Candid Canda

  Difficult people are everywhere, like it or not. It’s pretty certain that at some point in your life, you’ll come across a challenging person and will have to find a way to deal with them. It would be easy to think, “Why bother?” if being around them causes you hurt and grief. But it’s not as easy as that. Sometimes we’re just forced into situations we have little control over. Being related is one such circumstance. In fact, family members are often the hardest to deal with, because they’re connected to us in a more complicated, intimate way. With difficult acquaintances like friends, colleagues, lovers, or neighbors, you may have to deal with them for a time, either until a conflict between you is resolved, or you are able to remove yourself from the situation. With family, we are almost obligated to go the extra mile for the sake of the integrity of the family group. In other words, personal relationships may affect the family as a whole. If you don’t get along with a family mem

  My husband and I watched a limited series this weekend entitled, Little Fires Everywhere . Peace and harmony may be the goal for most families, but dysfunction is common and insidious and arrives in many forms. Family quarrels, grudges, and estrangements can have lasting effects, sometimes following members into old age. When one family member contends with a problem such as mental illness or alcohol, the entire household is impacted. In a dysfunctional home, there is normally no sense of unity or empathy or boundaries, and members can be highly critical of one another. This is what happened in this series when the mother decided what was correct for all members of her family and not acknowledging that each person within the family unit is individual in thought, action, and deed. I realize after years and years of rationalization, my mother did not love me, let alone like me. My brothers did no wrong and received her love and devotion. The reason why some mothers hate their daugh