News From the Hill

Posts Tagged ‘Relationships’

As I write I can hear rain drops pitter patter-ing on the roof light, it’s a lovely sound at night when you are warm and cozy and do not need to go outside.

We did get some really nice weather week before last and made good use of it too!

A couple of friends from different parts of the country had asked if they could come visit and was there any work that needed doing around the place?

What a silly question! There is always work to be done around our place – everyone is welcome – bring your workclothes and boots, a good attitude and a smile and your dinner will be on the table!

We got lots of work done and even managed to have lots of fun whilst doing it! Double whammy!

We cleared the yard of accumulated “this will come in usefull” stuff and neatly piled it in a better part of the yard. We organised a fox-proof container for keeping the rubbish (trash) bags in ’til it is time to go put them at the crossroads for collection.

We moved around a few old vehicles that actually do have a use – you just couldn’t guess it to look at them! One truck has a very reliable engine that will become our key-start back-up genny for when we have a few of those dark, non-windy days that sometimes happen in the winter, leaving us a little short of electrical power. We moved the truck nearer to where we keep our electrical control equipment and will incorporate it into a lean-to on the side of our workshop.

We shovelled a couple of years worth of couch-grass off the gravel on the yard – hard work! Anyone who thinks that the Earth is in jeopardy has never lived with couch grass! Seriously, the couch grass will inherit the Earth long after we are gone! It’s our own happy, healthy existence that’s in jeopardy.

The foundations to the house got some work done on them too! Now that’s what I call exciting! With a bit more ground-work by the two of us and another visit from some helpful friends and the foundations will soon be finished – yahoo!

Imagine, with all that work in just a few days we still had time to go for wee strolls, laugh at the lambs and their mums who pop in to visit, conveniently keeping our grass down and we even managed to have some really good chats with each other.

So now it’s raining and we are back to a more solitary existence and enjoying those moments too!

Happy St Patrick’s Day! Whatever that means to you…. Maybe green rivers in Chicago, trade deals in New York, for some binge drinking in Ireland and for others putting face paint on the excited kids of the local children’s playschool class. It is a very odd mix of activities isn’t it?

I loved St Patricks Day when I was a child, for starters we had a day off school which was always a cause for celebration in my book! Secondly, even thought we were in the middle of Lent we were allowed a free day – we could eat the things we had given up for lent such as Tayto crisps, sweets and ice-cream. Thirdly, we lived near a city which always had an exciting parade and it was fun to go watch it with our family and to meet friends there too.

Drinking alcohol was not a big thing in my family so my childhood memories of the day do not involve seeing people drink to excess and as I grew older it was not something that I associated with the day.

I found it a little boring when my college friends got “rat-arsed” on paddys day, although I was a party goer most other days of the year, I never could see the whole “it’s paddys day, we have to get extremely drunk” thing.

I am looking forward to the parade in one of the towns that I live near. It will be a lovely simple affair with tractors, both new and vintage, hopefully the fire brigade truck, the playschool kids in colourful costumes, brownies and cub scouts looking so proud. How do I know what to expect? Because it has been the same for the years that I have lived here and I really do enjoy it!

As I said, when I grew up we had access to quite sophisticated parades and they were great fun and very colourful and noisy with all sorts of marching bands, big fancy floats and often American bands with cheerleaders.

There is something really lovely for me in the simplicity of the local small town parade, it seems more real, more rooted in the community, not trying to be something that it is not.

Many people are happy to go and watch their local parade and then have a pint or two with their friends and neighbours and I do enjoy that sort of socialising and may well do that very thing today.

However I will leave early so as not to be in town this evening when it becomes messy and also because I want to cook a lovely meal of bacon and cabbage! – Yeah, I know, it’s a little cliché but I do love bacon and cabbage and today is a really good day for it!

What does St Patick’s Day mean to you? Whatever it represents I do hope that you have a lovely day and enjoy some fun with your family, friends and neighbours this week.

Families can be so complicated, I am sure that it was always thus. Now we have more family than ever, even though the old fashioned extended family has gone by the wayside we now have a new fashioned extended family because we have our in-laws and we now have out-laws.

No, I don’t mean Billy the Kid or the Great Train Robbers, what I mean by out-laws is that we now have the assorted ex-in-laws.

We have our own ex-in-laws, if there are children involved and we are lucky we may have a reasonable relationship with them. Then we have not only our new partner’s family – the in-laws, we have the ex-in-laws and that relationship in whatever state it is. To top that we now also have our siblings’ ex-in-laws and possibly new in-laws as well. Phew, who has a big enough table for that family gathering?

With the best will in the world it is hard to maintain good relationships with all these new “relations”. Family responsibilities may become very confused and boundaries are ever more difficult to maintain – ah! There is the “wild west” motif sneaking in again – fence wars, boundary problems!

For many of us healthy boundaries within our immediate family may be quite enough to concentrate on, let’s face it – not many of us learned about healthy boundaries whilst growing up. By immediate family here I mean our partner and whatever children we may have between us, for some even this distinction is not clear.

I recently had a conversation with a sibling who assumed that by immediate family I meant my siblings, I was quite shocked and so was my sibling. You can imagine the conversation – sibling: but we are your family; me: yes, of course you are still my family, I now have a bigger family and more immediate family priorities with my partner and my partners children; sibling: where do we come in?; me: I actually left that unanswered and I’m still trying to figure it out, hopefully my sibling is also giving the matter some thought…

Family responsibilities are not clear and easy to deal with for many people and now with all the added family it has become even more difficult.

It may be the case that because of a particular skill you possess you may have taken on the role of doing certain jobs or having certain responsibilities within your first in-law family. When divorce or separation enters the picture that role may not be as clear as it was.

It may be that you wish to continue providing that skill to the now ex-family and there is resentment coming from others in that family, on the other hand perhaps you would prefer to keep very clear boundaries and withdraw from that level of family involvement and other family members resent you for doing that!

It’s even worse if there is simmering resentments or bitterness in the out-law family, not necessarily from your ex, sometimes these resentments come from your ex’s siblings and that can be very difficult to deal with. These feeling can sift downward in the generations, perhaps becoming exaggerated as they do and then affect the children no matter what age they are.

Even trying to write that is confusing, never mind actually trying to live it. Think I will put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea.

I hope your day is not filled with confusion…

Blian Núa Shona Dhuit – Happy New Year to you and those you love. My global wish (hey, why not be ambitious?) is that we all learn to prioritise the truly important things in life and concentrate less on the superficial and commercial.

I had a lovely break over the Christmas, didn’t even check my email for nine days straight!!!

I hope that you all, my two lovely readers   had a beautiful Christmas, as I did, spent some time with loved ones in my family, had lots of great food, some great walks, some great sitting and watching classic b+w films and some great chats.

As for New Year’s Eve – I have to admit that I have never been really interested in all the fuss that accompanies it, even in my younger and wilder partying days I was never into the N.Y.Eve parties, the resolutions that everyone assumed would not last past February, singing and hugging complete strangers etc. Somehow it all seemed a little exaggerated, superficial and unreal.

When I was younger I was not quite sure why I felt like this, it’s not as though I didn’t enjoy partying as much as the next young wild one and I wouldn’t have known a grounded, living-in-the-moment person if I bumped into one, which wasn’t likely actually in the places I hung out! It makes more sense now that my life has changed quite a bit and I have stopped floating through life in a smoky and busy haze, taken the time to challenge some of what I was running away from, dealt with some of the baggage that I was dragging around.

The concept of living in the moment was a difficult one for me to grasp, obviously I knew what it meant intellectually but it was a while before my heart caught up. No surprise there, my head was nearly always in the way. I still struggle with that  but now when I speak of getting out of my head it’s a very different out of my head experience than that of the eighties! Now it’s about taking the time to listen to my heart, taking time out of the rush and hustle of life to slow down and really listen to what it is that I need, what it is that I feel.

For me this is not as easy as it sounds, I really have to remind myself to do it and sometimes I have hearing problems – it can take quite some time before I can clearly hear myself. I suppose that this is sustainable living for me – in order to live a real and healthy life and to have healthy relationships I need to do this, I need to take time out to listen to what is really going on for me.

For me the Winter Solstice was a special time, a time for reflection, to acknowledge the year gone past and a new beginning, the days becoming longer, the sun coming back to us, growth starting slowly under the protection of the soil, promise and optimism.

I hope that this new year brings with it many wondrous and joyful experiences for us all…

I recently had the opportunity to sit in a group and work through some unresolved tension between some of the group members. The method used for relieving the tension was so simple – good communication.

Everyone spoke in turn, without interruption. People took their time, there was no rush, there was time to think about what you were saying. We all spoke about how we were affected by the situation thus avoiding the “you said” and “you did” elements which can be so unhelpful.

We realised how what we say and the tone used can be so easily misinterpreted. This can cause hurt, which if not aired can fester and lead to resentment.

It is not as simple as it sounds to sit and listen to each other without interruption and without the chance of an immediate come-back – which often just escalates a situation into an argument. The value of speaking in turn is that by the time it is your turn to speak you may no longer wish to say what you were expecting to say, you will have had to time to listen to others speak and this may well have changed how you see things and given you the opportunity to identify what you are really feeling.

There may be many rounds necessary to resolve a situation, you sit with it until it is finished. People sometimes ask – how long will this take? It takes as long as it takes!

It is also not often that people are courageous enough to really speak from the heart, to say how hurt they are feeling or vulnerable or frightened or angry. We are so often afraid to let others see how we really feel, we wear masks to protect ourselves, to hide behind. There are many reasons that we do this, it is a learnt behaviour. Perhaps in the past someone used our vulnerability against us or took advantage of our fear to frighten us further, whatever the reason we can unlearn this behaviour and learn a new way to be. Learning any new skill takes practise and to do this it helps to have people around us that we trust and feel safe with.

I would love for everyone have the opportunity to experience this sort of communication, to experience what it is like to sit through a situation which could very easily lead to confrontation but doesn’t, which allows everyone to speak their truth and to really hear each other.

Simple things can be really difficult – but it is worth it!