Taking a Stand - Blog Therapy
Something has gotten into me - maybe it's a good thing, and maybe not. But I'm now more and more able to stand up for myself and tell people what I really think. No matter how uncomfortable it is, or confrontational - I'm opening my mouth. It started at work over the past year - in the position that I'm in I come across difficult situations with not only students, but "educators" who have been in the business about 20 years longer than I have. (I use the term "educators" lightly as these individuals need an entire mental shift to get them out of the 70's.) I have had to put my foot down often, and where I used to be a bit wishy washy with my feedback and instructions, I am becoming more blunt and to the point. Not everybody is happy with the new me, but I'm quite proud of the fact that I am no longer avoiding confrontations.

And now it's spilling over into my personal life. My mother who is convalescing threw me some big BS yesterday and I called her on it and told her that her treatment towards me wasn't fair. Not to diss my siblings, but they have been useless when it comes to my mother's surgery despite the fact that I sent the SOS signal to them months before the surgery. I work full-time in a stressful job, I commute (ie. 14 hour days), I am a single parent, and I have my own health issues to worry about. And yet I am the big fucking disappointment who can't quite please my mother. My brother and sister don't get the guilt trip when they don't call my mother every day, but I do. I tried to visit almost every day when she was in the hospital, and I took her home from the hospital, and I have been to her house almost every goddamn day to see if she needs anything. Yet the "I just thought that you'd like to know how I am and would have called" crap that she threw at me last night .... well you'd think that I hadn't been in contact with her for a month. No more! I've lived my entire life as her punching bag for all of life's disappointments, and I've had to try and grow into a communicator because my family's big dysfunction is the fact that nobody talks and we just let things sit and boil inside of us.

Okay, enough blog therapy for today.