HEARING OTHERS … rather than just listening!

For those of you who have been following these blogs, you may recall some issues I had with my mother over Xmas [Christmas Gifts]. This has left the usual legacy of “I/ we have do something about this…” and that then circles in a decaying orbit with no one being quite sure what the best thing to do is. So this time I am clear, I am going to gently ask her to not bother with the whole gift thing, which she plainly has problems with. In this case, literally, nothing is better than something! My daughter actually felt relieved when she thought she had been missed out this year! So I am determined to stop this for once and for all. I believe in Change, so I have a built-in expectation that everyone is capable of doing it and it is the responsibility of everyone to achieve it.

Yesterday we are driving my eldest back to university and she takes it upon herself to challenge this decision. We have quite a long discussion that strays into heated at times… this is raises so many tough issues. Still she sticks to her guns, sure that she is right. I explain my position, justify my decision and tell her that I have a right to feel hurt by all this… and yet in the end, I found myself wondering if she wasn’t right.

It is a tough pill to swallow, and I find it tough to believe this is do’able but hers is the higher path. The very scale of the challenge she has thrown down to me and my siblings tells me she is right, and I can tell you I am squirming! I only became aware of the anger I felt about this when my father died a couple of years ago, and somehow it tells me that it has a right to ‘life’. She is saying that it serves no purpose and only more hurt can flow from it, I need to accept my mother’s behaviour, see her for the flawed human she is and still offer her the best of myself.

Wisdom out of the mouths and babes and sucklings eh…

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” Lewis B Smedes

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 14:07 and is filed under Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.