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I just got back from a few days visiting my Mum and sister in beautiful Maleny…near the Glass House Mountains. My elder daughters and I had such a good time and the best bits were the past rememberings…..and laughing the kinda belly laugh that you only share with those closest to you! We also had a great time listening to my mum’s stories about her life pre and post me! Mum grew up in South Africa and had a monkey and a springbok for pets…..she first married a surveyor and spent some time out in the veldt with him, cooking over an open fire and trekking miles in the bush to visit with the closest neighbour. She battled off snakes, baboons that came down to eat out of the backyard every evening and the odd elephant or rhino. She has been married a number of times, lived in New Zealand and various parts of Australia and driven with only her young daughters across the Nullabour plains before they were bituminized. She has managed her parents hotel in South Africa and been threatened at knife point during the Mao Mao uprisings……(as children we all slept with our bags packed at the end of the bed ready for escape and trained in our escape route, while Mum was trained in the use of a pistol)…In Australia with her third husband she has mined opal at Andamooka in northern Southern Australia, living in a house built partially underground…she has travelled much to the Philippines and Switzerland -her favourite places in the world…and has weathered many adventures.
My sister has lived in many places too and had many and varied experiences…(I have decided that we are a family of the stuff that Sagas are made of! ) We always enjoy hanging with her many pets, most resued from terrible experiences of their own and given a new freedom and happier life in my altruistic sister's home. She is a Buddhist and truly lives her vows of compassion through these fortunate pets!
We are also a little left of centre and had a ball spending our time divining for water on my sister’s property…..my daughters are quite good at it actually!
We also possess a common strength of will and the desire to be in control……I objectively viewed this need to control in my sister and immediately went into workshop teacher mode and told her, and told her also about the mechanisms for letting go……..she was grateful…I was vilified……..but the next day I had a control breakdown of my own, phoning home I realized that my son had gone out and my hubby ( bless him) had paid little attention to the details of this excursion…….I was a little edgy about this as I believe kids will think about what they‘re doing if they know you are thinking about what they are doing too!! Not such a bad approach, but hubby, busy at work and left to care for the house, pets and two youngest was somewhat distracted and I was feeling ‘out of control’ abut this! I let my feisty tongue loose and felt, well vilified again (darn the ego)…but soon I realised how it looked… it looked like I was having a control issue of my own….probably because I was!! It’s a lesson I need to learn, but it isn’t an easy one, even with all the tools of the psychological trade at one’s disposal! Ah,tis good to have an ego wake-up call occasionally, keeping it real as the kids would say!
There is a wonderful work through book on the issues of control on the
net…www.coping.org.control I recommend this and I also recommend that if anyone needs to use it they might they find themselves going back to it over and over again!!! That’s O.K. letting go of control is out of our control……..the attempt is praisable, the repeat attempts are even more so! We cannot in the end control our need for control because of course you can see where that leads us…to an impasse…but we can take responsibility for it and attempt to move on…….
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