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Differentiation
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Should I discipline my girlfriend’s children?
12 Mar 2007 by Rod Smith / 25 Comments
My girlfriend’s children are rude and get whatever they want from her. They are thankless and demanding. This is a woman I love and I am trying hard to help her with being a single mom. I was raised with strong discipline and my dad was never afraid to give us a good hiding. I think I should step in and give her children their limits. She says I better not touch them. This makes no sense. She can’t handle them and won’t let me do it. This is going to be what causes us to break up. Please help.
I’d suggest you do not, under any circumstances, resort to any form of physical punishment with the children. You are correct: this issue will probably result in the breakup of your relationship. Interfering in pre-existing relationships will almost always get a person in trouble. I’d suggest that you try to accept that your girlfriend will inevitably side with her children (over siding with you) even if the children are “demanding and thankless.” While we’d all prefer to live in a world where children were less-demanding and filled with appropriate gratitude, these are not values that you, the outsider, will be able to impart.
Chime in, please...
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We met and had an affair…. will he do then same to me?
08 Mar 2007 by Rod Smith / 4 Comments
“I had an affair and we now live together. It was very passionate. I was the true love he’d been looking for his whole life. Being divorced myself, this was also very thrilling for me. It really was, despite all the secrecy of our relationship, and it was the time when our relationship was at its best. We argue more now than we ever did while we were having an affair. I understand that things would ‘cool down’ but sometimes I think he regrets leaving his wife. Do you think he might have another affair and cheat on me?”
Extra-marital affairs are very seductive. They seduce the participants from their real issues and offer a false sense of belonging. The intensity you describe was probably not the product of authentic love, but of the secrecy and deceit required to maintain the affair. Adrenalin and anxiety combined can feel very much like the kind of love for which you have always longed.Please write, I'm reading...
Of course he might regret his divorce. Just as you too have discovered, he may also be reminded that his new domestic set up is not all he believed it would be. Since each of you is capable of cheating, as you have already demonstrated, of course it is possible for each of you to betray each other with someone else.
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I am in a bad relationship with a trustworthy man….
02 Mar 2007 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
Question: I am in a bad relationship with a trustworthy man but I have no ability to trust or believe in him. I jump down his throat and feel disappointed when I don’t get the attention I require. I am jealous and suspicious. He will leave me if I carry on like this. I am trying to change and grow. I cry a lot and face fears but I can’t go faster than my heart allows. I get angry with myself but my upbringing was bad and abusive and I know the damage comes from there. I am scared of loosing because I think he is fantastic. He would be a fabulous dad, and a loyal husband. He helps me face my fears. To be honest, every day is a struggle and a headache. He comes from a stable, loving background and cannot understand my past. I don’t know whether to stay or go. He says he loves me, imagines me having his babies. We live together. I am a horrible, possessive, insecure girlfriend. (Letter shortened)
Rod’s Response: Marriage and babies will only increase the intensity of the difficulties. Living together is no taste if marriage. Without intensive personal work on your part – he’ll not be the man you now think he is.
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I want the sex details of her past relationships – it is my business, and she won’t tell…
27 Feb 2007 by Rod Smith / 6 Comments
QUESTION: My girlfriend was very sexually active before we met. Jealousy often rages in me. She won’t tell me about any of her past relationships and it feels to me like she still prefers other men.
ROD’S REPLY: I predict that the more this eats at you, the more you will want to know. The more she tells you, 0r refuses to tell you, the more you will ask. Every detail she divulges will haunt you, and finally, your obsessions will silence her. When she is silenced, you will claim that she has something to hide or that she still has “feelings” for some guy she probably no longer even knows. This is your issue, not hers.
Shakespeare did not call jealousy the “the green eyed monster” for nothing. Try to get over it. If you want this relationship to grow in a healthy manner, you had better understand what is, and is not, your business. Jealousy over relationships that predate you is unreasonable. Her behavior then, is none of your business, now.
I’d suggest you focus on trying to be a little less controlling. My guess is that were this not the issue, you’d be jealous about something else.
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Her son is oppositional and ruining our relationship…
02 Feb 2007 by Rod Smith / 12 Comments
“My partner and I live in a home we bought together in July 05, with her little girl of 9 at the time. A year later her 13 year old son, now 14 who has been living with his father for the last five years, asked if he could move in with us because he was failing school and wanted our help. What a mistake. He ADHD with what I would consider oppositional defiant behaviors. He passive aggressively challenges me when I call him on his nonsense. He stares at me as if I’m supposed to back down. This little terrorist has taken over home, is still failing at school and his mother has told me that she would move out instead of have him move back to his dad’s house. I asked her specifically before we moved if she would ever let him move in. She was adamant she would not. I should have never agreed to let this him move in. Kids like this will ruin a relationship in a heartbeat.”
Sir, you might have a whole lot more room to exercise your wishes if you were married to the child’s mother. Until then, the boy will have more say than you do. He needs help from you - not your defiant attitude.
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Get Rod on FaceBook and/or Twitter
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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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