I M Perfect lady

Tag: hollering

  • Growing Up.

    I heard my own words coming back to me, I listened to what I sounded like, it was a live tape recorder, my son.

    “You are not listening to me.”

    “Why are you being so difficult?”

    “Why do you have to make this so hard, you know what you need to do?”

    He wasn’t screaming, but trying to maintain his polite stance so that I could see he was good.

    I had done this too, I didn’t want him to see the bad side of me, yet after a few times of speaking and no action I would abandon that plan and just go full tilt in the hollering mode.

    I had wanted him to take care of his responsibilities without me having to take care of mine.

    Something had changed within me; he could feel my strong stance and that he had lost his power or rule between him and I.

    I no longer cared about being a ‘nice’ mom.

    I was done.
    I was tired.

    My words, my pleading, my forever telling him what to do and when, my constant directions had me exhausted.

    I had a voice-activated son. If I screamed and hollered, he moved.

    And I was tired of moving this big kid around, for
    I now had to look up at him.

    Perhaps it was his large body or the fact that I was worn down, but I finally had had enough.

    I took his iTouch hostage in exchange for responsible behavior.

    What I want most is a son who is responsible for self.

    What is insane is that I have been spoiling, babying and taking care of him, EXPECTING him to be responsible. Guess there was no need, for I had it!

    I was finally tired of doing his life along with mine.

    I will take away whatever else needs to be taken away to get him to now undo all my years of spoiling.

    It will be a hard and long learning curve for both of us, for I am guilty of over tending since I was so unattended.

    There is a balance in the middle.

    I will continue to find the things that I am responsible for, what a tending mother does, but not a spoiling mother.

    There is a fine line.

    He isn’t a bad kid, but he was teetering on the edge of following his peers and group mentality, for he was so used to following words of others.

    He was perfectly taught by me.

    What is so blatantly obvious is how he treated his superiors at school was the same way he treats me.

    He dances on the line of disrespect, before slipping back into compliance.

    He is approaching the cross roads in life, where he will decide who he is, what behaviors he wants to define himself, will he be responsible or blame those in charge for his circumstances?

    What I know for sure is that I have been a negative influence as far as holding him responsible for being responsible.

    I had taken too many responsibilities away from him and now I am going to have to work harder to give them back.

    And it will be harder on him to learn to follow his own voice inside.

    Perhaps that is called growing up.

  • Equal In My Eyes.

     

     

     

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    What is the difference between hollering and verbal abuse?

     

    What is verbal abuse? 

     

    Well I looked up the definition of Verbal Abuse.

     

    Psychology A form of emotional abuse consisting of the use of abusive and demeaning language with a spouse, child, or elder, often by a caregiver or other person in a position of power.

     

    So hollering becomes abuse when the one doing the hollering is in the position of power or caregiver, hence parents.

     

    I know for a fact that what I used to call ‘hollering’ was verbal abuse, I was the person of power.

     

    I looked up the word ‘demeaning’ to see if what I was hollering about was ‘demeaning’.

    Demeaning. Humiliate and degrade: to reduce somebody to    a much lower status in a humiliating way.

    To reduce someone to a lower status, wow hollering makes him or her lower.  I also felt the guilt, but this puts a name on the feeling.  I was lowering their sense of status in our home, by hollering for them to do their jobs.

     

    We could split hairs and say, hollering at them to clean up isn’t demeaning, but what we fail to notice is that they are our equals.

     

    We have neither right nor power to subjugate them to feeling less then us.

     

    What I came to learn was that by making them equal I gave them back their responsibility.

     

    Yesterday, I had a prime example of this interaction.  My daughter who is in college now, but living at home, wanted to just study all day.  What a sassy child you are all thinking, but what we expect from each, is not only to do well in that part of their world, but also to contribute to living here.

     

    So, we had a conversation, each of us stating their side.  I truly commended her on doing her life so well, but that she forgot to leave time for contributing for her living.  She suggested that I do all the work, since she was so busy and I had a day off.

     

    She has homework time, boyfriend time, but no “taking care of her living” area time.  Time management was her issue; she forgot to include cleaning up house time.

     

    We have offered to accept money instead of time, but they all decided time was cheaper to give. 

     

    I addressed the issue of her noncontributing, that it was to raise her up to my level, not to keep her beneath.  To show her that there is more to living than just schoolwork and a boyfriend, but to also be responsible of her living space.

     

    I stated, “I could do your part, but that isn’t fair to you, you need to feel that you are a contributing part in this house, and it surely isn’t fair to me to carry your weight.  It is abuse in the opposite direction to make you useless.”

     

    It is sad to know that so many of the hollering mom’s believe that they are hollering to make the children be more, yet what they are doing is bringing them down. 

     

    Whittling away at the Bright Spirit that they arrived as.  We ironically whittle them down to our own dysfunctional size.

     

    Lowering their status, keeping the scales unbalanced, keeping them feeling less and less, neither of us feeling good when the hollering is done.  We both are losers, we both feel less.

     

    But what we fail to realize or have the tools to implement, is that we must  bring our children up to our equals.

     

    How often do you see someone holler at his or her equal? 

     

    How do you feel after you have been hollered at?

    Does it raise your sense of wholeness, your brightness, and your rightness?

     

    Hollering is sugar coated verbal abuse.

    Hollering makes it seem less to the hollering person.

    Call it what you will, but in the end, it lowers the status.

     

    It is our job or responsibility as parents to raise our children, not lower them.

     

    What I knew was that this abuse had to stop, and I had to be the one to stop it.  It was up to me to save my kids from me!

     

    I had to be the change. 

     

    I had to focus on raising them and to do that, I had to raise the bar, raise the consequences, and make them an equal in my eyes.