News flash: what people do in the privacy of their bedroom is not my business. I do not care. I do care if someone is funny or kind or giving. I care if someone is a misogynist or a racist or abusive. I will never ever get mad because someone is happy and in love, no matter who it is with, as long as nobody is getting hurt. And, of course, all parties must be consenting adults.
All these homophobic people America seems to have lately is really ridiculous. Part of me feels like they’re just really insecure with their own sexuality. Maybe they have confusing feelings they haven’t dealt with yet. Or maybe I’m just noticing them so much now because my youngest daughter just came out as gay.
We must overcome the notion that we must be regular. It robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre.
Uta Hagen
All I know is that my daughter just came hurling herself out of the closet. My only job, after raising her to be an amazing and productive human being, is to be her biggest supporter and her human armor against any hate. It is not to judge or ostracize her for making decisions that are different from mine.
Even though I am not psychic, I already know she will spend her life tolerating and enduring the comments of mean people regardless of her sexual orientation. There are trolls everywhere in life and online. I will not be one more.
I spent seven years of my life trying to make a marriage work, in a conventional husband and wife relationship, while he was abusive. He almost ruined my children’s childhood and very nearly ruined me. Looking back, my children and I would’ve been a lot better off if I had been with someone that wasn’t a dirtbag and made me happy, regardless of gender.
People ask me if I am grieving all the stuff I won’t be able to do now that she is gay. There is no need for me to mourn. She is still the daughter I have always had, always adored and I know her heart now as well as I did before. Whom she chooses to love does not change her soul or make her fair game to be bullied. I promise that her choice of partner will not be what anyone remembers about her once they meet her.
She is absolutely brilliant, makes amazing grades, and loves animals. She especially loves reptiles and can spout off amazing facts about them as if she had been studying them all of her life. And all this at only ten. I have no doubt in her potential to change this world.
I pity the fools who can’t see beyond their own bigotry.
As women, we should build our daughters up instead of giving them insecurities
Depression
As a mother, before taking any action or making a decision of any kind, you must ask yourself, “How will this action that I’m considering right now affect my child?” Before ANY DECISION. It’s just a simple question. It’s not that hard. This one action will save you a lot of grief down the road.
It’s a lot harder to put something back together after you break it than it is to just keep it from getting broken to begin with. Take the answer you provide yourself and make the best choice for your child or children. Not for you. For them.
Women, and men obviously, have their own set of mannerisms and habits that drive me crazy as they are extremely damaging to children.
Men
Ladies, the company of your child is more important than the company of any man you are dating. Childhood is fleeting.
Children form their personalities early and you have essentially done all you can do for them as far as parenting goes by the time they are ten years old. After that, it is up to their experiences and their peers.
So, unless you want your child to grow up as a needy ho-bag by extension, you would be better off focusing now on trying to raise her to be educated and independent.
I know women are capable of having sons. But the damage they are capable of doing to their daughters is worthy of a separate article. Lead by example. Little eyes are always watching and little ears are always listening even if it might not seem that way.
Pretending you are dumb and acting ditzy is the most annoying and unflattering thing a female can do for a male’s attention. Encourage intelligence and independence.
I’m not lying when I tell you that I want to slap the hell out of any woman that acts like that.
Body Image
For 1000 different reasons, it is very common these days for women to have body issues and insecurities. Even so, please do your daughters a favor and stop publicly dieting and criticizing yourself. Stop calling yourself fat in front of them, even if you are. You may be a hippo, I know the feeling, but your daughter is an elephant. They never forget anything.
So please don’t project your body image issues and obsessions onto your children. The world is hard enough without adding to the load they will carry. Teach them about self-love, not self-hate. Teach them about confidence and how there’s a difference between that and arrogance.
Don’t idolize looking like a porn star, either. You don’t have to dress like a lot lizard. Do you really want to teach your daughters to act and look like that? Do you really want to teach your sons to desire that? Natural is beautiful.
Intelligence
We need to make intelligence in women sexy and valued. Less focus should be placed on boobs and more on brains by society, men, and ourselves. We need to set our own standards of beauty. We need to be proud of our accomplishments, our integrity and our character.
Stop hiding your intelligence from men. A real man won’t get intimidated by a strong, smart woman. He will value her as his partner. He will be proud to have such a person on his team. And if he’s not, you should not accept that as an acceptable mate for yourself.
Friendship
When your daughter or child is 25 and self-sufficient, y’all can be best friends. Until that day, you have to be the bad guy like the rest of us and actually parent your children. They have friends. They don’t need you to be a friend. They need you to be a parent.
They need routine, structure, love, guidance, and discipline. They need to be taught values and morals amongst 1 million other things. Focus on being a parent and you won’t have time to worry about the little, meaningless things that you shouldn’t be.
Parenting is hard and thankless. There are days that I cry myself to sleep and think I’m failing. But, I still get up every day and do it again. I owe that to them. And as a result of that, they have turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done.
Whatever you want and need right now is irrelevant and will be until your children are raised.
Discipline
As I am sure many of you can also attest to, my mama used to tell me it hurt her more than it hurt me after she whipped my butt. I thought that was complete and total bullshit until I became a parent. No matter whether I was just getting on to them or saying I was disappointed, it was always hard to be the cause of anything but happiness to them.
I have had to put aside my personal feelings on how I want to handle things and do it the way I know I should instead. It is no coincidence that we have an entitled, unkind society. It is now more important than ever that we return to discipline, morals, and guidance.
I would rather have them mad at me for a little while so I can ensure that they grow up to be the best humans that they can possibly be. And because I did the hard parts, my children are amazing people that are responsible and independent.
We, as a society, are more worried about political correctness than we are about creating a good generation to leave after we are gone. We have let teaching morals and building a foundation of good character fall into disarray.
Hard-working men have now turned into blustering, overly sensitive little whiners that are dependent on other people for everything. Even men with full bushy beards don’t think they should have to do a full days hard work. Self-sufficiency and hard work has become a thing of the past for most people, not just men. Morality is going out the door with it at a very fast pace.
Instead of hiding behind closed doors and praying for a better world, we should all be working diligently to create one. I hope to teach my children not to wait for change, but to be the cause of change. It only takes one person or one small act of rebellion to spark the fires of change.
At least I can take comfort knowing that there will be a few hard-working men in the next generation. Along with a few hard-working, self-sufficient women. Because that is how I am intent on raising him.
I might not end up accomplishing much in my lifetime, but if being the mother that my children is all I can achieve then I’ve done enough and more than a lot of others have. It would be more than enough of an accomplishment to make me proud of my life.
I am a very straight-laced, down to earth person with gypsy tendencies. I can also be described as a redneck with an affinity for leopard print. Also, as a tomboy who loves long, dangly earrings. Or an uptight prude, if you’re listening to my children. So, I’ve always scoffed at those who labeled themselves as empaths.
According to the dictionary, an empath is a person with the paranormal ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual. However, I don’t think most of us that use the word think of it as paranormal activity. It’s almost as if our souls sense the other person’s soul. Our souls communicate nonverbally.
I just thought I was sensitive and/or paranoid.
As I grew older, I noticed my ability to read the vibes and intentions of others got better and better. Suddenly, I felt the bad vibes of the people I had been friends with for years. I tried to ignore it and told myself I was being paranoid. But, after my vibes turned out to be correct on two back to back occasions, I started paying attention.
The first example was when I started thinking my first husband was cheating on me. I ignored my instinct. I called myself paranoid. I would’ve saved myself a lot of heartache if I had paid attention.
The second time was when I felt a sudden coldness between myself and someone I had considered to be a best friend. She just stopped calling me. I knew instantly she wasn’t my friend anymore, I just didn’t know why. I found out just weeks later that she was badmouthing me to other friends. I realized that I had felt this coming. The reason didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t need people like that in my circle.
I can read the vibes of most people around me and once I focused on that, my sales at work far surpassed the quota I had always worked hard to barely meet. I started paying attention to all of my intuition. It has not led me astray yet, that I’m aware of.
I have found that when I go with my instinct I never regret it. And I don’t second-guess myself constantly. When I make that decision, I do it with confidence.
I have found myself being right so often now that it’s almost creepy.
I only wish that I had learned to listen to me forty years ago.
My family has extremely bad luck, but most of us have two nipples
Canva
I never thought I’d write about my Aunt’s nipple. At least, I’m not writing about my Uncle’s testicles. Yet.
This story has been passed around more than my high school best friend since this incident happened. People at bars have heard it. People at church have heard about it. I created a children’s book about it and read about it to my son’s kindergarten class. OK, well, maybe I didn’t do that. Yet.
I will preface this story by saying that my Aunt, my Mother’s sister, was very sexually active back in her day. She continued to be sexually active long after her day passed, also.
Breast cancer runs in our family and has caused many tragic, untimely deaths. So, in an effort to be proactive against cancer, my Aunt had a double mastectomy. She went ahead and had reconstructive surgery soon after and had those puppies lifted and enhanced.
Fast forward a while later. This is where things get foggy. I’m not sure if it was eight weeks or eight years, but she had taken her bra off during the night and her nipple fell out of her bra onto the floor. She reportedly yelled, “Shit!” out loud.
Honestly, I don’t know what I would’ve done. I can probably say that I wouldn’t have gathered my nipple up, set it aside for the night, and worried about it the next day.
Maybe she didn’t worry about it the next day despite what she says. Because to date she still does not have a nipple on one side. Yolo, I guess.
I may be the black sheep, but there’s a herd of us in my family.
Some would call me an accident. And by some, I mean my mother. In full disclosure though, she always said I was the best accident that she’s ever had.
My sister was 15 when I was born and my brother was 13. So I didn’t have very many years with them around before they flew from the nest with little thought to the foundling left behind. Which could be the main reason why we never learned to hate each other.
Growing up, my brother was definitely my biggest ally and caretaker. He would pull me around in a box, which in hindsight is not that great. But apparently, I loved it back then. It’s not as fun when you’re 42, though. My sister didn’t spend much time with me when I was very young because she was a social butterfly and the queen bee of our little town.
My brother married the love of his life shortly after leaving for college. He excelled in his career and still is the best husband I’ve ever seen up close. He dotes on his family. He has continuously educated himself and moved up in every aspect of his life. I am only now just beginning to understand how important it is to keep growing and learning as a person.
My sister became my best friend when I was a little older. As a teenager, I thought the sun rose and set on her. She was my hero for many years.
As adults, we have both been prone to impulsiveness and bad decisions. We both love to prank people and can be somewhat obnoxious at times. There have been many moments in my adulthood that I wouldn’t have made it through, if she hadn’t been my ally. For the most part, we are always there for each other when we need each other.
There is not another man, other than my husband, that I respect more than my brother. If more men were as good at being a husband as he always has been, this world’s divorce rate would plummet. There is not another person on this planet that can make me laugh as much as my sister can.
I don’t want to make any of this go to their heads, because it will. And my sister cannot afford that at all. I just wanted to take a moment to praise them, because all I hear about from my kids how much they hate each other. Not all of them do that, but most of them do. And if they don’t say it, it is very evident in their actions.
I know they love each other, because when any one of them is sick they will ask about the ill one behind closed doors. I guess it would be considered a sign of weakness to them, if they thought anyone knew they really cared.
I pray that they will grow out of this feeling. Other parents have assured me that they will, but I never have had ill feelings towards my siblings so I wouldn’t know about that.
I would love to post a picture of my brother and sister, but one of them is immensely private. I don’t feel right about posting one and not the other. However, I will post their Social Security numbers. Kidding…
I would really love to hear about other people’s relationships with their siblings. I would especially love to hear about siblings that grew up not liking each other, but ended up becoming really close as adults.
In this life we will never truly be apart, for we grew to the same beat of our mothers heart.
Time is limited when it comes to making sure your teen doesn’t turn into a douchebag.
Canva
We must act now to stop more entitled teenage brats or even worse, grown up douchebags, from being unleashed upon the world! The quota has been fulfilled. There are a multitude of ways to accomplish this, but the following is a list of experiences that I feel every teenager should experience, for his or her own benefit.
Volunteer
We need to make them understand, aka show them repeatedly and mention it non-stop, that there are people in the world that don’t have it as good as they do. We need to teach them how to give instead of take all the time. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labor, but you should also continually strive to help others.
Whether they are helping at the animal shelter or handing out food to the homeless, they need to understand the act of giving is so much more rewarding than just receiving all the time. This understanding can be life changing as a person. Live your life with a servant’s heart and you will never be poor.
Save
Teenagers and young adults should be taught early to save 25% of their income. I know that seems like a lot, but when they don’t have any outside, or aka real, expenses that is a doable figure. Then, when they do eventually move out and pay their own way, they will have to go down from 25% and, hopefully, they will stay around the 10 to 15% range. If they move out. Wink wink.
Healthcare
Having volunteered at a hospital, rehab center, or retirement home. How many teenagers will lose at least one friend in high school due to an accident or car wreck. But they need to understand the fragility of life. They need to treat life with appreciation and understand just one stupid decision can make it end very quickly. The life changing consequences of one bad decision can haunt them forever.
I am a firm believer that teenagers should have to pay their own phone bill at a minimum, if not all of their bills. They use their phone for everything, including getting in trouble. It’s also good experience to know what paying a bill feels like and to know the feeling of that reoccurring pressure that they will soon be getting all too familiar with. Then you can just tell them to multiply that by 50. Don’t worry, you cannot make your child too responsible.
Sugar Baby
When I was in high school, I took a home economics class. I learned how to sew, cook a casserole, and balance a checkbook. Of course, if I was allowed to give a review, I would take off some points for not learning about credit scores and debt. But, that’s neither here nor there. By the way, if you put a review on the high school website they will take it off.
Again, I digress. The absolute most impressive thing that they did during this class was to make us care for a 5 pound bag of sugar as if it were a baby. You had to take constant care of it, or get a babysitter and log that, and wake up every two hours to “feed” and change it. And, yes, we had to keep a genuine cloth diaper that was laundered on it. I assume that a disposable diaper was also an option, but not for me. This was extremely aggravating and an accurate display of parenting. It was a genius move that got thrown away sometimes after my experience, but before my own children could benefit.There is no telling how many grandchildren are not being raised by grandparents due to this. I describe that as life changing.
Those items above are what I consider a few good ideas to instill some rapidly dying values into our youth. What are your best parenting tips?
Kylie’s Rants 