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Boundaries
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Don’t go to another seminar until you’ve done these four things……
11 Sep 2011 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
There’s a constant search for experts, formulas, and steps to bring relief to personal, family, or business stresses. Expensive seminars and books are plentiful. “Experts” fly around the world charging exorbitant fees for “life changing” workshops. Here are several broad parameters for personal work that will yield fruit and will save you a lot of self-help money all for the price of this newspaper.
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Is there no room for jealousy and possessiveness?
06 Sep 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
“You write about jealousy and possessiveness in a relationship as ‘leeching.’ Is there no room for possessiveness or jealousy and is it never an indication of love? Please say more on this topic. While I find your column interesting I also find it tough and hard.” (Question deduced from much longer email)
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Habits to cultivate when you work with people……
01 Sep 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
If you work among people there are some habits worth cultivating…..
1. Avoid sharing too much about yourself too soon, if you ever share anything personal at all. Work is not a place to find friends or to solve your loneliness issues. That’s what your social life is all about. Your organization employed you to give of your best every day, every moment of every day. Anything short of this is to cheat your company and to shoot yourself in the foot.
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In my situation mothering will not end…….
30 Aug 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
“You wrote that successful mothering does end. I feel that I am doing a great job with my 15 year old son. I adore my son, however, I am beginning to ‘let go.’ I am excited about his future and the role that I play in his becoming an independent young man who will leave us to spread his wings. However, I also have a younger son with severe autism. I also feel that I am doing a great job with him but this young man will not be spreading his wings. I am worried about his future and I am not sure that my mothering will end. We don’t have the facilities in South Africa to accommodate my son I really don’t think it is going to be possible to work myself out of this job. Do you have any advice for me?”
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When mothering becomes smothering…….
29 Aug 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
When the need or the desire to continue mothering, within the mother, exceeds the need for mothering, within the adult son or daughter, the result will be smothering for the son or daughter. His or her response will be to fight (reject and resist), to freeze (or tolerate, numbly), to flee (escape and seldom willingly return), or to negotiate.
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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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