spiritrestoration.org prayer group

relationship troubles

From: bxsmile@yahoo.com
Remote Name: 216.194.21.249
Remote User:
Date: 30 Aug 2004
Time: 10:32:29 -0400

Comments

Please tell me I can have something other than perpetual singlehood or my parents’ marriage. This may not sound too nice but sometimes I cannot stand to be around them at the same time, because it really bothers me to hear somebody be extra mean and shrewish to another person. That’s how my mother treats my father when she is unhappy. She lacks the coping skills to handle her frustrations any better. It doesn’t excuse what she does, but to me, it explains why she is the way she is. Her parents were married for many years, until her father died. So technically it wasn’t a broken home but in some ways it was not an intact home. Her father was unfaithful and had a lot of children with different women. He was verbally and physically abusive and managed to do time in jail for various things. My mother does not have any interest in getting counseling for her past but I think they have to do with why she married a guy that she can push around and walk all over. My father is a very nice man, an honest man, a faithful man. He has been employed their entire marriage (something which cannot be said for many men in this society) and has many good characteristics. But he does not stand up to her. I can’t tell which bothers me more – that she bullies him or that he lets her do it. Either way, I didn’t like seeing it as a child and it is still bothersome to me as an adult. My father’s father did a disappearing act early in my father’s childhood and was not seen or heard from again until I was about 12. He died 7 years later. So, to be fair, neither of them had a particularly good model for marriage during childhood. Of my three siblings, only one of us is even married (although I know that at least two more of us want to be). My brother married a woman who seems to want to isolate him from the rest of the family. She finds reasons why he can’t come to family events and he goes along with her. When we were little, my mother used to do the same things. She found reasons why we could visit her family but it was usually a problem to spend time with my father’s mother and sister. (After he learned he had other siblings via his father’s other women, it was also a problem to visit with them too). And when we did, we spent only a token amount of time with my father’s family. (Since my mother’s family of origin lives in or just outside of the same city as my father’s family of origin, and most of these people are a local telephone call to each other, this never made a lot of sense to me, not even as a child). My brother’s wife is very domineering. She has been very nasty to my brother, in front of other people. One day it was so bad, he called back later to say that everything was OK with them. In these ways, she reminds me a lot of my mother. And my brother’s reaction to her is a lot like my father’s reaction (or lack thereof) to my mother. I stay out of who is feuding with whom and I speak from time to time with my relatives, even those that my mother says aren’t her siblings. I live in the same city as some of these people and I need to know who they are if, for no other reason, so that I don’t inadvertently end up dating a cousin (which happened briefly to another cousin of mine in my generation, because some members of the generation of our parents tried to pretend these people don’t exist). I don’t tell her when I speak to them or if we hang out or whatever, but I think she probably knows that I do. I asked her if they did something to her or were morally objectionable people or if there was some other reason I should avoid them but she would not respond. I just don’t feel like her enemies have to automatically become mine, especially if I am not given good reason. On both sides of the family, broken marriages (or never married with kids out of wedlock) outnumber anything else. I don’t wish to end up single forever or have single parenting be the only parenting option for me. I have tried to honor God with my body and am still a virgin but I don’t want to die this way. I want to be a happily married wife and mother. I don’t want to end up with a domineering, abusive jerk – unlike my mother’s mother, I do not need a man to survive economically and could not tolerate living with such a person just so I could be married. Nor do I want a man who would let another person – not even his wife – run him, control him, dominate him. My brother has repeated, in some ways, my father’s past. I sure hope I can have something different. Most of the people I wrote about in this request are unhappy in terms of marital relationships - either we lack them, or we have them but they are dysfunctional to some degree. Please pray for a good marriage to occur for those of us who are still waiting, and for there to be happier, more harmonious marriages for those who live together in less than ideal marriages or who have split up.