call me heartless

Sometimes we make tough choices/decisions which are surprising and out of the norm. Not everyone can understand that it was also difficult for the decison-maker to come to that decision. If a choice is tough, it's tough - and no matter how bad it looks on the 'public' level, it still didn't put the decision-maker in an easier position either.

What people need to understand, is that sometimes, we need to be cruel to be kind. No everyone operates on the same level i.e. we do not feel the pain of a victim of an accident, although we are able to 'feel' their discomfort - it's two different things. We can never know how the other person is feeling to the pore of their skin and sometimes it takes the very impossible, before we can totally understand why the person had to go the way he chose to go.

I have come across as a very tough person - simply because I have chosen to live by my own merits completely - I chose to minimise my dependence on social networks and family support systems, simply because I didn't want to ever have to do something I didn't wish to do, or half-hearted about. Many people find me very verbose - but that wasn't so in the first 20 years of my life. I spent those times watching, making mental notes, and just figuring myself out. Perhaps that's why I describe myself as quiet, but willing to speak my mind. I'm very firm about how things should be done, because without discipline, nothing gets done. That I learnt from the 'school of hard knocks'.

So my inner circle of friends, who's known me for 20 years at least, who accept me for who I am, still cannot understand why I come across as lenient to my son and unforgiving to my first-born. Perhaps the dynamics of the relationship is too complicated for everyone to comprehend. My son has never, to date, given me reason to doubt his intentions. He is straightforward and doesn't deal. My first-born is manipulative, lying and always with an agenda. To make it worse, she's in touch with her father, who had physically abused me even when I was pregnant with her. How will someone understand, why I have chosen to cut my ties with her? They can never understand, how I took the battering and shielded the unborn child from being hurt. To have fed her, clothe her, never lying to her about how she came to be, yet have her lie to me and see him behind my back. I raised her, with no help from him, and right after she becomes a teenager, he makes himself present in her life.

I am not able to forgive her or him for that.
Take it like i'm some surrogate then.

I have issues with this and I have dealt with it, my way. If the bottom line is unacceptable, then too bad, because I was the one who was physically abused, I was the one who could have gotten badly hurt, just because I was trying to save an unborn child. I am not prepared to be manipulated and used again, by the same 2 people again.

Call me heartless - it doesn't matter - if I don't look after my heart, who will? them?