2329. Suggestions for Raising Children — Part III

Strategic Parenting Shapes the Family Environment

Theme:  It’s the wife and not the mother that keeps a father in the home.

Whatever children learn well before puberty that makes them feel good about themselves, you can expect to last for life. If they learn and feel good acting as adults albeit immature, they are not nearly as vulnerable to teen peer pressure.

1. Organize first. Arrange family thinking around dual roles for each adult. That is, four roles and with this rank structure: husband, wife, mother, father. Each ‘reports’ to the one next left. The most vital role is the wife. Her responsibility is home and family. She catches it from both sides and is the only one capable and therefore most responsible for coordinating family efforts and trying to orchestrate harmony.
2. Start with good material. Good father-candidates are identified by their character and willingness to follow this model in the home: Husband bosses wife but mother bosses father. If husband has issues with the kids, he takes it up with his wife and not with the kids themselves. His leadership is most effective when he never imposes it directly except to back up his wife as she does her mothering thing. He stays above the fray of getting children to do what they’re supposed to do and not do. (I know you don’t like “bosses,” but nothing else works in so few words. Two cooks spoil the pie. Two bosses ruin an organization. Wife-mother is in the middle, so let her direct the home orchestrations to achieve harmony. She reports to husband for her performance in raising children, and expects him as father to help and not interfere with her ‘bossing’ them. IOW, husband tells wife what he expects and then as father he enjoys what mother has produced.)
3. Recruit a better-than-good man. One who has the patience to accept the reality that mom can’t immediately change a child’s excursions into what or where they shouldn’t go just to please her husband’s expectations. If he frustrates easily over small things, put him back in the parade. He likely will harangue his wife or their mother just because he’s irritated or angry with himself. Red flag.
4. Build the family attitude. Base and continually promote respect for each other first as person, then as male/female, then according to their respective roles and responsibilities within the family. Then, follow up the teaching and promoting with heapings of love spread evenly among all members. Without mutual respect first however, mutual love is seldom achieved.
5. Moms shouldn’t suffer. Mother has the hardest time earning mutual respect. She earns it easiest and best this way. a) She keeps the children advised that most importantly she’s the wife of and responsible to her husband. It’s easier to earn the respect of others when you live up to someone bigger than yourself. Such as wife up to husband and children up to parents. b) As mother, she’s responsible for the upbringing of her children. c) She has the constant approval of husband as the kids see it. As much as husband displays lack of respect for his wife, it weakens respect of children for mother. (It happens most easily when father sides with the kids against mom. He elevates father over mother and it undercuts his wife, which displays lack of respect and reduces kids’ respect of mother.)
6. Disagreement stifles. Effective parents never let the kids see them disagree over decisions about them. Permission to do this or that, for example. The first parent to make a decision, the other backs them. Parents subsequently take it behind closed door to resolve differences. Otherwise, children learn to play one parent against the other, which makes parenting much more difficult.
7. The right target beckons. Raise children to be good adults and they will turn out to be average or good children. Raise them aimed at becoming great children and they will turn out to be poor or less-than-average or poor adults.
8. The future beckons. Always focused on the future, mothers predominantly shape behaviors by shaping childish thoughts into more mature thoughts. ‘Stop that and learn this’ type of leadership. Parents do best by helping rather than directing a child’s aspirations and ambitions and aiming them toward adulthood instead of some earlier period in life such as adolescence.
9. Self-developers emerge. Children develop best when they and peers organize playtime activities. Parental organizing for play interferes with self-development. It demonstrates with action that kids are not trusted even in their own domain of play.
10. Guidance tops directness. Focus parental effort on guiding and encouraging kids and less on discipline and punishment. As self-developers, they develop aspirations and ambitions beyond the present. If well respected by parents and siblings, they dream about becoming adults. If not respected that way, they dream about earning self-respect through immature methods such as adolescent lures and behaviors, games and drugs for example. Respect compounded by parental love keeps their aims aligned as parents hope. Parental guidance is most productive by helping bring to fruition dreams for their adult lives.
11. Kids make mistakes. They learn quickly from experience. Prevent their making mistakes and over supervise and it slows or discourages their development. Enhance their self-development and you raise good adult-minded kids. Teach and don’t fight against their efforts to play-now-and-get-serious-later, or you raise poorly behaved children. Each child has ways of letting parents know when they over supervised. It’s not over-supervision that is the culprit but the child’s perception and growing conviction of it. Respecting each child as a person provides feedback for parents to determine when appropriate to guide or supervise.
12. Don’t become friends. Parents who would first be friends with their children abrogate leadership responsibility. They try to lead without authority they give away by making the child equal as friend, which the child sees as a huge competitive advantage and can’t resist using. When it doesn’t turn out as equal as expected and parent still governs the child’s behavior, the child rebels internally but not so evidently to the parent. The crux is here: The parent is well intentioned, but the child seeks advantages that inspire disingenuousness and even hidden dishonesty. The end result promotes disrespect for the parent that is overlooked because of their good intentions and conviction they are doing right. The child’s behavior out of parent’s sight deteriorates to the opposite that the parent hopes for.
13. Life ain’t easy. Don’t make it easy for kids. It teaches them to continually look for the easier way throughout life, and it later shows up harmfully as weak sense of family responsibility.
14. Assign responsibility. Match their maturity. Even toddlers should have something to do routinely. Nothing teaches character better than having responsibility and being held accountable. Responsibility assigned to match maturity. Accountability imposed seriously but gently and forgivingly by mom enables kids to learn they like to please her. As they mature it turns into liking to do their duty. First they learn to please mom. Next, they learn that they like to please her. The long range effect is a stronger sense of family responsibility. Finally, boys learn that they please themselves by pleasing mom. Girls learn from being gently and forgivingly held accountable that it works later for raising their children and coaching the man they love.
15. Worth repeating. Men thrive on responsibility, and so nothing raises boys into good men any better than an early-developed sense of duty. Don’t expect or teach perfection. Teach stick-to-it-iveness, finish the job. Kids understand completion or finish much, much better than perfection or adult standards or expectations. Respect them enough to let them determine the quality they can produce. Boys start by trying to outfox mom. When they see that inadequate performance doesn’t displease her, through repetition they teach themselves to do better. Think of keeping their room uncluttered or well organized. After awhile they do it well in order to please themselves for pleasing mom. It’s the same process by which they will later love their wives.
16. Mothers reward themselves. They routinely express their love and affection to a child they birthed or someone else. She feels better for just having expressed her love. Once the conscious mind opens and a child recognizes he or she is also a person, they can figure things out accurately as they sense it but immaturely for others. By mom showing trust as more important than her love, her child is more easily convinced of mom’s love. IOW, without respect mostly in the form of trust, even showers of abundant love can be unimpressive and unconvincing.

Strategically, the home environment is a complicated place. It’s run more by subconscious habits than conscious thought. Shaping and arranging personal habits to produce a harmonized setting for a good family is primarily the work of woman.

Men sense it to be true but low self-esteem, self-image, or both often cause husbands to interfere, which sends loud messages that wife is not respected, which means not truly loved. Also uninformed about making organizations function well, such men take literally the practice of submission and use dominance to interfere with woman’s work of raising children to become good adults.

Wife responds by fighting back to defend, protect, or win her way of doing things. It triggers disrespect from husband, wife responds with her own version of disrespect, and the war begins.

As children view it, their future turns bleak. Even they can guess groundwork being laid for parental separation. Instinctively they sense but probably don’t recognize that repeated disrespect foretells the likely death and prevention of restoring love.

Editorial comment is next at 2330 and Tactical Parenting: Guidance and Encouragement follows at 2331.

2328. Suggestions for Raising Children — Part II

Three monumental events rattle and shake the peaceful upbringing of children. First is dependence on mom’s love. Second is the opening of each child’s conscious mind. Third is each child’s passage through puberty. Each event can be pacified by women with sound judgment. The kind of judgment that automatically flows out of making something more important than love.

1) A woman’s love arises in two forms. Those they birth and everyone else. They can harmonize their home by blending the two forms into a common sense, well-accepted, and connected set of relationships. But her love alone can’t do it. Contrary to modern female thought, even mother-love isn’t enough.

The most important ingredient is respect continuously and equally generated into mutual respect. But there’s a catch. Respect, which is a part of mother-love, does not include respect for others.

Respect is more important than love for the process of bringing and holding people together. Respect lays the foundation for love. Without some sort of foundation of mutual respect, even mother-love can’t hold a family together.

When family members recognize they are respected as individuals, they can overlook the biases of mother-love spread among unequal targets. Personal conviction that they are respected first and loved second shifts their thoughts from me to us, from self-centered to family-centered.

When husband receives respect from wife and kids, he buys in. When husband respects wife without reservation, her authority is established. When children are respected as exceptional by gender, capability, and contribution, they take it personal that their exceptionalism is unique, deserved, and adequate for their own purpose in life. Hence, everybody buys in.

Being respected makes love credible. Human nature makes one doubt they deserve the love of another. Respect, especially trust, overcomes but never completely removes doubt.

2) Sometime in their third year, a child’s conscious mind opens and they come online as an independent person with under developed personality. Recognizing themselves as another person, they instinctively expect to be treated like the big people they see around them, who seem to do just what they please. Being copycats, even toddlers follow suit.

Trust is the most dynamic form of respect. It’s instinctive that boys especially be trusted for two reasons: a) They see others being respected and presume they are alike and deserving. b) They are self-developers. They consciously recognize their independence and expect to take advantage to do what they want to do; to play, explore, fix, look inside things, and especially climb.

Without being respected, they’re neither free nor trusted to do what they think proper, not respected as much as they think they deserve. It’s the result of recognizing that they too are a person and entitled to develop themselves as they see fit. Of course they don’t go through those thought processes; it’s instinctive and grows more intuitive with experience.

Both sexes are hardwired as self-developers. Boys deal with things and expect to do it alone. Girls deal with relations and expect to be guided without too much oversight. Both expect to be respected as they witness others being trusted to go about their own business mostly undisturbed by overseers.

Consequently, children develop themselves better when not overly supervised but respectfully guided away from threats and danger.

3) They pass through puberty. From being willing to absorb instruction, they shift to insist on giving it. From being malleable for those they respect, they shift to being one of those due respect as an adult. The less their hearts and minds are filled before puberty with mature adult values and standards, the more susceptible they are to let peers fill the vacuum. The more intensely they model themselves around adult values and standards before puberty, the less impressionable they are among those outside the family with whom they associate.

The thread starts early and never ends. To earn their respect, you have to first give it. The best form of respecting someone is to trust them. Toddlers, tweens, and teens expect it. Children show respect for parents, and parents receive it as trust and vice versa. Parents show trust and kids receive it as respect, but not vice versa. Adult expressions of respect that don’t convey trust don’t register much with kids. They aren’t sophisticated enough to convert routine parental respect into trust. To kids, trust is action and words meant to convey respect are not as meaningful.

Family success starts with greater respect for everyone. When kids arrive mom starts it with toddlers. By generating mutual respect throughout the family, mutual acceptance morphs into mutual love to hold the family together for life.

2288. Favored Quotes—Collection 45

1. “But, if men are getting their worth and value from a woman, then he’s looking in the wrong place.” [That Horse Is Dead at 2203]
2. “Incidentally, I have come to the conclusion that femininity protects itself – the more committed I am to conducting myself like a lady emotionally, mentally and physically, the more I want to protect that lady and maintain those high standards. What a profound discovery.” [Prettybeans in email to Guy]
3. “As THID says, the solution is a steady conviction to chaste singleness and if I may add to this, ultra femininity.” [Prettybeans at 2203]
4. “We need a major revival of chaste single women to get things back on track.” [That Horse Is Dead at 2203]
5. “If I were ever in a position to seek a mate again, I would strongly consider dating (chastely) lots of men until the day I had a ring.” [Miss Gina at 2271.]
6. “Women really are designed to bring out the best in men and most of us are the happiest when we are engaged in this task. In the modern world there is a great deal of political correctness messing things up, but for the most part what really makes us happy, what fulfills us, is to be pleasing to a man and to actually desire to support and encourage him. This is not a one sided deal of servitude, we really do reap huge dividends ourselves, it is a pleasurable and complimentary arrangement.” [Insanitybytes22 at 2286]
7. [Context: At 2231 Guy posted this as #5: If you have little or no interest in making yourself clean, neat, and attractive just to pick up your spirits, why do you expect men to take a liking to a missing feminine spirit? Jen fired back.] “#5 is something I’ve firmly believed and adhered to my entire life! It is so, so true, though many of my female friends refuse to or cannot believe it. Alas, they are also missing out on the confidence and thus better mood gained by making themselves look the best they can. No, we cannot all be model-gorgeous, but Doing Our Best To Look Our Best is truly mind-changing…and that alone might end up changing the course of our lives. Such a very simple concept sounds absolutely bonkers, but it’s also absolutely true.” [Jen at 2231]
8. “That really speaks well to the differences between men and women. Sex simply means something different to each gender and I think men tend to fear they will be compared to someone else or replaced or weighed and measured. A extensive sexual past can make him fear that he will someday get passed over in favor of another.” [Insanitybytes22 at 2273] – [The last sentence is the height of male insignificance. Guy]
9. “Perhaps what makes a woman so attractive as she puts these attributes [Her Jewels at post #59] in concert with her life is that suddenly she has become extra-ordinary: very good at doing ordinary things with grace, kindness and a flair that is all her own. What a pleasure to read this blog! [Princess Jessica at 59] [
10. “‘As women go, so goes society’ this is why the Cultural Marxists encourage feminism because, through corrupted women they can indirectly corrupt men and children too, and bring down the traditional family &c. And the corruption in much of the Manosphere (along with Male Feminists) proves that the strategy has some effect.” [Eric at 2203]

2243. FEMININE

Surfercajun at 2239 inquired about feminine. Here’s my response.

We’re talking about men, so surprise, surprise. Feminine is not who or what she is, it’s who and what men perceive her to be. Which means she is whoever and whatever his curiosity, imagination, and conscious thought make her out to be. It makes sense but why do I mention it talking to women?

To make this point: Whoever and whatever you think you are, however beautiful, great, and praise-worthy you may be to yourself and those who know you, you’re still just a sexually available female to all men until you prove otherwise to each and every man who wants to bed you. Insensitive and tactless, perhaps I am, so forgive me. I’m on track to make a connected point.

Feminine is the totality of the female creature that serves to hold a man permanently. Not beauty, not sexual attractiveness, not career greatness, not laudable behavior. Feminine is most important because it includes the others in the male mind. Too simplified, perhaps, but I continue on track to the next point.

Feminine is complex to females but simple to males who visualize it in mind and heart; of course every man is different. Consequently, there are no perfect attributes that make a woman feminine. There are only attributes aimed at turning on masculine curiosity, imagination, and conscious thought that most likely generate the maximum interest in you out of every man. The more men attracted to you, then the merrier for you. It provides you with the greatest number of opportunities to find AND KEEP the man of your dreams. The more feminine you appear to each man, the more likely the man of your dreams will crave to spend his life with you. Men compete; the more one man wants you the more the next one does too. It’s up to women to make that last sentence mean HER more than sex.

Three main characteristics appeal to men. Feminine mystique, female modesty, and monogamous spirit. When her other features, traits, and behaviors emphasize those three, she shows up as very feminine to the greatest number of men. Examples follow of what each characteristic consists of in the eyes of men.

Feminine mystique. She’s so short of being totally understandable it’s not worth his effort to try; she’s acceptable as is. (Exaggerated, yes, but men don’t have to understand their woman nearly as much as women have to understand their man).

She’s an enigma, not the least bit of a male thinker. Unpredictable about even the smallest things. Composed when she should be upset. Upset when composure is called for. Independent on matters about which she should be dependent and vice versa. Curious when uncalled for because whatever was the matter is now resolved. Dumb about the simplest and surprisingly knowledgeable about the complicated. Surprisingly adroit when she needs to be, but not afraid to admit being uninformed.

Expresses her pride through mothering and nurturing and not through trying to outdo him. Doesn’t show off even when she deserves to do so. Can love even those whom she doesn’t respect. Can admire a man’s strength and learn to support or rely on it even after it fails him. Can forgive easily (he forgets to ask or notice if she can forget).

Can out-compete the toughest people but chooses to outwit and outsmart rather than out-fight. No one’s too big for her. She’s feisty but it’s a rare occasion when she shows it, because she’s so well respected even by fairly important people.

She isn’t hesitant; in fact she’s pleased to inspire him with a new hint of mystery. It prompts him to think. Why is a woman so willing to do what this wise woman recommends as part of being feminine. Superslaviswife suggests that women exhibit “An openness to new experiences and places that tells him she can accommodate him in her life. And an eagerness to share those experiences with him and be a part of his life.”

Female modesty. Under the guise of modesty, she controls her life according to her best interest. She looks and acts modestly, which means attractively with minimal attention to sexual features and the absence of sexually suggestive behavior. Fashionable and classy attractiveness signify that she’s unique, which is a logical step toward fascination.

Modesty is her most significant weapon of defense against masculine intrusions in her life. Such as, time to ponder elsewhere (powder room), break away from excess passion, turn a blind eye to offensive behavior, flee or slap someone when her sensibilities are threatened, and justify not explaining herself or complaining about others.

Modesty enables her to evade having to defend or protect her values, standards, and expectations. Thus, she can leave men thinking they have won whatever mental battle just transpired; she defers to him when he wouldn’t defer to her, which effectively steals his victory and adds further mystery to her. She’d rather retreat now and gain advantage for next time.

Monogamous spirit. His woman’s physical infidelity is the greatest assault on a man’s dignity, self-respect, respect of other men, and sense of significance. Every evaluation of a marriage candidate’s character, features, and behaviors is done with this thought top of mind: Will she be faithful to me? Until he proves YES to himself, he is unlikely to propose.

Consequently, a boyfriend’s interests and interrogations spotlight everything connected with her future faithfulness. Her appearance, emotion, behavior, and sexual history hold clues for his detection. When he’s not working on the subject directly, his subconscious mind is alert to things that might even hint at future unfaithfulness. Notice this, he’s not looking for signs of fidelity but infidelity. He accepts faithful based on lack of evidence to suggest unfaithful.

The feminine woman’s attitude includes support and clear thinking about monogamy, marriage, trust, respect, commitment, and devotion. It can easily shape his thinking to her advantage. Her support and promise of love means little for his assessing her for being faithful to him. It’s too easy for her to fall in love with someone else or have one still lingering in her heart. Men are not all that trusting of love and its promises.

Feminine. The truly feminine woman—if men were so inclined but they’re not—would regularly receive from every man she encounters compliments about subjects other than sex. Because men are so disinclined to compliment a woman unless they want something, women have to compliment themselves about their femininity (mirror time, anyone?), belief in themselves, and confidence they are doing right for themselves. With that foundation, women can much more easily attract good men and then weed out those who act in ways contrary to their self-interest. The Marrying Man likes to lurk until he spots the likeliest of candidates for his taste. I submit to you that femininity is his greatest magnet.

2176. Dating in Mid-life — Part C9: Prepare Against Submission

Gotcha! Prepare against submission? Yes, and do it while dating. No legal, moral, marital, or biblical injunction makes you submit. In fact, both sexes have free will, both are made to be compatible as mates, and to submit means that one side loses. However, superior relationship wisdom enables women to generate win-win regularly if not every time. Your relationship expertise ranks with adaptability and survivability as cardinal traits that enable the irresistible force to move immovable objects.

Your man may not have been taught any better; he might try to enforce submission. You may have to teach him. Indirectly works smoothest and leadership by example works best. Your examples can be absorbed as logic, reason, and the compatible nature of mating. Men look for logic and reason and love the likeability afforded by compatibility.

Marital common sense to teach such things is embedded in the female nature. Not in you? Not to worry. I’m here to help. As you will soon see, submissiveness is the hub around which revolves most of the important family interactions.

When you marry and husband expects you to submit, you steal his thunder by revealing a submissive spirit that shows him how smartly he married. Submissive, it’s an adjective describing you as volunteering; you don’t do mandatory. Why volunteer? Are the following 16 reasons enough?

1) A family can’t stay together with two leaders, too bosses equally yoked to the same undivided responsibility. They eventually fight for dominance. 2) A man won’t conscientiously honor and fulfill his responsibility unless he appears to dominate control of it; it’s his nature and often more ego than logical. 3) You are more flexible, the relationship expert, and the only one capable of balancing and harmonizing all the challenges inherited with family life. Without you taking the home load off of husband, he’s not free enough to earn a good living. 4) Two bosses can be successful only when they agree to having separate responsibilities, and a separation of powers empowers and rewards them both. 5) Children can’t function much less develop successfully, if they have unequal standards and expectations to which they must respond. It causes confusion to reign, teaches rebellion, and kids learn to play one parent against the other. Everyone functions better with only one boss, and kids respond best to mom with backup from her husband. 6) You can’t manage the home without husband’s recognition and acceptance that it is your responsibility, which places you in the follower’s role wherein submissiveness pays off with greater success for both parties. 7) A successful organization needs both a chief executive officer and chief operating officer, CEO as ultimate authority and COO to administer CEO policies. 8) The ultimate authority is no better than the chief operator below who promotes the respect due him, protects his reputation, and preserves his dignity even when he doesn’t deserve it. 9) The next-to-ultimate authority does best when looked upon as supporter and facilitator of CEO’s expectations. 10) Men are satisfied and significant—happy in your words—when someone weaker proves to be stronger in surprising and dedicated ways. 11) Whereas husband can’t do it at least by his nature, you can bring the superiority of your gender into the home—especially adjust-ability and survivability—in ways that everyone benefits. 12) He’s not naturally willing; only you can find ways to balance his dominance against getting your way sufficiently to fulfill your hopes and dreams. 13) Converting from courtship to marriage, you’re capable and understand the wisdom of shifting from the competitive mode of protecting yourself to the cooperative mode of fulfilling your marriage. 14) He’s generally unwilling to do something about it, but you are well enabled to find ways to smooth the rough edges from his dominance. 15) With his constant focus on the present, and your focus more in the future, you’re better situated to adjust to his present-day needs than he to your future aspirations. 16) Submissiveness enables you to impose a rank structure that calms family leadership jitters. In rank order, this works well: husband, wife, mother, father, and children, which splits adult roles into four separate responsibilities for better, more efficient, and more easily acceptable decision making.

Accomplishing all those things fits naturally into your marital persona. He’ll see all the merit once he’s taught by you. Success starts with your submissiveness that so clearly matches up with your relationship expertise and the other blessings you inherit at birth. Then you can fit him into your nest. (You may find other benefits at Female Blessings at Birth at blog top.)

To prepare for dating, I suggest you study those 16 items above for the different roles that you and future husband will fill. Then, measure each man against your imagination of how you two will fill those roles. That is, imagine how his personality would fit yours in this situation, just for example. As his wife and ‘second in command’, you hold him up as more important than the kids. Yet, as their mother, you fight him in favor of the kids. Can and will he help fulfill your hopes and dreams and be Mr. Good Enough? Or…?

You might deny it, but I view it this way. Mystique mystifies you, vanity promotes you, modesty protects you, marriage insures you, and submissiveness elevates you to kingpin in the monogamy-sphere. Nothing else produces a more successful family. You see, when you know what you’re doing, you do everything right for everyone. It’s your superior conscience. That, darling, is what the submissive spirit enables you to do. To give it a fanciful name, I call it sterling wifeliness.

——

P.S. For background material, you may wish to review the 12-part submission series that runs with interruptions from 2043 to 2058. (Or, two dozen other articles with submissive/submission in title plus a chapter in my book.)

 

2047. Submission #05 — MHW’s Great Teaching Moment

A recent comment amazes me. To honor the author’s perspicacity, I interrupt the daily sequence to publish it as a sterling addition to this series. I sure wish I could make things as simple and clear. I trust you enjoy it as much as I.

The following comes without change as Her Highness My Husband’s Wife posted it at 2044.

This subject is so good with so many aspects to explore and think about. Wives/husbands/pastors always focus on the “submit” verse, but I believe there is great value to a wife in understanding the other half of the equation regarding her husband in Ephesians 5:25 (“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”) If you were to sum this verse up in one word, it would be “SACRIFICE.”

So then a wife looks at HOW a husband sacrifices DAILY for her…some examples would be:
• Working to pay the bills with a job he doesn’t particularly like = sacrifice
• Picking a practical vehicle to save vs. sports car = sacrifice
• Despite so many attractive women, being physically faithful to wife = sacrifice
• Giving up his independent lifestyle to be with her = sacrifice
• Spending less time with the guys to be with her = sacrifice
• Limiting time spent on hobbies to be about family business = sacrifice
• Quitting a partying lifestyle to be more family oriented = sacrifice
• Forgoing new camping equipment to buy household items = sacrifice
• Staying with her despite her failures/imperfections = BIG sacrifice
Of course each marriage is unique in the way husband gives up things for her and his family. It’s quite humbling when a wife sees really how much husband does which ultimately injects GRATEFULNESS for him into her heart. Of course he won’t always sacrifice perfectly as women don’t always submit perfectly.

I see this contrast in my marriage clearly when I compare my husband’s single friend to him. The single friend is all about buying whatever he wants, getting all sorts of women, doing what he wants/when he wants, he doesn’t always have to work, etc. etc. It’s every man’s “fantasy!” Then I look at my husband who has given up so much and his “independence” for the sake of “us” and it’s pretty amazing. It’s HIS version of “FREE TO SERVE” with his FREE WILL.

 

1995. Self-gratitude — Her Angelic Presence

She loves others and is grateful for some. She fails to appreciate, love, and be grateful enough for herself. She envies the best in others, but fails to look for and find it in herself. Internal pressures cause it. It seems unfortunate, but it’s not. It’s a natural defense against overextending herself. It prevents female expressions of dominance that can be rightfully claimed by the natural superiority of her sex, but which inevitably run into the superior and thus highly respected physical strength of males. In short, her naturally enforced accommodation with her nature helps bring balance to mating.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love yourself more, but that you should love yourself specifically for your superior qualities and abilities and not your desire to impose your will on others. See the difference? You benefit when your superior spirit and admirable character float in the view of others without demanding they do your bidding. They see your participation in their lives as so routinely important that you’re neither questioned nor challenged. Your presence is enough to cause self-gratitude to grow in the hearts of family members, but the taproot is your own self-gratitude.

Always deserving of more affection than you receive, you’re needful of a strong sense of importance more than affection. You make yourself important and leave to others to sense the need to show you affection. It enables you to live with the A.D.D that afflicts both you and your man. Nevertheless, with almost angelic composure, low expectations for yourself enable you to set and dominate the values, standards, and expectations of home and family. In that lays practical confirmation of the self-gratitude that you can absorb while privately seated before dresser mirror. And therein lays the reason for the poet’s claim, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” [William Ross Wallace]

 

1987. Self-gratitude—Self-reinforcement by Surfercajun

Her Highness Surfercajun reinforces her self-gratitude this way. She volunteers these factors as presumably significant in her life. Such a sterling contribution rates this separate posting.

1. I am grateful for… a healthy body that works for me and serves my family/others.
2. I am grateful for…ideas and words that I have that will help lift others spirits.
3. I am grateful for…a smile (braces) that my parents paid for that serves others.
4. I am grateful for…. listening ears and feminine attention when a perfect strangers tells me their story, stops and then says, “Why did I just tell you all of that?” …I just smile.
5. I am grateful for….no hospital bills or the fact none of us needed expensive medicine when my husband was unemployed for over 3 months.
6. I am grateful for…the little things my husband does for me “just because.”
7. I am grateful for… flowers that were picked from the side of the road than from a florist. (I still remember from so many years ago and remind him.)
8. I am grateful for…my children and the one that was taken away.
9. I am grateful for…tears that spill over innocent children and animals.
10. I am grateful for…advice given to me that help my family and I in turn can share with others.
11. I am grateful for…a tender heart that shudders when someone speaks to me harshly. Reminding me how words can hurt our heart.
12. I am grateful for…found books, articles, websites (this one), that make me a better person inside.

Editor’s Note: I love it when pretty women do my job so well for me.