People are often stronger than they realize or know. Put to the test, people can accomplish amazing things and overcome huge hurdles. You can read such stories in the press most days — where “ordinary” people accomplish amazing things. Your inner-resources are probably largely untapped in the rhythms of day living. They will rush to the fore when you are under inordinate pressure.
The inner-person within each of us has a vested interest in being well and in thriving. A lot depends on it. Do the right thing as you know it to be, and your inner-person will feel better, become an ally and will assist you in your search for greater emotional health. The smallest steps routinely employed toward greater emotional health will immediately begin to pay off and make a huge difference to your life.
Your inner-being has a natural urge to connect, to make a difference in the lives of others, to create and then leave a legacy (large or small) and so it should not take a person by surprise if isolation from others is painful to the extreme. We were created for strong and lasting relationships and when we are deprived of them we feel it within our whole beings.
“I am in a cross-cultural and cross-religion marriage. Neither of us is active in our religions. He is, in his mind, the ‘master of the house.’ I am here, in his mind, to serve him and meet his needs. This attitude has come to the fore over the two years of our marriage. This is not the issue. I can handle this attitude and I can handle him. There are even times we can laugh about it and he is very nice. What is an issue is how he treats my family. He treats my parents and brothers and sisters as if they are second class citizens. He is rude and expects to be served. He’s better with the men in my family (my dad and brothers) but he is arrogant with the women. Please help.”
I am not sure culture or religion has anything to do with the predicament you describe. The manner in which your husband treats women reflects his character, not his faith or culture. There are men of diverse faiths and cultures who are paragons of virtue when it comes to respecting and treasuring women. Your husband is apparently a complicated man in need of help, face-to-face professional help.
“My boyfriend tells me what I can and cannot wear and gets all crazy and moody if I don’t agree or obey. What should I do?”
Buy him a mannequin and flee! He can dress the dummy in whatever clothes he deems suitable as often as he pleases. The mannequin will give him the total control he wants over you, and, since dummies are brainless, he will be able to win all arguments and keep “her” in total submission.
That you ask the question suggests you are putting up a fight and resisting his advances on your brain. Small-minded men (any who dictate what “their” women wear, to whom they talk, how they spend and arrange their time) usually flee any sign of independent thinking on a woman’s part if, at first, they cannot kill it. Strong women frighten them since they confuse control and “love.”
Don’t fall for it. Love and control are not even in the same family. A man who wants to dictate how you dress will also want to tell you how to think, feel, and see before long. Men who want to control “their” women do so because they are rarely capable of feeling in control of anything else. A healthy man will leave your clothing choices up to you unless you specifically elicit his opinion or unless he’s praising how you make an outfit come alive!
Next week, aiming particularity for Thursday, millions of people in the United States will travel “home” to a family meal called Thanksgiving. It’s almost a given that, after turkey and mashed potatoes and all the “fixings” and before the football (American “Football” of course) on TV people will go around the table and express their gratitude for everything from the nation as a whole to grandma for fixing her trademark green beans.
I confess, it is no easy holiday for an immigrant given that it’s my sons and me and no extended family, but we have grown accustomed to it and are always included in Nolan Smith’s (former Beachwood and Durban North person) family for Thanksgiving.
I have my list ready to go:
I am grateful for my sons and the men they have become. They are honest and very hard working. They know how to conduct themselves in all contexts and I am often moved to tears when others tell me about some of the things they know about my sons.
I am grateful to my readers around the world. I never imagined that The Mercury would become the international platform that it has become for me.
I am grateful for my extended family around the world who do such an amazing job of keeping in touch. Not a week goes by without a vibrant back and forth involving several continents.
I am grateful for the speaking opportunities afforded me. It’s a demonstration of Beauty for Ashes and Grace-upon-Grace if ever I knew one.
I am grateful to be an American and to have dual citizenship with South Africa. Really, a man can love two nations. I know it is possible because I do.
If you have been a caregiver to your spouse, a parent, friend, for any length of time and now that person has died, you may expect:
To feel that part of you is lost or gone because it is. Caring (end of life health care) requires love and deep unique bonding, a bonding other than how you are already bonded as spouse or son, daughter, parent or friend. In the separation, in your own way, you yourself are or probably wounded. Not damaged, wounded. Know the difference.
To feel you are rattling in a cage of caring habits — no more required — and not quite sure of what to do or where to be. You feel pulled between responsibilities that no longer exist and feel irresponsible for not being present where you once were. In short, you don’t know where to be or what to do. It’s dizzying.
To experience some guilt about the way things turned out, developed or did not develop. You flood with questions: was there more you could have done to ease pain, prolong life, usher healing? Was something crucial missed, forgotten?
To feel guilty – at least momentarily – if you have fun.
Take heart. Like a child, who, arms outstretched, turns and turns until dizzy, falls to the ground, then rises to walk and appears to have had too much to drink, in the act of walking, balance and order gradually returns.
You will reorient after your double loss: a loved one and an integral role and find your feet.
May your heart be renewed and be full of warmth for others and full of great expectations. May you be sufficiently resilient to be able to embrace those who are unfamiliar with a warm welcome and are therefore prone to regard it and you with suspicion.
May you know and see and experience the goodness of which you are capable and the courage to let it have its full way with you.
May you have childlike eyes. May they be filled with joy and wonder as you allow yourself to see familiar things in new ways with “new” eyes.
May your thoughts dwell on the goodness around you. May you spread the goodness you enjoy and focus on your great and healthy future.
May your words be soft and sweet and encouraging, while, at the same time, you remain unafraid to speak your mind with courage and conviction.
May your hands be open to give and to receive. May your touch be gentle and comforting on the lonely and those who are afraid. May your touch bring comfort, healing, kindness, and relief to those who most need it and who may least expect it.
May your friendships deepen and expand.
May malice and contempt from you, and for you, cease that you return to no person evil for evil.
There is no need to twist God’s Arm in ardent prayer seeking God’s Presence.
Hold God’s Hand, instead.
It’s nearer than you may think.
Right there, there’s God’s Hand.
See it?
It’s at the end of the arm of the woman begging at the traffic light. You and I and thousands of others drive off trying hard not to see her and when we do, many of us blame her for her addiction and say things like – in our heads of course – I am not paying for her next pack of cigarettes and I bet she has a cell phone.
Did you see God wave at the traffic light?
God’s Hand is the hand of the unshaved man holding the begging cup and grasping his homeless sign.
You and I and thousands of others drive off remembering just how hard we work for our money and think – to ourselves of course – why can’t he work hard for his money and then you and I remembered how we pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps and why can’t he.
Then – to ourselves of course – we blamed the government.
What are they doing about this begging problem?
When we hold the hand of the lonely, the poor, the disenfranchised, the frightened, we are holding God’s Hand.
If you have been a caregiver to your spouse, a parent, friend, for any length of time and now that person has died, you may expect:
To feel that part of you is lost or gone because it is. Caring requires love and deep unique bonding — quite different from the bonding you already had prior to the season of caregiving. In the separation, in your own way, you are wounded. You are not damaged, you are wounded. Know the difference.
To feel you are rattling in a cage of caring habits and not quite sure of what to do or where to be. You feel pulled between responsibilities that no longer exist and feel irresponsible for not being present where you once were. In short, you don’t know where to be or what to do.
To experience some guilt about the way things turned out, developed or did not develop. You flood with questions: was there more you could have done to ease pain, prolong life, usher healing? Was something crucial missed, forgotten?
To feel guilty – at least momentarily – if you have fun.
Take heart. Like a child, who, arms outstretched, turns and turns until dizzy, falls to the ground, then rises to walk and appears to have had too much to drink, in the act of walking, balance and order gradually returns.
You will reorient after your double loss: a loved one and an integral role and find your feet.
Somewhat caught up with the housekeeping, laundry washed, dried, folded; Nate in his room downstairs, Thulani at work, it overcame me.
I began to miss my sons even though both were very reachable.
One so near I could hear his television.
I was missing an era.
I was missing the times they were both on top of me, getting in my way. I was missing the way they’d run all over the house chasing each other, doing cart-wheels then landing on the sofa. Much to my faked chagrin they’d skateboard from the kitchen to the living room and back again. I was missing their rapid shift from fast friends to seeming enemies following the most minor of interpersonal hiccups. I recalled with fondness how immediately they’d make up as soon as I tried to play peacemaker.
The baby years, the toddler years, the so-called tweens.
I was missing the us we were, and, like emotional jet-lag taking its toll, it hit me all at once.
There is no doubt that I love them exactly as they are and I want them to be exactly where they are and doing what they are doing.
Deep inside me, snow falling all round, I was longing for what we were, what was, what is gone.
“My daughter was previously married and has two children from that marriage. Her two boys are five and eight. My daughter married again, a man with twin sons (9). Together, in the new marriage, they have a girl. My daughter has an ex-husband (who loves his children). Her new husband has an ex-wife (who loves her twins). There are periods when this ‘blended’ family seems to work, but it seems things are unraveling and the marriage will soon end. My daughter is asking for help.”
My heart goes out to all the participants in this difficult circumstance.
Blending families is among the hardest challenges any couple in second and third marriages will ever face.
There are always multiple levels of loyalties and commitments, pushes and pulls, recognized and unrecognized.
There will be times when everybody will feel “in the middle” and “left out” and “picked on” purely as a result of the number of relationships in the family and the busyness of daily living.
I trust your daughter and her husband both know that ending the marriage will only multiply complexities.
While your daughter may not have the time or desire to read I’d strongly suggest “Extraordinary Relationships” by Roberta Gilbert. It’s quick, it pulls no punches, and it empowers the willing reader to make healthy shifts in the most difficult and complicated families.
difficultrelationships.com 