coming back into reality

well we had a chance to talk yesterday, or should i say i cried and cried and tried to speak and he tried to understand. he brought up a good point that i had not thought of, and i don't think my sponsor would have said it because she would have before, this is an ongoing issue with me and him and the kids.
but he said i have some triggered emotion from the past with haley and gillian, and i am trying to stop what happened with me and my sister by taking it out today. i think i said that wrong, but what i mean to say is that i am comparing gillian and haley's relationship to me and my sister, and wes said it is not the same thing. now i am not saying ok you are right i am wrong and letting it go, because i just don't know what this is, but that is a perspective i never thought of before.

when we were little girls, my older sister could do no wrong, in my fathers eyes. really, i mean mom would go to punish her for doing something like stealing and dad would tell her it was ok. my older brother was my fathers step child, jimmy's daddy died when he was 2 years old, and him and dad of course never got along. my older sister came along and had daddy wrapped around her little fingers, any time she would cry, even wolf, daddy would spank jimmy or make him stand in the corner with a telephone book on his head.
this turned my sister into the biggest manipulating child one could imagine, remember the show little house on the prairie? remember nelly olson? that was how my sister was, to all of us. really.
now i don't remember all the fights but one flash memory that i do have was when mom went to my uncles house to play cards, dad came home and it was just us kids and he was pretty sauced up by then. so he walked in and told jimmy to take the garbage out to the street, we were all at the dinner table, me, my sister and jimmy, then he went to lay down, he always went to lay down.
so jimmy asked my sister if he could have the basket ball to dribble while he took the garbage out, my sister said sure and handed him the ball. then he went out and my sister made a bee line for daddy's room. daddy came out with his belt out and he was screaming at jimmy. i don't remember how much he hit him or if jimmy hit back, he was about 14 at the time. but jimmy left the house and called my mom at my uncles and that is when all hell broke loose.
mom came home and put me and jimmy in the car and daddy pulled a shot gun out and told her she wasn't leaving. mom turned around and put the muzzle to her head and told him to pull the fu*&en trigger. of course daddy didn't, then we left.
there were many more of these fights to come over the years, and a couple more kids too, i think mom was pregnant when this happened and that is why she stayed. i don't really remember.

i remember hating my sister to the very core of my being for years and years. it wasn't until after daddy died, and after i got clean that we even developed a relationship. it is hard to have boundaries with her, but necessary, but our relationship has only been what it is for the past 4 years.

so when i say wes may be onto something when he said i am comparing how i grew up to what my children are experiencing, he may be right. so how do i know this is different, does this require more faith and diligence on my part. because while i am not turning a blind eye to how we discipline the children, then how do i differentiate the two situations. going over my stepwork, my fourth step, i never wrote any of this down in my resentments, and i was so thorough.
am i angry at my mother for not being anything more than a martyr, or am i angry at my father for being a drunk? i thought i forgave them, they did the best they could, the only way they knew how to parent. that doesn't make it right, and i do not agree with it, but i accept the past for what it was so why is this bothering me today. i guess this is where a call to my sponsor would come in handy, huh. cause i ain't paying dr. phil!!!
now as for discipline, we use the 1,2,3 magic method by dr. phelan. his philosophy is to think of children as "wild animals" and the parents as "wild animal trainers". i know it sounds absurd but check it out it really is a great method. he also says there is a one in 1000 chance you will have a problem child, or "room wrecker" as he labels them, and i have that one in a 1000 in my haley.

the 2 main rules of this method are for the parents and the first one is "no talking" the 2nd is "no emotion". you simply count and put in time out. no emotion no scolding and it is very difficult to not get emotional. but he says 99 percent of the time when the method stops working it is because the parents have broken one or both of those rules. I have the video so I will watch it again with wes, we need a refresher. it is very good and it is wonderful because it works, if you work it. so I can say I am in a much better space today, i am still a work in progress, still on step 7, my friend showed up yesterday and installed my fire alarms and put up my bulletin board, I went and did my tb test for my assessment and paid a medical bill and i just dropped my daughter off for her first day of college!! so gratitude to keep me in today;
1. today I am grateful for the ability to see things from another perspective.
2. today I am grateful that i am continuing to pursue getting my daycare opened.
3. today I am grateful that I have not quit.
4. today I am grateful to have gotten over another emotional roller coaster.
5. today I am grateful I never had the urge to use drugs during that time.

I did not go to a meeting last night, wes asked if i would go, but it is so discouraging to be the only person who will share so intimately what is truly going on with me. i want to go somewhere where everyone feels it is safe to share, and they do. that means going out of town, so I will try to hit a meeting in hutch or newton this weekend. i went to the gym today and was busy busy and that leaves me with todays thought;
"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." Anais Nin