Have you ever heard anyone ask you to take off your kid gloves? Someone else told me to develop Rhino skin. Seems to me we come up with a lot of interesting ways to tell people to toughen up. I have come to the conclusion that if I DID toughen up as much as I likely need to in order to "take" what others dish out all the time, I would no longer be totally me. My ability to feel for others comes from being able to hurt for them. Being more sensitive makes me more vulnerable to being hurt, but always able to have deeper compassion. In short, we can't have it both ways. My wonderful tough friends are great leaders. I am a boo-boo kisser(:. Not that I can fix all the boo-boos of the world. I am just learning to figure out where my strengths and weaknesses are and try to be less self critical. It is so easy to list out all of my short comings and become consumed by the lack of improvement. I wish I could encourage myself as easily as I can someone else. Words can be so sweet or so bitter. They can offer medicine or offer poison. Once the poison is in there; it is difficult to remove. I can only hope I haven't poisoned anyone I love, but sadly I might have):.
As a kid I watched my parents fight about different things. I don't really have any other parents to compare them to so I can't really say whether they were normal fights couples have or not. I couldn't even say what most of them were about except the ones that were about me. We only ate as a family on holidays. My father came home late so we kids ate without him. I do remember spending time with him in the evening before I went to bed so it couldn't have been that late. My own husband gets home a little later because of his job commute so we eat late every night. But home schooling has given us the ability to be more flexible than my Mom was able to be. We had school early the next day. As I got older, I remember my Father being home less and less and the fights seemed to intensify. I remember one night when I was thirteen. I could hear them yelling through the wall. My mom found me crying and I told her I didn't want them to get a divorce. She told me...
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