This is not a religious post.
Yesterday, at church, my Catholic priest, Fr John Pipat, a jolly Thai guy who looks like Friar Tuck said in his warm, smiley voice, “Jesus did not command his people. He spoke with authority, authority of love.”
And I thought, so true, when applied to real life. My children’s father, who almost never screams or loses it with our children, have so much authority where they are concerned. He just needs to say something – once, and not loudly either – and they would obey, no question. He has such gentleness about him and his children respond beautifully to that.
Not quite so with me. I am a shouty mummy. My temperament. But over the years, I have learned, first from my mother then my children’s father, to show love, to show love, to show love. The rest, they said, “Will come out in the wash.”
Children become damaged adults because lack of love, cruel words, emotional neglect. Not from not having showers, messy bedroom (stinky football stuff festering away), refusing to accept Hess’s Law (chemistry) and doing too much maths….which were the last four things I shouted at my daughter about. I don’t need to command her, she is growing up nicely on her own. Those niggly little things are not important. Far better to use those words to tell her how much I love her … which I do, a lot (tell her that I love her, I mean).
“At least you shout with love,” she said magnanimously to me. “But do watch your blood pressure, Mum.”
So here I am, trying to be chilled. Have a good week, all x
A friend of mine in high school said to me, “I really envy how women always do what you tell them to do.” To which I responded, “I’m telling them how to get a better grade on their paper and you’re telling them to sleep with you. It’s two very different things.”
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Not all women are that obedient, Paul, hahahaha.
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I guess you’d have to meet me to understand. There is something about me that as long as I don’t have a vested interest in the conversation, people find me quite convincing, but if I’m asking a person for something, I get nervous and uncomfortable. So many of my fellow students asked me for help that out of sheer practice I became rather good at explaining things, but flirting felt like slow torture for me. At least, this held true until the age of social media, when now I’m meeting people so emotionally invested in sexism, racism, etc, that arguing with them is like beating my head against a brick wall. And since my first conversations with women I met in China centered around our explaining our cultural differences to each other (Chinese always have more questions about Americans than Americans have about China), flirting was so much easier that I’ve been out to dinner with more Chinese women than American women.
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Am not a psychologist, Paul, but I think it’s quite common to feel tongue-tied/at loss for words when we have vested interest. Time for assembling our emotions, I guess.
One of the perks of dating women/men of different nationality to oneself is bypassing arguing about politics, I guess! And yes, learning/teaching a new culture, which is very interesting.
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