if I’m supposed to back down. This little terrorist has taken over home, is still failing at school and his mother has told me that she would move out instead of have him move back to his dad’s house. I asked her specifically before we moved if she would ever let him move in. She was adamant she would not. I should have never agreed to let this him move in. Kids like this will ruin a relationship in a heartbeat.”
Sir, you might have a whole lot more room to exercise your wishes if you were married to the child’s mother. Until then, the boy will have more say than you do. He needs help from you – not your defiant attitude.
January 30, 2007
Sometimes you get little sleep…… with pre-dawn tag!
It’s been a tag free-for-all in my house tonight. Not the traditional run-hide-and-find kind but the keep-dad-awake version. One child goes off to sleep; the other turns his head a fraction off the pillow to say he is “starving.” I think immediately how little we know in a land of plenty about starvation, but decide not to enter dialogue with a 4-year-old about this important matter, especially when my bedside clock says 3:16 a.m.
Next thing, I am downstairs. I know I shouldn’t be but here I am, semi-comatose, boiling the kettle, throwing a bag of instant oatmeal into a bowl while my mother’s words from a quarter-century ago about no child ever needing to go to bed hungry reverberate in my head. Oatmeal and a spoon in one hand, a filled baby’s bottle in the other, I reach the landing, and Mr. Starving is fast asleep. I can eat the oatmeal or watch it coagulate like wallpaper glue since starvation got the better of him. He is sleeping so deeply I could swing him by his feet and he’d not waken. Not that I want to swing him by his feet, even though we’ve been through this routine a time or two before. I should be able to detect that “Dad, I am starving” might just as well have read, “Tag. You’re it.”
Now I lay me down to sleep and all I can see in the darkened room is the clock’s obnoxious florescent glow on the baby’s white bottle. It is ready and waiting for his next eruption of hunger. Have you noticed? Very young babies are never just a little hungry. It is never minor progression along a gentle continuum. It is never, “Oh. I think I will awaken now. I am feeling a little peckish.” Babies do not do “hungry” like that. Babies erupt when they are hungry. It is a full-volume announcement, a blast, an emergency directive in a train station or sports arena. It’s fire-alarm urgency satisfied only with a full gob of rubber and the slow release of Simulac With Iron.
I feel myself drifting off to sleep when Rhino the dog, with full knowledge of my condition, bumps the side of my bed. He smiles, tail wagging, to announce his need of a bio-break an hour earlier than usual. The clock is self-righteously announcing that it is 3:46 a.m. I prepare myself to stand in the yard watching Rhino do his thing in order to prevent his taking the opportunity to climb through the hole in the back of the fence, and visit a long list of neighborhood pals he befriended, when I have been more tired, less vigilant.
Man and dog enter the house together. I am relieved no neighbors were out at this hour walking their dogs. I did not have to run for cover lest I be seen appearing on my lawn in boxer shorts. Rhino bounds up the stairs and I go to the crib’s edge knowing that any minute the baby will awaken.
Nathanael is not stirring – not yet, anyway. So I tiptoe over the wooden floors, for the creaking has been known to awaken big brother, and ease myself into bed. I turn my head from the clock and its glib 4:06 a.m. and wonder what it is with the sixes tonight.
Grace has come and I will finally sleep. The baby, sensing the imminent presence of Mr. Sandman, reacts and now I am cuddling an infant who drinks deeply of the bottle while nestling against my chest. He searches for something in my eyes I hope he finds. At the very first burp, he has forgotten he’s hungry and drifted to sleep when big brother walks in, trailed by the dog. He asks, as he sees the baby asleep against my chest and climbs onto my lap, if we can have a “group hug.”
As we hug, sleeping children draped over me like throw rugs, I thank God for women, two birth mothers, who in the great and heavenly game of tag, unselfishly and unreservedly declared me “it.”
January 30, 2007
The craziness and joy of bringing up children while flying solo….
If I were endowed with the power to award gold medals, mothers who stay at home with their young children day after day would be decorated for their bravery. Two days after the curtain closed on my son’s delightful Christmas pageant, and we took our children home for the holidays, I was already fried.
To be honest, it’s finally happened. I’ve gone over the top. Lost it. My entire identity has been dragged through the transforming challenge of sharing the holidays with a 3-year-old. Hook, line and sinker; nose ring; ball and chain — choose whichever metaphor gives you a picture of my being dragged hopelessly through scatterings of toys, buried under mounds of paper, lying on a bed of Legos, covered with dog hair, exhausted and muttering, “Oh where, Oh where has my adulthood gone. Oh where, Oh where can it be?”
These holidays, I’ve done everything I found ridiculous and amusing about other parents when I was a childless observer. For instance, I drove to four Walgreen drugstores covering a radius of about 20 miles from our home in search of a single $3 whoopee cushion, which, on delivery to my son’s grateful 4-year-old friend, burst immediately in their unified search of the ultimate whoop.
All the while, in an attempt to stretch my mind, I’ve been forming a list of the Most Ridiculous Things Adults Say to 3-year-olds. They include “Wait,” “Keep that on the table,” “Keep your shirt clean,” “Put the dog down,” “Lie still,” “Tomorrow,” “Where are your socks?” “Let me show you how to do that,” “Put the food in your mouth,” and “Don’t jump.”
Today, to illustrate just how far off the rails I have gone, I drove 9.5 miles for the sole purpose of picking up two, 2-inch plastic medieval men (one red, one blue) my son left at a Christmas party. Without them he will not launch the plastic bomb from his Lincoln Log castle to bomb the living room that has been perpetually bombed every day since the good reindeers delivered Santa to our rooftop.
Have you noticed that Legos, Lincoln Logs, jigsaw puzzles, Monopoly – the games and toys with lots and lots of pieces – require only the briefest little tug to open the box and you are knee-deep in a colorful mess of stuff? Toys with limited potential to be strewn afar, like Buzz Lightyear, are straddled into multiple packaging, twisted secure, limb by limb with wire, taped and screwed into box within box requiring at least a hammer, chisel and power saw to extricate them for play.
About music and videos: How many times can a 3-year-old watch Toy Story? There is no limit. How many times can he want to hear the Bananas in Pajamas sing about walking down the stairs? There is no limit. How many times can a 3-year-old want to jump off the dresser, onto the bed, onto the floor while shouting, “From here to infinity and beyond”? There is no limit.
I do have limits. There’s a limit to how much stuff I will pick up. This week, I have picked up stuff from morning to night. I pick up the same stuff every day, several times. I’ve packed and repacked drawers my son has, for no reason at all, unpacked.
Yesterday, I picked Legos out of the heating duct, the garbage disposal, the upstairs and downstairs toilets, the blender, the piano, the potted plants, the teapot, the dishwasher, the freezer and the VCR. As evidence of my personal growth, I can retrieve stuff using my bare hands out of toilets, sinks and sewers. These are places I could not even look in when I was a child without feeling squeamish. Now I go right ahead, put my hands in without holding my nose, turning my head or closing my eyes.
I’m holidayed out. I’m done. If my son’s preschool teacher wonders why I am so glad to see her, it’s because I have seen the slow process of my encroaching craziness. I have become irrational, unreasonable, overly emotional, irritable and illogical simply through the tiresome process of removing Legos, Logs and Lightyear from every imaginable, inconvenient place in our universe and I am ready to send my son back to school so I can build the castle, load its cannon with real fire power, aim it at Buzz, and the ridiculous singing, dancing bananas and be rid of them, once and for all.
