{"id":194,"date":"2018-05-08T11:43:57","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T11:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/?p=194"},"modified":"2018-06-04T03:04:40","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T03:04:40","slug":"thanks-for-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/?p=194","title":{"rendered":"“Thanks for nothing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

My arm was about to hit him.<\/p>\n\n

 <\/p>\n

Shh, Don’t Tell! stories are meant to be heard<\/strong> – in the person’s own voice – as well as for the original music. Please click above and listen, if you can! The transcript is also below.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kendra: When my reserves are low, my mom or my dad\u2019s parenting style comes out. Where it\u2019s I\u2019m the lord and you\u2019ll do what I say. Instantly.<\/p>\n

Narrator: So Kendra yells. Loud.\u00a0 A lot. But it doesn\u2019t make her feel powerful. It drains her.<\/p>\n

Kendra: For me there\u2019s this awful feeling of knowing I could do so much better as a parent and as a person. This human being that I\u2019m trying to mold and create and let have life in this world can be so shattered by what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n

Narrator: When Kendra told her Shh, Don\u2019t Tell! story, she talked about her kids \u2013 and she talked about her parents.<\/p>\n

Kendra: So my parents got divorced when I was seven, and I was with my mom the first five years they were divorced and with mostly my dad the second five years. Both came from not the nicest of childhoods, not the kindest of parents. Either of them. And they were much kinder but I think they also didn\u2019t know what to do in certain situations. They didn\u2019t have the coping skills.<\/p>\n

My mom also expected a lot, and she thinks very highly of herself. And she\u2019s very narcissistic and very vain. And if you don\u2019t do what she says then it\u2019s a huge argument.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

You know, it\u2019s how you look and how you act and what you do. But she also didn\u2019t have a lot of friends. So I became her best friend growing up, to a woman who emotionally doesn\u2019t do very well. I never knew she\u2019s bipolar, and when things aren\u2019t going right for her she blows up. And she was always explosive. And always trying to leave whatever husband she was with and then always coming back and there\u2019s always arguments \u2013 she and my stepfathers were always arguing \u2013 I always figured they were the bad people for yelling at her and then as I\u2019m about to yell at her I\u2019m like ohhhh..now I know why they were yelling at her all the time.<\/p>\n

For my dad \u2013 you know, I\u2019ve never asked him, but while I lived with my dad, he wasn\u2019t there a lot. He was usually at the American bar. So if I needed to find him I would call the bar and they would find him. So I spent a lot of evenings at our off the base apartment by myself. And yet he was a teacher, so he knew what was happening at the school. Like he\u2019s friends with all the teachers so he knew if the principal ever called me in. He knew immediately. So I had to be always so good and perfect and I guess I just always thought if I got better grades or lettered in cross country and did everything right that he, I don\u2019t know, would come home. Or be there. And he wasn\u2019t. And yet my dad and I have a great relationship all these decades later. I don\u2019t know if he just didn\u2019t know what to do with a teenage girl \u2013 I think there was something that wasn\u2019t working for him that caused him to just disappear. Altogether. But I don\u2019t really know. I think it just \u2013 it crystalized even more this impression in myself of how I was supposed to act and what I was supposed to do, to I guess gain that love. And one of the phrases my husband says to our boys is what you did was bad. You are not bad. And that is just revolutionary for me. Like – had someone said that growing up \u2013 what you are doing is not right. Let\u2019s work on that. but you, you are right.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

There was one time and Will must have been in first grade, and I get him some milk and I hand him the milk and he says \u2018thanks for nothing.\u201d And part of me felt like my arm was about to hit him. And part of me was like I wonder if he even knows what that means. So I didn\u2019t hit him (laughs) I didn\u2019t yell at him, and I had one of those wonderful mom moments of like, \u2018do you know what that means?\u2019 And he was like \u2013 no. He just had heard it and was trying it out. And so I explained to him and he looked at me in shock and horror \u2013 it was like, oh, I didn\u2019t mean that. I didn\u2019t mean that, you know, to totally criticize the lack of value I have for what you did. And he never used it after that. And I was like, oh my gosh, what a mom, that\u2019s great!\u00a0 And I still had energy, he\u2019s not a puddle on the floor. Like what a great parenting moment.<\/p>\n

Special thanks to Baby Blues Connection<\/a> for help with Shh, Don\u2019t Tell! Stories, to Jenny Conlee<\/a>\u00a0of The Decemberists fame for our awesome theme and other music and to cellist\u00a0Collin Oldham<\/a> for his terrific compositions and scoring.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My arm was about to hit him.<\/p>\n

Click to listen“Thanks for nothing”<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,30,27,28,24,25,29],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":219,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/219"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}