Not allowing your girls to take a backseat to their cousins is a very important lesson as well.
I feel that it’s very important to teach my girls not to be abused. This is what my spiritual advisor said as well. Limit the time you spend with the abuser, cover her tracks and speak about her well in front of the children.
When it’s intentional, it’s not a “difficult person”. It’s an abuser.
I made the horrendous mistakes of
1. marrying her baby
2. Giving birth to two girls he loves more than her
Jesus said turn the other cheek. He didn’t say set yourself up to be slapped.
Excellent point - I'm corrected.
For 5 years, my only gifts from my parents for Christmas or my birthday were greeting cards with a handwritten note that $20 had been taken off my debt.
My parents were well-off, but when I got divorced, I was stuck with the mortgage and having to pay off some nice-sized debts my hubby had run up. Then our condos increased the monthly HOA fees from $60 to $300 and it took me by surprise.
That first month, I borrowed $200 from the folks. No one in the family ever let me forget what a deadbeat freeloader I was. Sheesh! They spent that much on a meal.
When it’s intentional, it’s not a “difficult person”. It’s an abuser.
I made the horrendous mistakes of
1. marrying her baby
2. Giving birth to two girls he loves more than her
Jesus said turn the other cheek. He didn’t say set yourself up to be slapped.
= = =
INDEED.
If we will have to give an account for every idle word—as Scripture insists we will—and we certainly will—
then I think we shall also have to give an account for
NOT
drawing healthy boundaries around ourselves and our family and teaching our kids to do the same.
There is a time to suffer in silence. But I have found that Holy Spirit leads me to do that far less than I’d been raised to think.
There are potential learning moments on a lot of growing edges all around us. When we fail to rise to the occasion, we suffer needlessly and usually cause others to suffer needlessly, too.
Boors, insecurely arrogant selfish clueless folks often need emotional 2 X 4’s upside the head to wake them up to reality in a list of ways. They are usually artists at being victims, needy, whiney, petulant, demanding, controlling and generally all around miserable and gifted at spreading their misery far and wide.
ENOUGH ALREADY YET. If you want time with me, learn to be more real, more honest, more loving and more constructive . . . or get out of my sphere and stay out.
I don’t always emphatically enforce that last part but if someone is persistently prone to being negative I will certainly minimize my exposure to them.