Posts

Showing posts from October, 2014

Are Love Letters Real?

Image
Dating is so hard! Do love letters complicate it? Watching my children experience dating relationships, I can really see the strong benefits of waiting to find your mate when you are ready to marry. We always taught our children this but "courtship" is so antiquated. To us, "Ready to marry" means you are financially stable enough to support a wife and begin a family. Of course, no one is ever that ready so it means you have a steady job, a means of support. This is the ideal, not the one and only standard. What to Say in Love Letters (love letters by Lizkit50 on deviant art) My husband and I got married at 21; we have been married for 30 years. We had no money; well, $300 if you count the money we got as marriage gifts. We had no jobs. I had recently graduated as an LPN (licensed practical nurse) preparing to support my husband through college. We moved to a new city, Nashville, TN, as a newlywed couple. I still have the first groceries receipt that took

When To Stop Talking

Image
I have a serious problem. I don't know when to stop talking, and I cross many lines of comfortability for other people. I have always noticed I have had a relationship problem. I figured it was due to my abusive childhood and not learning developmentally how to properly relate to people. I never blamed my past or my parents. It was more of something that I accepted as one of the many side effects of my terrible childhood; I thought something hardwired into my brain that I had not yet learned to change. And this probably is true, but God made our brain malleable. You can teach an old dog new tricks! You can also grow new brain cells and habitual pathways or lack of them, as the case may be. But, I like most people had something blocking me. You see, it is very hard to learn to change something you can't identify. I notice the glassed over eyes or ones that dart beyond my head and know that the person I am speaking to either needs to be doing something else, would rath

Obedience, Disobedience - Depends on your Worldview - 21st Century Parenting

Image
What is obedience? This answer depends on your Worldview. This is an issue my husband and I have been reassessing as our children grow into adults. We are reflecting on our own choices and experiencing the consequences. We are also learning to improve our own choices to be better parents. The the big questions that most people have pondered at some time in their life are: Who gets to decide? Who makes up the guidelines, the rules, the moral code? Who decides what is right or wrong? Even the atheist or agnostic has decided on some kind of base system of a moral code, such as: It is wrong to kill your neighbor. It is wrong to walk up to a person and take what is his. It is wrong to make up lies to defame a person, to spread false rumors and damaging gossip. It is wrong to have sex with your child, your relative. Almost everyone in a society of civilized people can agree on these. They seem fair to all. But beyond this, the rules of wrong are harder to categorize. Mo