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Spousal abuse
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Preparation now may enrich your family for generations to come……
19 Oct 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
You’ve met someone you consider attractive. The relationship has the potential to move toward marriage. A wise couple can act to pave the way for an extraordinary relationship. While these suggestions may appear “off the wall”, the couple that can tough it out and discuss and implement these few ideas will reap benefits for their enriched generations that follow:
1. Discuss individual and shared beliefs about money. Study each other’s personal finances. The wallet is a window into the soul.
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Resist blaming the victim, yet, until the victim takes some responsibility……..
21 Aug 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
It’s easy to play judge. It’s easy to wonder at people who stay in destructive relationships. The patterns, to the outsider, are obvious.
Yet, the man who is with an alcoholic, ranting wife, or the woman who lives with a chronic womanizer, seems to be oblivious to the fact that things do not have to stay as they are.
He or she seems unaware that, at least in some manner, it is also the issue of the person who allows destruction to continue.
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Are you tripping over your umbilical cord?
01 Aug 2011 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
The umbilical cord is infinitely elastic. It’s eternal. Enduring. (Murray Bowen, Rabbi Ed. Friedman, and others).
If any person refuses to come to terms with the enduring power of the umbilical cord, by refusing to make peace with his or her mother, he or she will be tied up with it, will trip over it, in one way or another, for the rest of his or her life.
“Coming to terms,” means honoring the power of mothering, honoring the role of women. It means respecting women as full partners in every area of human endeavor.
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I hope your “partner” reads this and sees it as her impetus to bail……
27 Jun 2011 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
Clean up your language. It might make you more attractive all round. If you swear while you are writing about your most intimate relationship, one can only imagine what you must be like face-to-face. How a person treats outsiders (those whom you do not know and who will read your writing) is a powerful indicator of how you treat insiders (those close to you).
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I was unfaithful and now he wants out
23 Apr 2011 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
“I have been an unfaithful wife and my husband is tired of it. He has given me a fresh start on three or four occasions but this time he refuses. He says his trust well is empty and that he has to move on with his life. How do I convince him that one more chance is all I need? Please help.”
Your husband appears to be taking an option necessary for his well being. I’d suggest you move full force into recovery from serial infidelity.
Take responsibility for your actions
Unfaithfulness can hardly leave you with good feelings about yourself and I’d suggest you get professional help to delve into its origins in your life.
While his actions are painful for you, I’d suggest he has not had a painless journey.
If your husband were consulting me I’d attempt to solicit from him the level of his desire to remain married. Given any suggestion that he’d prefer to stay married, I’d encourage him to embark on an extended separation to allow you to get your troubled house in order.
Unfaithfulness is an individual pursuit. There’s nothing anyone can do to make you unfaithful. It’s not your spouse or any of your multiple cohorts. It is you who needs the help – get it. Allow him, in the mean time, to do whatever it is he needs to do.
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper.
Life inside the Smith household
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