Which hat will you wear with your family this weekend?

First a little Melodie Beattie for us all,she always comforts. Thanks to Pip for this:

Living with Families

I was forty-six years old before I finally admitted to myself and someone else that my grandfather always managed to make me feel guilty, angry, and controlled.
—Anonymous
We may love and care about our family very much. Family members may love and care about us. But interacting with some members may be a real trigger to our codependency—sometimes to a deep abyss of shame, rage, anger, guilt, and helplessness.
It can be difficult to achieve detachment, on an emotional level, with certain family members. It can be difficult to separate their issues from ours. It can be difficult to own our power.
Difficult, but not impossible.
The first step is awareness and acceptance—simple acknowledgment, without guilt, of our feelings and thoughts. We do not have to blame our family members. We do not have to blame or shame ourselves. Acceptance is the goal—acceptance and freedom to choose what we want and need to do to take care of ourselves with that person. We can become free of the patterns of the past. We are recovering. Progress is the goal.
Today,help me be patient with myself as I learn how to apply recovery behaviors with family members. Help me strive today for awareness and acceptance.

 

 Thanks to Jessie for the following reflection…

All well here. The sun is shining and I can hear one of my favourite sounds -a blackbird singing – just outside my bedroom window. Followed by a second …..my husband unpacking the dishwasher!

 

Feeling reflective here this morning and grateful if a little sad….but only a little. A year today my Dad died. We were so lucky to have time to laugh, cry, pray, joke and talk with him and hold him close to us. Everyone who wanted to got to say goodbye to him and he to they. Nothing important was left unsaid. He knew he was dying and truly believed he would that day be in paradise with my mother. The memories of the last two weeks I spent with him, every day and many nights, are etched on my heart and I have immense gratitude for all that we had.

 

Being my fathers daughter was not always a role I filled easily. He had high expectations, a sharp tongue and a short temper. He was funny but he could be cruel,hardworking but harsh; passionate about education he gave me a lifelong love of books, he had an intolerance for the oppression of minorities – except his five daughters at home! Brought up in post war England as a young Irish man he was tough, resilient and always ready to do battle to defend himself.

 

He was also an alcoholic. As was his father and his father before him ….. It coloured his entire life and much of my own. Fortunately poverty , religion and strong values of providing for his family kept a tight rein on him. But in later years with more money and less responsibilities it unravelled. Witnessing this accelerated my own determination to live a life without alcohol. It is what it is. I am the woman I am because of the many many lessons and opportunities my father taught me and gave me. I can’t wish it were any other way because to do so would be to diminish him ….. It is futile to wish it were different. It was a sad but integral part of who he was. And I loved him – all of him.

 

My dad had a great love of hats …. A picture of us wearing hats together was taken shortly before his death as we packed up the family home. I decided a modelling shoot with the three of us wearing all the hats in turn whilst my husband took pictures was the best way to choose a small selection to take to the nursing home. We laughed instead of crying as we packed up a family life. The one Dad was wearing sits proudly in my study now.

 

So some sadness, huge huge amounts of gratitude , and a rich tapestry of memories to sustain me. Today I am going to open the box in my heart where they remain and slowly pick over some of them. Xx