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.
-
Education
-
Questions healthy people discuss when new, significant relationships form…
30 Sep 2007 by Rod Smith / 4 Comments
1. Are we spiritually, financially, psychologically, and emotionally, sufficiently suited to each other?
Take Up Your Life
2. Do our long-held, individual, long-term, personal goals and personal dreams somewhat fit with each other?
3. What do we each imagine is possible for us to achieve (service to the poor, overseas travel, learning foreign languages, learning new skills) within this relationship and potential marriage?
4. How do we each perceive our individual and mutual responsibilities to our parents and extended families if we marry?
5. Which of us is better with money? If we marry, how will we organize our money? Will we keep everything separate or will we pool all our resources? How will we decide what we buy, how we buy, and when we buy expensive, but necessary items needed by a new family? Which professional will we choose to help us with the wise use of our resources? [Do not enter a relationship with someone who is in excessive debt.]
6. What does each of us think about religious observance? How will we decide on where and how we will worship?
7. What help do you need from me in order that you may achieve all you have ever wanted to achieve with your life? -
Six observations, almost always true about families…..
24 Sep 2007 by Rod Smith / 4 Comments
Axioms (observations that are almost always true) for families:A man or woman who has an open, friendly, respectful, and playful relationship with his or her own parents will seldom have problems with his or her in-laws.
Extra-marital affairs are symptoms of a troubled marriage and not the cause of trouble in a marriage.
The teenager who is open and friendly and kind to his or her parents is laying the foundation for a happy and open and friendly relationship with his or her future spouse and children.
When children “take over” a family, and become the center or the glue of a marriage, relational carnage (with the marriage and even possibly with the children) waits in the wings.
The couple that engages in sex, but never discusses it, will finally end up discussing (or arguing about) why one or the other partner has lost all interest in sex.
People who can stand up to each other (resist poor treatment; declare what he or she will or will not do; speak up about what he or she really feels) are more likely to have a lasting relationship than people who relent or give in to each other’s wishes in the name of love.
-
It takes two to tangle……
02 Jul 2007 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
“My fiancé – of 15 years – and I seem to be operating at a tangent with regard to a host of issues. She is a elementary teacher. I am an academic. Her behaviors abound with inconsistencies, lies, secrets, and manipulation. I am more consultative in my communication with her; she is highly defensive and irrational. She has serious temper tantrums, very often derailing the focus of our discussion. She cheated on me once; blatantly lied, but with time, I forgave her for her deception. I believe that by my being supportive and understanding, I am carrying her deep unresolved psychological baggage and subconsciously feeding into my own dependency needs by intellectualizing. I am going to stop forthwith. Please let me have your views. Regrettably because of space, I could not overwhelm you with all the relevant information.” (Letter shortened)
You are apparently a person with much insight. It seems you have decided to turn your insight into action. Well done. Insight alone (by itself) is usually quite useless. You are well aware that people are usually as emotionally well, or unwell, as those whom we tend to choose as partners. It takes two to really tangle!
-
Sometimes you get little sleep…… with pre-dawn tag!
30 Jan 2007 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
It’s been a tag free-for-all in my house tonight. Not the traditional run-hide-and-find kind but the keep-dad-awake version. One child goes off to sleep; the other turns his head a fraction off the pillow to say he is “starving.” I think immediately how little we know in a land of plenty about starvation, but decide not to enter dialogue with a 4-year-old about this important matter, especially when my bedside clock says 3:16 a.m.
Next thing, I am downstairs. I know I shouldn’t be but here I am, semi-comatose, boiling the kettle, throwing a bag of instant oatmeal into a bowl while my mother’s words from a quarter-century ago about no child ever needing to go to bed hungry reverberate in my head. Oatmeal and a spoon in one hand, a filled baby’s bottle in the other, I reach the landing, and Mr. Starving is fast asleep. I can eat the oatmeal or watch it coagulate like wallpaper glue since starvation got the better of him. He is sleeping so deeply I could swing him by his feet and he’d not waken. Not that I want to swing him by his feet, even though we’ve been through this routine a time or two before. I should be able to detect that “Dad, I am starving” might just as well have read, “Tag. You’re it.”
Now I lay me down to sleep and all I can see in the darkened room is the clock’s obnoxious florescent glow on the baby’s white bottle. It is ready and waiting for his next eruption of hunger. Have you noticed? Very young babies are never just a little hungry. It is never minor progression along a gentle continuum. It is never, “Oh. I think I will awaken now. I am feeling a little peckish.” Babies do not do “hungry” like that. Babies erupt when they are hungry. It is a full-volume announcement, a blast, an emergency directive in a train station or sports arena. It’s fire-alarm urgency satisfied only with a full gob of rubber and the slow release of Simulac With Iron.
I feel myself drifting off to sleep when Rhino the dog, with full knowledge of my condition, bumps the side of my bed. He smiles, tail wagging, to announce his need of a bio-break an hour earlier than usual. The clock is self-righteously announcing that it is 3:46 a.m. I prepare myself to stand in the yard watching Rhino do his thing in order to prevent his taking the opportunity to climb through the hole in the back of the fence, and visit a long list of neighborhood pals he befriended, when I have been more tired, less vigilant.
Man and dog enter the house together. I am relieved no neighbors were out at this hour walking their dogs. I did not have to run for cover lest I be seen appearing on my lawn in boxer shorts. Rhino bounds up the stairs and I go to the crib’s edge knowing that any minute the baby will awaken.
Nathanael is not stirring – not yet, anyway. So I tiptoe over the wooden floors, for the creaking has been known to awaken big brother, and ease myself into bed. I turn my head from the clock and its glib 4:06 a.m. and wonder what it is with the sixes tonight.
Grace has come and I will finally sleep. The baby, sensing the imminent presence of Mr. Sandman, reacts and now I am cuddling an infant who drinks deeply of the bottle while nestling against my chest. He searches for something in my eyes I hope he finds. At the very first burp, he has forgotten he’s hungry and drifted to sleep when big brother walks in, trailed by the dog. He asks, as he sees the baby asleep against my chest and climbs onto my lap, if we can have a “group hug.”
As we hug, sleeping children draped over me like throw rugs, I thank God for women, two birth mothers, who in the great and heavenly game of tag, unselfishly and unreservedly declared me “it.”
-
Seven things healthy parents know about teenagers…
26 Jan 2007 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
My teenager —
1. …appears more invested building peer rather than parent relationships. I expect this. Healthy interdependence will not occur if separations are not practiced within primary relationships.
2. … faces change, opportunities, and forms of seduction I never faced. I expect some relational turbulence, questioning of values as my child finds appropriate footing in the adult world.
3. … appears more grown-up than my child is, so sometimes I will get the cold shoulder from a know-it-all. I’ll be kind and forthright when occurs. I will do all I can to avoid embarrassing my child to win control.
4. … may embrace friends other than those I would choose. I will welcome people until there is cause not to. When this happens I will be honest to avoid unnecessary unpleasantness.
5. … is a master of non-verbal communication so I will not to over-interpret what I see. I will ask for verbal clarification when necessary.
6. … wants a parent, not a buddy. My child wants to be cared for, and not have to care for me.
7. … probably feels uncomfortable talking with me about intimate matters. I will not allow discomfort to restrain me from being an involved parent regarding difficult matters.
-
-
-
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
-