I had a long talk with my mum on the phone last night. d was at her dad's. We talked so long that we flattened the batteries on both our cordless phones! My mum is deeply religious (Catholic) so I wanted to ask her how I stop being angry and forgive him. We went round in circles a fair bit because I don't see the value in being nice to people just so you can get to heaven (she didn't say it like this btw). What if there isn't a heaven? Isn't that going to make me feel pretty ripped off?
I found a cool quote in a book I'm reading that described why we should try to get along with people. I'll have to remember to put it on here later.
HIya M,
I've got the quote ready. Basically the reason I rang my mum was to say, how do I stop being so mad at him? How do I start to treat him like a friend when he has been such a sh*t to me. Mum was talking about forgiveness and how it gets us closer to God. I was countering with 'so what does that really do for us?". I feel like I believe less in a God and I believe more in Gaia (or Mother Earth). Following on from that, I can understand why it's important that we are good to the earth (pick up rubbish etc) but I couldn't articulate why it's good for us to be good to each other. I guess if we co-operate more we can do more good things and discover more things (like other planets out there that we could live on and space travel that would allow us to get there) but.... the 'nicer' we are to each other, the less people get killed in wars, the more over-populated this Earth will be and the more screwed we (the human race) will be in the long run unless we can find other places to live. So I wasn't much closer to finding a reason to be friendly with h (i.e hang out together with d6). Add to that whole mix is the feeling that he is trying to make things up to me and therefore lessen his own guilt by us hanging around together and being friendly. However, rightly or wrongly (and dear readers, give me your opinion on whether you think this is right or wrong), I feel that he is continuing to be disrespectful of my boundaries by pushing to hang around together when I have tried to make it clear that I am angry and hurt and don't want to hang around with him at this point. I want to keep to the facts, to dealing with d6 and co-parent effectively. I don't want to deal with explaining why I don't want to spend time with him, and I don't want to have to explain what I am doing in my life, where I am and who I hang around with. I try not to ask what he is doing (cos it hurts to hear him spending time with new girlfriend and doing things that don't involve me and spending money that I would love to get spent on d6's vacation care so that I had a little more money to pay off credit cards).
My mum was later talking to my sister (who also knows everything) and mum said that I wanted to stop being angry. My sis pointed out that perhaps I might still need to be angry in order to deal with him effectively (becuase I have been a doormat for so long, being angry would be a 180).
Ooops...anyway...rambling - must get round to that quote. This partly helps me understand why I need to forgive h and move on in an altruistic world-reaching kinda way. I'm not however saying that i can do this yet. I think being angry is healthy in some ways. I just can't let it go for too long and/or turn into bitterness.
"Since the microcosm of personal relationship influences the macrocosm of civilisation just as the civilisation - its customs and culture - influences personal relationship, it is in our relationships that we might effect this change. If so, an opportunity is present today in our everyday lives. It is the opportunity we have to value ourselves and to awaken to the way we express and protect that value in our relationships."
from Patricia 3vans. "The_verbally_@busive_rel@tionship"
Basically what it's saying is, that unless we make efforts in our personal relationships to value each other, then civilisation as a whole will eventually be effected because they are interdependant on each other.
