DIARIES FROM DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

You can be kind to animals and kind every stranger who crosses your path, but kindness to strangers is not the measure of your character. Kindness at home is the real test of who you are.

Strangers don’t carry our history and strangers don’t activate our wounds and strangers don’t mirror back the parts of us that we’ve avoided for years. Our spouse does, our children do and our home does. 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that most people avoid, if all of your graciousness is saved for strangers, that’s not kindness, that is image management.  The real measure of who you are isn’t the polite smile that you give to a shop attendant, it’s the tone you use with your partner who loves loves you and raised your children and now grandchild. It’s the time you offer your children who are overwhelmed and in need of guidance. It’s the softness you choose on the days your egos want to snap.

Your second marriage didn’t collapse from one major betrayal, it eroded slowly from daily neglect, casual disrespect and a pedestal nobody could ever live up too.  It was a slow leak filled with unkindness and indifference and I know this because I remember some of it. It’s not my fault I remind you of a life you didn’t get to live. That’s the thing about the relationships we play out in our head, they are perfect and don’t have to suffer the indignity of being real. Real relationships are flawed much like people and you don’t get to use that fact as the reason you throw people away or always too busy to check in and see if they are okay.

Remember, kindness to strangers might make people like you but the kindness you show your spouse and children makes you trustworthy.  Kindness to strangers creates an image and if those strangers knew how you treated those closest to you they would have a very different opinion of you.

Kindness at home creates a person of character and if someone is kind everywhere except in their own home, that’s not kindness, that’s performance. It’s image management dressed up as virtue but you know this, that’s why you isolate and micromanage everyone around you.

I guess my only question is do you think this is why you don’t really like who you are and if you are completely alone in the end will you be content?

Lots of love

The Scapegoat