**********************
So, after enjoying a nice dinner with my then boyfriend he started to pull the meat off the turkey. I mentioned to him that he didn't have to do it all the way- that I wouldn't mind finishing it up for him. Now in my history- I've picked lobsters and poultry carcasses clean because I was good at it and as a service to my family and a way to show appreciation for an expensive meal (of lobster).
Robert actually hates picking the carcasses (he never told me this until two years later!) and so his picking the turkey was his gesture to me of helping out with the holiday routine.
I don't remember the specifics, but it turns out that Robert mistakenly thought I wanted to do the other part of turkey picking so I could eat the meat. I was getting annoyed because he left a lot of meat on the bone and I was like,well why did you even bother doing it if you were going to do it half-ass (pardon my French). I figured that I could have done it from the get-go if he was going to ditch it half way through.
LOL! So we fought over this mis-communication and our hidden attempts to please/serve each other. I wondered why he thought I'd want to eat so much turkey AFTER the large meal. LOL. Looking back on it, I could have kept my mouth shut and "cleaned" the remaining meat off the carcass when he was done and not worried about my 2nd round of eating. hehehe.
And thankfully, I've found that a lot of our mis-communications have been in attempts to impress/please/serve each other.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Now, our biggest fights are over parenting (which is pretty universal for blended families). Technically, we have very good stances with great motivations. I like to be in-volved because I appreciated what my father taught me and I hated feeling neglected by my mother. And Robert emulates his parents at being more pleasing and laid back. Neither of us are wrong other than acknowledging the fact that perhaps our children don't need what we are prescribing them as parents. So far Jasmin has fared very pleasantly with my attention and occasional sternness. Robert is not used to a lot of parent/child interaction and so he feels threatened when I interact with the other children while I try to parent them all the same. To me, attention is love. He prefers me to parent like him; and I wish he could see my loving intentions with all the kids. Neither of us are right or wrong... we just understand parenting differently coming from different households.
Our assumption is that we are the only ones that have parenting disputes. I'm interested to see how we can mesh our parenting techniques for the baby boy. And I'm hoping that that experience will let us relax on stressing our differences as an expression of bias regarding the children and more as just a historical part of our comfort with parenting.
I guess this goes back to my post about... are we wronging each other, or are we just rebelling against our differences?
No comments:
Post a Comment