Recent Comments

1. 4 days ago on For Better or For Worse

   The washer had/has no center agitator and the drum cannot be filled past a certain point because the parts that spin and agitate the drum can’t handle filling beyond 3/4 full. All my kids are grown and moved out (ages 35, 30, and 27), and my daughter has three of her own kids (my sons have three more between them, and my oldest son has a step-daughter who is pregnant with her first). As far as I know, my daughter does her laundry just fine now. And I wouldn’t have made her pay to fix the washer. She was 13 and had no job. None of my kids had jobs while in school. I gave my kids no allowance, and the money they got for birthdays and Christmas was separated into a “fun” account and a “college” account. They could spend the one on whatever stuff they wanted, but the other was untouchable until college. All three saved most of their fun money to purchase cell phones when they graduated High School since I didn’t allow them to have phones when they were school-age teens.

2. 5 days ago on For Better or For Worse

   I tried to allow my kids to do their own laundry. My two boys did an okay job, and if they ended up with pink socks they learned not to mix colors with whites again. But my daughter was another story. I showed her how to use my almost new washer and dryer multiple times, but the second time she used the washer, she over-filled it and it broke. After it was fixed, I banished her from my laundry room. As long as she put her dirty laundry in the bathroom hamper, I washed it with mine and my husband’s. It was just easier that way.

3. 15 days ago on For Better or For Worse

   Not dark, just a normal human being. We all must separate ourselves from our parents eventually. The teen years are when most people begin to do that.

4. 16 days ago on For Better or For Worse

   The key words here are “a few years ago”. Perhaps I’m the only person whose ideas, opinions, and perceptions changed drastically during my teens, but I certainly hope not. I believe as we grow and see and experience more of the world and how people act, our opinions change. The teen years are when we begin to grow away from our parents on the way to becoming adults. So Brian was prone to tell his mother everything at 12 or 13, but by age 16 he’s seen more of life and begun to form his own, separate ideas.

5. 20 days ago on For Better or For Worse

   My mother, and me for the most part, kept her abuse secret from my dad. He saw her yelling at me, but very rarely did he see the physical stuff. I was around 11 or 12 the one time he actually saw her abuse. I had accidentally knocked over his motorcycle in the garage trying to reach something on a shelf for my mother. When I finally extricated myself from under the bike and went to tell her, she pushed me down in the mudroom and began to kick me as I curled into as small of a ball that I could. My dad came home from work about then and stopped her. That’s the only time I remember him intervening.

6. 23 days ago on Overboard

   I had a German Shepard who loved to be vacuumed. He’d lay on one side and then turn over for me to get the other side. Now I have 1 dog who runs and hides when the vacuum comes out and 1 dog who believes it’s her duty to kill the vacuum. I have to put her outside when I clean because she’s already ruined 2 vacuums.

7. 24 days ago on For Better or For Worse

   Or he was a child and someone gave him a hat he didn’t like so he left it behind on a family vacation. Surely you remember being a kid and hating at least one article of clothing that was foisted upon you.

8. about 1 month ago on For Better or For Worse

   I am so sorry for what you went through as a child. No child should be treated like that. Your step-mother sounds like a real piece of work. I’m sorry to say this, but shame on your father for not protecting you. I hope you found healing as an adult. Emotional and verbal abuse is insidious because of the way it seeps into your internal language. Then your self-talk helps your abuser continue to hurt you well into adulthood. It took me 30 years to seek help in healing from my mother’s abuse, and I’m still afraid of her.

9. about 1 month ago on For Better or For Worse

   It’s the same kind of logic I had when I was Gordon’s age. My mother had been accusing me of doing things I wasn’t, and punishing me for them physically, verbally, and mentally for years. I finally figured since I’d been punished for so long, I might as well do the things she was accusing me of. At least I had a little bit of fun then. The last time she beat me, chasing me up the stairs to my room hitting my legs and back with a wooden hairbrush, was the day after high school graduation. I went out the next day and got pregnant with my first child.

10. about 1 month ago on Break of Day

    A long time ago, when I was 19, I was basically working to pay my rent and utilities and had little to no extra money for such frivolous things as food. I worked in a mall and at lunch, I’d go to a nearby Arby’s and get a packet of Arby’s Sauce and a cup of water. Sometimes I’d splurge and get a packet of Horsey Sauce. That was my lunch almost every day for 2 years.