Subscription
Enter your e-mail address to receive this newspaper column each weekday.
My strict privacy policy will keep your email address 100% safe and secure.
-
Boundaries
-
Planning a wedding?
12 Dec 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
A wedding in the family provides a snapshot view of the wellness and the challenges of any family. Here are a few suggestions if you have a wedding on the horizon:
It’s not YOUR wedding (bride and groom). It’s the merging of several tribes, communities, and cultures. The more you are able to include all of the immediate and extended families, the more healthy muscle you are building into your primary relationship.
-
How do I “move on” now that it is over?
08 Dec 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
I get a steady run of questions about “moving on” after the break up. Here are some ideas and practical suggestions on this tough topic:
You will never “move on”, which I take to mean find freedom, experience an emotional release, and discover a new life with others, while you continue to “hold on” to the promise of reigniting or restoring a dead relationship.
-
12 ways to get in the way of your own growth
05 Dec 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
1. Accommodate abusive behavior from anyone
2. Search for certainty or guarantees in relationships
3. Harbor resentment and refuse to forgive
4. Blame others for any undesirable situations in your life
5. Glorify the past (as if it was without hurdles or problems), discount the present (as if somehow it is without joy, potential, and challenge) and fear the future (as if it is without promise)
-
The charm is the glue to keep you stuck to him
29 Nov 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
“I have discovered I am one of at least three woman involved with the same man. And we ALL love him and thought we were the only one. And he is married. Please help.” (Edited from a LONG letter)
-
I can’t tell my family what is going on……
23 Nov 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
“I have been married for almost 10 years. We have 3 children. We haven’t always had a great marriage. Three years ago we started going back to church and it turned our whole marriage around and had a marriage to be envied! For about the last 8 months we had some financial trouble. He stopped going to church. Then he started calling me names, being cruel for no reason.
-
-
-
Get Rod on FaceBook and/or Twitter
-
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.
Life inside the Smith household
-