It Just Gets Better
November 18th 2010 02:44
I really took it hard when my new wife said I could no longer clean my chain saw on the kitchen table. In spite of this, we lived together in reasonable harmony. I say this because in any marriage there is always a settling in period. Because we both came from a background of being single parents and this was our second marriage, there was more to give than take sometimes.
The children bared most of the brunt simply because they played Hine and me off against each other. I mean they would ask Hine can I do this and she might say no and give a valid reason. My children would come to me and I say yes.
Not really understanding much about conflict, I got a six-month course in this. It took this long to get my head around why I had to say no sometimes when I normally would say yes. No, I am not a yes person by any means; I just love my kids and want the best for them.
The trouble was to find a way of dealing with this amicably. We sometimes call this in New Zealand saving face. Americans might call it something else, Lol. After some serious prayer, this is how Hine and I dealt with it. At our house, we began what became an institution. Yes, that is right; ‘The Family meeting’ was born.
The rules were simple. One person speaks at a time and the meeting lasts for an hour. If no one wants to talk, we sit there and look at one another for the hour. To my memory that only ever happened once and most meetings went well over the hour. Incidentally, the television set always off.
We would start with the youngest member and work our way up to mother and father going last. I would ask each one what they wanted to talk about and wrote it down in the book. The reason for this is sometimes our discussions got so in depth we often forgot what was important to us as individuals.
The first thing we did was always give the glory to God. We had a bible reading and prayer then got onto our discussion. Often a lot of conflict got resolved this way and as time went by the tension grew less and less, and I have not cleaned my chainsaw on the kitchen table since.
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