The Perfect Family…or not.

One of my favorite movies is the female-charged roller derby flick “Whip It.” I could sit here and quote the whole movie but instead I’ll jump straight to the quote that has inspired this blog post: (view actual scene here) “Just because you found a new family doesn’t mean you throw the old one away…”

I don’t know about you, but I could probably take a guess and say that Bliss (Ellen Page) and myself are not the only ones who have found a new “family” at one point in their life and thought about getting rid of their “old” family. It’s common and unfortunately some people really do it. But I’m here to talk you through that and hopefully you won’t, tempting as it may be.

The concept of family is a bit confusing to me. Two people love each other and get married (or that’s how it used to be) and start a family. Sometimes it’s 1 kid, sometimes it’s more…but either way, the couple produces an offspring. This person is then raised by their parents (usually) and grows up surrounded by the earlier generations of this family. All of these people share genes and therefore have overlapping traits, personalities and learned habits. However, each person has their own unique qualities as well. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t question God, but seriously…it just sounds like a setup for disaster. So that’s my conclusion – family = disaster. SO WHY DO WE EXPECT ANYTHING DIFFERENT?

So many people are out searching for their “perfect” family…the Brady Bunch concept. Well ya know what, the Brady Bunch wasn’t perfect and neither is anyone else. God put a bunch of imperfect people together “for life” to help people LEARN how to love. Love is a feeling/emotion/concept that comes easy when you get to choose the person. Everyone else you have to learn how to love. That goes for your blood family, your adopted family (if you have one), your church family, your married into & extended family…all families are disaster zones. But God commands us to love and forgive and move forward. The bible tells us to forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive. This is not a concept just for the prophets or teachers or “good” people. Learning to love and learning to forgive is for everyone and it’s what helps a family stay together and grow together. It’s so unfortunate that some people don’t see it that way and this concept/trait is a growing epidemic. Kids raised with unforgiving/not loving parents are usually not equipped to break the cycle and therefore will teach it to their kids and so on. We as children (no matter what age) have to make the active decision to break these hereditary curses. It just takes 1 person to break the chain and change the future of their family tree. Are you brave enough to be that person? To swallow your pride and selfishness and agree to disagree with someone? To forgive when it’s painful to even THINK about it. To apologize to the hardest people to admit failure to. To choose to love those that don’t seem worthy of loving…

The truth is, if you don’t learn to love and forgive – you’ll never find a family that’ll live up to your standards. All you’ll be left with is a lot of “old” families that you threw out.

I’ll leave you with one last movie quote from another favorite of mine. “Love is not a feeling – it’s an ability” – Dan in Real Life

The Perfect Family…or not.

One of my favorite movies is the female-charged roller derby flick “Whip It.” I could sit here and quote the whole movie but instead I’ll jump straight to the quote that has inspired this blog post: (view actual scene here) “Just because you found a new family doesn’t mean you throw the old one away…”

I don’t know about you, but I could probably take a guess and say that Bliss (Ellen Page) and myself are not the only ones who have found a new “family” at one point in their life and thought about getting rid of their “old” family. It’s common and unfortunately some people really do it. But I’m here to talk you through that and hopefully you won’t, tempting as it may be.

The concept of family is a bit confusing to me. Two people love each other and get married (or that’s how it used to be) and start a family. Sometimes it’s 1 kid, sometimes it’s more…but either way, the couple produces an offspring. This person is then raised by their parents (usually) and grows up surrounded by the earlier generations of this family. All of these people share genes and therefore have overlapping traits, personalities and learned habits. However, each person has their own unique qualities as well. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t question God, but seriously…it just sounds like a setup for disaster. So that’s my conclusion – family = disaster. SO WHY DO WE EXPECT ANYTHING DIFFERENT?

So many people are out searching for their “perfect” family…the Brady Bunch concept. Well ya know what, the Brady Bunch wasn’t perfect and neither is anyone else. God put a bunch of imperfect people together “for life” to help people LEARN how to love. Love is a feeling/emotion/concept that comes easy when you get to choose the person. Everyone else you have to learn how to love. That goes for your blood family, your adopted family (if you have one), your church family, your married into & extended family…all families are disaster zones. But God commands us to love and forgive and move forward. The bible tells us to forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive. This is not a concept just for the prophets or teachers or “good” people. Learning to love and learning to forgive is for everyone and it’s what helps a family stay together and grow together. It’s so unfortunate that some people don’t see it that way and this concept/trait is a growing epidemic. Kids raised with unforgiving/not loving parents are usually not equipped to break the cycle and therefore will teach it to their kids and so on. We as children (no matter what age) have to make the active decision to break these hereditary curses. It just takes 1 person to break the chain and change the future of their family tree. Are you brave enough to be that person? To swallow your pride and selfishness and agree to disagree with someone? To forgive when it’s painful to even THINK about it. To apologize to the hardest people to admit failure to. To choose to love those that don’t seem worthy of loving…

The truth is, if you don’t learn to love and forgive – you’ll never find a family that’ll live up to your standards. All you’ll be left with is a lot of “old” families that you threw out.

I’ll leave you with one last movie quote from another favorite of mine. “Love is not a feeling – it’s an ability” – Dan in Real Life

Expectations: Choose Wisely

Expectations are probably the biggest source of many people problems. You know what I’m talking about – the issues that arise between 2 fairly intelligent people. I’ve been learning how expectations and assumptions can really tear a situation to pieces very quickly. “He said” “She said” He should have” “She should have” “I didn’t”….phrases sound familiar huh? It’s called shifting the blame away from yourself based upon expectations or assumptions. And we all do it.

But what happens when it’s done to you and there is nothing you can do about it? Well I’m finding that you have 3 choices. You can defend yourself, you can get walked all over, or you can get through it and move on.

The choice to defend. It’s somewhere in our blood that we don’t like to be wrong or challenged. We all have it. That need to be right, to be justified, to be defended. Whether we defend ourselves or we find the right person to stand by our side, we’ll fight to the end to not accept the blame being placed on us…whether it’s accurate or not. In the end, I find that this accomplishes nothing except a nice big wedge between the accused and accuser. In the end, you both are stubborn and no one is right. It’s a situation that doesn’t get solved…just ignored until it happens again.

The choice be get walked all over. Call it insecurity, call it a door mat, call it a people-pleaser. Call it what you will, but in the end, whether you were right or wrong, you’re giving someone else the upper hand and admitting to being wrong, even if you weren’t. Some people call it being peaceful but I don’t think there is anything right about another person’s expectations becoming your reality. I don’t believe in giving power to evil doing or keeping quiet when something needs to be said. In the end, you both lose. You are accepting a reputation or mindset that you didn’t earn and the accuser is given the ego and power of conquering a situation. And things between the 2 of you will never be the same. This situation WILL happen again and you’ve now enabled it to happen to someone else as well.

The choice to get through it and move on. Someone else’s expectations  and assumptions are not your fault. You cannot take responsibility for the way another person thinks. However, you can take responsibility for how you react to them. You can hear the person out, talk about the confusion and apologize for a misunderstanding when you can understand their point of view. You’re not accepting the blame, but you are being compassionate of the frustration they have felt because of the situation. You can voice your side of the story and figure out between the 2 of you how to avoid this in the future. And then you can both move on with this situation behind you. Honestly, you both win.

So what happened to cause this blog you ask? Life happened. Work happened. God created people and Eve ate the apple. It doesn’t matter what happened yesterday, last week, last month or last year. These situations arise when people have to interact with one another. Next time remember that you DO have a choice in how you deal with situations. Choose wisely.

What An Attitude!!

There are many days in this nice 9 month journey that I’m just Jess with a belly. But then there are other days…and those days seem to be getting more frequent now that I’m in my third trimester. I’m talking about the days when I laugh, cry, become sad, then happy, hate everyone and love everything all within an hour.  Can’t relate? Well that’s okay…today’s post isn’t about pregnancy or mood swings or hormones. It’s about attitude.

Although I realize it’s perfectly normal to be hormonally imbalanced at this point in my life, I’ve also been made aware that I don’t have to give in to it. I can fight against the urge to throw keys at an annoying landlord office worker and not cry in the middle of Home Depot. I can wake up with a sore back and do some stretches to make it better. I can look at the rainy sky and completely stopped traffic and breathe a sigh of relief that I’m still happy, healthy and loved. Attitude and control really can make such a difference in my life if I give them the power to do so.

And then earlier today I realized that it’s not just me that God is speaking to about this…the rest of my post is from my bloggy friend’s post. And I swear, we didn’t talk about this. Take a read below and read the full post here:

It’s hard to be upset and play the victim role when you know God knows what He is doing. So we choose to trust in Him. We choose to stay positive. We choose whether we allow outside drama into our lives. We choose whether we allow ourselves to take our eyes off God and instead look at the worldly ways. We choose to find the good along with the bad.

While we may not always be able to choose our circumstances, we can choose our reaction to them.

We can choose our attitude.

……….I love the following quote by Charles R. Swindoll……..

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.

We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.

So.
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what do you choose?

Love, Hate and Coffee

I’m torn between 2 topics to write about. Both are weighing heavy on my heart and therefore I’ve decided to combine the two. Please excuse the chaos.

The past few mornings I’ve been waking up with “Praise the Lamb” – Alli Rogers stuck in my head. Not really hard to figure out why, it’s the song we’re presenting a dance to on Sunday in church. (All are welcome to come by the way! Sunday 10am @ connections church in wappingers falls). So this morning I woke up singing this song. Then realized my head was still pounding from the migraine I developed yesterday and I was going to take a sick day, so I went back to bed. When I re-awoke at 10:45am (yup!! haha it felt goood) I was singing a different tune. It was non other than the Beatles’ song “All you need is love.” Now it could be because every blog and tweet I read is chatting about the Beatles’ Rock Band coming out. Or it could be that my life is surrounded by love and although it’s not all I need, it sure is a big part of it. Comments/thoughts welcome on this!

Now this transitions me oh so horribly into my 2nd blog topic.

I have a love/hate relationship with coffee. My gosh I love the taste so much. I have a physical passion for it’s taste, a mental craving for it’s comfort and an emotional drawing because of past memories over coffee. However. I do know that it’s not good to literally love coffee. And I know that it’s the reason for the migraine I had for 20 hours over the past 2 days (yes, yikes).  Let me explain.

Coffee does not give me migraines. BUT coffee takes the place of drinking alternative beverages such as, oh I don’t know, WATER. My body is seriously dehydrated this past week due to my increasing consumption of coffee and therefore decreasing consumption of water. So little water + caffeine over 3 days = massive migraine.

So one would think that I would now be like “oh my gosh give me water.” I wish that were the case folks. I’m craving it so bad. It’s so hard to sit at home and not make myself a ginormous pot of coffee and refill my beautiful ceramic mug over and over again while watching the most ridiculous movies until Chris comes home. So I took the high road. The coffee stays in the jar, the mug stays on the shelf and a bottle of water is sitting in front of me. And this transitions me even worse than before into my last thought of the day.

This is the 3rd time in the past week or 2 that this thought came to mind, so I think I’ll share it with you. In life we’re usually given 2 options. We can take the high road or the low road. The hard choice or the easy choice. The wide or the narrow. Do you have it in you to choose the right one?