Reader questions and other insights (click on heading for full article)

• The change from drinking to sober doesn’t mean the end of the problems

  Hi Rod

  I appreciated your column in today’s Mercury about having and sustaining a relationship with an alcoholic.

  I was married for 28 years.  We met when we were both students.  He was the life and soul of the party, whereas I am fairly shy, and so I was able to enjoy a great social life without much being demanded of me, as he took the limelight.  We married after we had both graduated, moved away from our home towns,  and by the time our second baby was born he was out drinking most nights, often returning home  well after midnight.  During my second stay at the maternity hospital, he didn’t even visit me every day as he was either hungover or drinking.  Things deteriorated rapidly, and I didn’t have the courage to leave, so I stayed and mopped up the pieces of our social life whenever he was downright rude to people, or fell asleep in a drunken stupor during dinner parties.

• Is there ever a sane reason to stay with an alcoholic?

  Reasons to stay – only 4/4 is sufficient reason to stay:

  1. You want to stay in the relationship and you want to be married.
  2. You have a support network outside of your immediate family where you can talk about anything you want to talk about.
  3. The alcoholic has admitted he or she has a problem with alcohol and appears motivated to be rid of the disease.
  4. He or she is committed to a legitimate recovery program and is part of a community of men and women who are ardently engaged in managing and beating the disease.

  Reasons to leave (1 out of 4 suffices):

  1. You are exhausted with trying to keep life together and you no longer have the energy to sustain life for more than yourself and your children.
  2. Your trust reserves are depleted and you no longer want to be married.
  3. You are expected to lie for your spouse as a result of his or her drinking.
  4. You are regularly subjected to abuse of any kind.
  5. You and your children are subjected to excessive drinking and all that accompanies the life of a drunk.

• Your son will probably lie to you if you make telling the truth harder for him than it ought to be

  “Please help me. My son (15) and I are fighting over a girl he wants to have as a girlfriend and I think he is too young to be seeing any girl. Now he says he will probably have to see her in secret. This is worrying me. We have always been very honest with each other and now I am sure he will be afraid to tell me the truth. By the way, he has no relationship with his father and it has always been just the two of us.” 

• Guidelines for emails, text messages, Facebook, and other forms of electronic communication…

  1. Write short full sentences.
  2. Greet your reader or readers.
  3. Punctuate, capitalize, and use apostrophes accurately.
  4. Resist using all capitals, abbreviations, and those ridiculous little faces and symbols.
  5. Edit.
  6. Acknowledge sources when using quotations.
  7. Be polite and kind under all circumstances.
  8. In the same manner that it is unwise to buy groceries when you are hungry, avoid writing and then sending what you have written when you are angry.
  9. Purify your writing. There’s enough litter already. Your capacity to use foul or demeaning language is not worth displaying.
  10. Write with the expectation that your writing will be read by more than your intended recipient or recipients.
  11. Avoid repetition.
  12. Not everything you think or feel deserves to be written.

• I want to go out in the world and travel and have adventures

  “I’m in my mid-twenties. I dated for three years. Everyone thought we had the ‘perfect’ relationship. I lost a lot of people I thought were friends when we broke up. There were two reasons: things were starting to get more physical, and he wanted to get married. To marry him would mean being someone other than who I wanted to become. He’s a very at-home person. I want to go out in the world and travel and have adventures. It hurt him a lot when I broke up.  It hurt me a lot too. He’s started texting and I’ve been ignoring them. I think I need to tell him he must leave me alone. Am I on the right track?”

Further reading (click on heading for full article)

• 26 Jan 2012

  Is there ever a sane reason to stay with an alcoholic?

  Reasons to stay – only 4/4 is sufficient reason to stay:

  1. You want to stay in the relationship and you want to be married.
  2. You have a support network outside of your immediate family where you can talk about anything you want to talk about.
  3. The alcoholic has admitted he or she has a problem with alcohol and appears motivated to be rid of the disease.
  4. He or she is committed to a legitimate recovery program and is part of a community of men and women who are ardently engaged in managing and beating the disease.

  Reasons to leave (1 out of 4 suffices):

  1. You are exhausted with trying to keep life together and you no longer have the energy to sustain life for more than yourself and your children.
  2. Your trust reserves are depleted and you no longer want to be married.
  3. You are expected to lie for your spouse as a result of his or her drinking.
  4. You are regularly subjected to abuse of any kind.
  5. You and your children are subjected to excessive drinking and all that accompanies the life of a drunk.

• 21 Jan 2012

  Your son will probably lie to you if you make telling the truth harder for him than it ought to be

  “Please help me. My son (15) and I are fighting over a girl he wants to have as a girlfriend and I think he is too young to be seeing any girl. Now he says he will probably have to see her in secret. This is worrying me. We have always been very honest with each other and now I am sure he will be afraid to tell me the truth. By the way, he has no relationship with his father and it has always been just the two of us.” 

• 13 Jan 2012

  Super-power #5 – the capacity to live with Integrity

  Integrity – “oneness” – the capacity to be true first to yourself and true to others is another of your many super-human powers.

  Men and women of (growing) integrity:

  1.     They live lives where day-to-day actions reflect deeply held values and beliefs.

  2.     They are who they say they are, and they are who they want to be.

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Life inside the Smith household

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Recent Comments

  • “I completely identify with the mother who wrote about her 15 year old son dating. My son was also Rod Smith in Your son will probably lie to you if you make telling the truth harder for him than it ought to be
  • Of course - he was a great addition to East London United.... Gavin Owen-Thomas in Help! - readers who loved Durban's soccer in the sixties...
  • Excellent, Rod; I'm sharing this on my facebook! May I express my disappointment, though, that it Jenny in Guidelines for emails, text messages, Facebook, and other forms of electronic communication…
  • Thanks Rod for reminding me that I really have received all things that pertain to life...and godlin Dave Engle in Super-power #3: Imagination
  • Yep...I know I'm Superhuman. We wrote a book about it!http://www.super-humanperformance.com... Derrick Miles in Did you know you are Super Human?

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