Turf Wars

I have been thinking about sharing something with you and then this phrase "Turf Wars" came to my mind and when I looked it up I thought it would be a great title for this post. Wikipedia says: "A turf war is "a bitter struggle for territory, power, control, or rights"." This is not exactly what this post is about, maybe a little bit though.

You know sometimes we think that what our opinion about a situation has the most truth too it and so we "struggle" to be right. This happened to me last week. I was talking to a few ladies and one of them was talking about how hard her divorce(that she had gotten 4 years ago) was on her now 30 year old daughter. So the daughter had been 26 years old when her parents got a divorce. In the conversation - it was stated more than once that it is much harder on adult children when their parents get a divorce. Well that just hit me in the wrong spot. It is probably mostly because my son is going through a divorce and his 3 year old daughter is suffering and it will affect her the rest of her life. And part of it was because my parents got a divorce when I was 11 years old. I had been very sheltered up to this point. SO much so that when my Mom told my sister and I that she and my dad were getting a divorce, I innocently asked, "What's a divorce?" My little family - Mom, sister and I moved from Pecos, Texas to Oklahoma City. I went from an over protected environment to having a lot of freedom- really too much freedom.

Oklahoma City can be a very dangerous place to live. I could tell you several different stories of scary things that happened to me - that had I not had guardian angels watching over me - bad, very bad things could have happened to me.

Anyway from these two aspects - I can come up with a lot of information and facts which prove the point that divorce IS hard on children and not only affect them during the divorce but for the rest of their lives.

Anyway I got a bit caught up in the trying to "talk sense" into these ladies. Which did not seem to understand my point of view. And I missed a very good opportunity to use a very good sentence that helps to end conversations that you just don't want to continue. - "You may be right" or "I am sorry you feel that way" I wish I could write these on my hand so that I could remember to use them when needed. Anyway I finally excused myself from conversation. As I thought about this conversation - I realized that when they had talked about how much harder divorce was on adult children - it really made me feel like my feelings from what I had gone through were not validated. Nor were the feelings that my granddaughter also has. And I realized that - that had been my reason to want to be RIGHT. If I could prove to them that it was just as hard and maybe even in some aspects - harder for children, that maybe my feelings would be validated. I then realized that just because they have different opinions than I do - does not invalidate me or my feelings - it is just their opinion. And they have the right to their opinions - just a I have a right to my opinion. And I need to allow other people to be who they are - not try to "struggle" to be in control or to be right. Acceptance is a very important lesson to learn. I have the right to be me and others have the right to be who they are and the sooner I can figure this out - the happier I will be.

I hope that this has made sense to you. It is a lesson that I have learned before, but apparently I needed to learn it again. Maybe this time it will be more ingrained in my thinking and help me to learn how to better to accept other people.

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER~
1. Acceptance is key

2. When others have opinions that are different than yours - does not make you wrong or invalidate your feelings

3. Remember when you are in conversations that really are not healthy - you might want to use one of these two statements: A. "You might be right"  B. "I'm sorry you feel that way"