Relationships: family members, couples, friends and business partners

Without relationship we are alone and the poorer for it. In my last post, the ebb and flow of relationships , I mentioned how we do go through times of closeness and times of needing space. 

I think of a relationship between different members, (be it family, friends, marriage, or partners, male, female, or two or more people), as having a “life” of its own or being another entity. I rather like to think of it as the "in-between-spaces" of my relationships. It adds another dimension to the relationship almost like a third party. If one considers a mathematics concept: two sets: set A and set B have common qualities that attract them together. They still own their own uniqueness and independence (I will discuss this further at another stage) but the common part where the set intersects is where the relationship is formed. In mathematics this is called a sub-section. It is not the sum of the whole we are talking about here, but the intersection. 

This intersection is where the essence and "life blood" of the relationship is found. Often we may feel that for some unknown reason we are comfortable with someone else. We can't put our finger on it but sub-consciously we match the other or connect in some way. Some say it is attraction or chemistry or something from our past that makes us feel familiar. This is where the intersection starts to grow. We feel it internally. It is intrinsic in nature and its identity has unique qualities that have potential, abilities and peculiarities. 

This “life” is also expressed extrinsically and has potential power, possibilities and immense effects, both for good or harm. The way it is expressed extrinsically or outwardly is through our actions, such as body language, words, behaviors, and our general way of life. Body language can be hand movements, the way we hold our torso or slight facial movements, etc. which are read by others receptors as well meaning or harmful or neutral. I think of these as micro-behaviors. Macro-behaviors are actions such as shouting, laughing, physical activities, statements and patterns we develop. Some times it is more difficult for us to know what is meant by micro behaviors than by macro behaviors. Never-the-less we should always check what is meant and not presume we know. Many a situation is derailed by presumption. The effects, potential power and possibilities are the results of our interactions as humans which can be either for good or for harm.  

The energy of this sub-set begins intrinsically between two people and it is up to them how they want this relationship to develop. They share mutual choice in developing the relationship and expressing  it extrinsically. 

 

In the next post I discuss: A relationship has a life of its own.

In the mean time enjoy the ebb and flow in the "in-between-spaces" of your relationships.

A warm smile,

Morag

The ebb and flow in relationship.

In any relationship there is a natural ebb and flow. Topics seem to arise in an unplanned manner. Diella and I have chats at the most interesting times. It has been colder here with the turning of the season and we have recently had a fireplace fitted into our lounge. So we have been drinking hot drinks by the fire. Sometimes we chat and sometimes we don’t. It depends on our mood at the time. Sometimes we’ll even skirt around each other because we sense the other needs some space. Today we were talking about relationships and how they seem to be different for different couples or people.  Over the next few posts I will be having a look at relationships.

They will be:

• ·         Relationships: family members, couples, friends and business partners,  

• ·         A relationship has a life of its own,

• ·         The Balance in marriage and partnership: examining this life together when things go wrong. 

I am sure there will be many more posts about relationships as my passion is about communication and having good relationships.I'll be back soon.

A warm smile,
Morag

What's next

Hi all,

I really love writing. It is something which I enjoy so much that it motivated me to start this blog with my mother.

I have so many things that I want to blog about here. I want to do some posts on my art, and how my mother has inspired me and encouraged me as an artist and just as a creative person in general. And I want to do some posts on some of the computer games that I play and how I have experienced them. I may do a little walk through of my favourite one at the moment, Guild Wars 2. My mother and I have even been asked to do a post about tattoos!

But. Unfortunately this is probably the last you'll be hearing from me until sometime in June. I am nearing my busiest time with my studies and then I go into exam period. Thankfully once that is done I will have LOADS of time to blog and to play Guild Wars. :D

Have fun doing what every you do,
Keep positive,
And keep drinking tea ;)

Diella
Xxx

Diella on Septum piercings

Captive bead ring

Hello again,

Diella here to talk about septum piercings.

This piercing I got when I was 20 years old. This is a funny one, it is actually rather conservative for me but it does seem to get me a lot of attention. Seriously, I can't tell you how many times random people have come up to me in the street or on the bus and asked me questions about it. Two of the most common ones are, "Did it hurt." (duh! All piercings hurt to some extent) and, "Can you still blow your nose with that thing?". (Erm... yes. I can. easily.)

So one day I asked Sheep how he would feel if I got a nose ring. Sheep said that he didn't mind but he would prefer a septum ring. I was aghast, Sheep is usually quite conservative and he is always the one dissuading me from doing something "crazy". And he was happy with a septum ring?! But then when he explained his reasons to me they started to make a lot of sense.

Horseshoe ring

With a horse shoe ring, if you suddenly find yourself in a situation where it was better that you did not have facial piercing, you can just quickly flip it up. These situations for me include meeting friends' grandparents, meeting little children (it seems to freak out my year old cousin for some reason) and that sort of thing. The other advantage is that if you decide to take it out... there is no scar or hole left visible. So this is why I think of it as a conservative piercing rather than a radical one.

Getting pierced. Oh my goodness gracious me. It hurt. A LOT. Like so much so that it is by far the most painful piercing that I have ever had and if it fell out and closed I would NOT do it again. Don't get me wrong I love the piercing it is so pretty, but way too sore. Retrospectively I think that my piercing was done through the cartilage not through the sweet spot, and this could be why it was so painful. It also took 14 months to heal, which is like a personal record for me, if you have read my other posts on piercings you'll know that I tend to heal fast.
On the day I was walking around the mall with Sheep before I went home and I didn't know what to do with myself it was so sore. Sheep kept saying that he thought it was pierced skew (actually my skin had swollen unevenly so it looked skew but a week or so later it went straight again)... I told him that if he touched my face I would kill him. So that was probably an exaggerated threat on my part but seriously I was not in the mood to be messed with.
The first few days were agony. In fact it was about 2 weeks where I was in incredible pain. Luckily I had not yet started university for the year so I did not miss anything. The day after I got it pierced my family and I went to go and see the second Sherlock Holmes movie, and I do not remember a thing. (That reminds me I should probably rewatch it.) Anyway it was just so sore that I could not concentrate on anything. I felt like I was sick. Suddenly I had realised how connected my nose/septum was to everything else. Here is a list of a bunch of things I remember hurting my nose:
Moving my eyebrows, talking, smiling, frowning, laughing, coughing... pretty much everything.

Then after about 2 weeks it started to calm down. It was sill sore if I moved my nose or bumped it but there wasn't the constant pain anymore. But, with healing comes itching. So I would wake up in the middle of the night in agony because I had scratched my nose in my sleep. *sigh* After about a month or two my nose was pretty much painless unless I applied direct pressure to the tip. Although it was only 4 or 5 months before I could flip up my piercing into my nose. Then after about 5 or 6 months I needed to have my wisdom teeth taken out. So I needed to change all my jewelry for bioplast or just take them out, if they were old piercings. Ouch ouch ouch. Changing my septum piercing hurt more than my wisdom operation! (Oh, I can actually do a post on my operation if people want. Comment below.)
Then it was only after 14 months, as I said before, that my nose did not hurt when I applied direct pressure to the tip.
Now it is completely healed. It doesn't hurt, and changing the jewelry is a breeze. :)

Here are some septum jewelry pieces which I love and totally want to buy when I have more money.  

Not my photo, click on photo to follow link

Not my photo, click on photo to follow link

Anyway. That is it from me. I hope that you enjoyed this post and found it informative.
Keep drinking tea!
Diella

Xxx

To be updated/ future piercing posts:

Diella on Piercings
Morag on Piercings
General piercing guide
Lobe and Cartilage piercings
Navel Piercing
Septum Piercing  (you are here)

Diella on Navel piercings

Hello There,
Diella here, and as you can see today I am going to be talking about my navel piercing.


I got my navel pierced when I was 18. I had wanted it done for quite a while before that but my parents had both told me that I could not have more piercings until I was 18 and my father was also paranoid about belly rings. My father was utterly convinced, after hearing one of his friends stories about a friend of a friend ect..., that if I got my navel pierced it would get infected and I would die.
In South Africa you become a legally independent adult when you turn 18, so I spoke to my mom and I just decided that once I was 18 my father didn't really have a choice in what I did to my body so I would go and get my navel pierced. I was still at school but obviously my school uniform covered my stomach and no one would need to know about my new piercing.  Since I was 16 I had begun paying for all of my piercings.

The day that I got it done I landed up being quite cheeky... the piercing shop that I was using at that time, Wildfire, was quite far from where I live and I realised that I needed someone to drive me there. My friends, boyfriend, and mother were all busy so that left my father. My father who didn't even want me to get the piercing. So I asked my father to drive me to "x" (the mall which the shop is in, I am not going to name it for securities sake.) Half way there my father suddenly asked, "So what are you doing at "x" anyway?" I replied."Ummm... Shopping."*insert innocent face here* Needless to say my father figured it out later.

My navel piercing did not hurt at all. It was about the same as my lobe piercings, less sore than my cartilage. This piercing also healed really quickly for me. For the first few weeks I put some saline solution in a little shot glass, lent forward and put the glass against my skin and then lay back and let it soak there. For more on how I look after my piercings you can read my post on General piercing Guide. After two months I went for a check up because I had never had a body piercing before and I wanted to make sure that it was doing okay. When I got there they did not want to believe that it was only two months old. That is when I first started to realize that my body heals really quickly. 

I got mine pierced with bioplast, you can see the type of thing I mean in the photo below. And then only once it was fully healed did I start to wear surgical steel jewelry. I would like to get more jewelry than I have although I do have quite a bit at the moment. I mainly have a bunch of coloured balls which I can swap on and off. I also have a couple of "dangly" ones but I don't wear them that much. I am afraid that that will hook on something, and I also find that the weight of them makes my piercing start to hurt. So I only wear my dangly ones for special occasions.

And now I can talk about one of my main reasons for getting this piercing. My tummy. I have always felt quite self conscious of my tummy. I am even a little nervous of putting this photo up. I have a little pale scar on my tummy, I am not sure what it is from, just general playful childhood I suppose. I was not really one of those stay in doors and play with dolls kind of children, more of a climbing up trees and running around kind of child. Anyway I also feel that I have a hairy tummy. I know that my hairs are small and pale and from a distance, like the first photo, you can't really see them. But they have still always bugged me. I may have them because I am skinny, as my sister says, or maybe they are just genetic. I don't know but they do bother me. But since I have had my navel pierced I am much happier with my tummy. I focus on my pretty jewelry instead of my hairs and my scar. Even the other day I took my piercing out for a couple of hours because it was a dangly one and it was hurting me... and I felt naked without my jewelry. It has become a part of me and it has helped me to accept myself as I am.   

Things that I needed to get used to were things like seat belts in cars, this sounds odd but with my height I find that I have to be careful that it does not hook through my t-shirt. Also if I am carrying something heavy I usually lean/hold the bulk of the weight against my body, I have to be careful then that it does not slide down and catch on my piercing. Also some high waisted pants can give me trouble as well. But all of these things have become second nature to me and I subconsciously deal with these things.

I hope that you enjoyed this post.
Keep drinking tea!
Diella

Xxx

To be updated/ future piercing posts:

Diella on Piercings
Morag on Piercings
General piercing guide
Lobe and Cartilage piercings
Navel Piercing (you are here)
Septum Piercing

Diella on lobe and cartilage piercings

Hi again,

Diella here. Today I am going to tell you a bit about my experiences of having lobe and cartilage piercings.

I had 5 of my lobe piercings done with a piercing gun, which I would never do now if I could change that. For a long time, the gun has been the standard jewelry shop way of piercing ears and every mommy with her ears pierced used to take her little girl to get them done there. (Yes I know that that is a generalization.But you get my point.) But as I have got older and done more research I have realized that I should have got even my lobes done with a surgical needle by a reputable piercer.
I cannot tell you what exactly is wrong with a piercing gun. I think that the two main problems are that most of the people operating the piercings guns are not actually trained piercers, and the other is that most of the guns are not properly sterilized, if they are sterilized at all.
But what is in the past is in the past and at least I can be thankful that nothing bad happened.

I do not actually know how old I was when I first got my ears pierced, maybe my mother can help here. But I do know that I got my second pair done when I was 11. My mother was okay with it and she took me to get them done. These were also done with a gun.
Then when I was 13 I did something REALLY stupid. I do not advocate this at all, in fact I actively discourage people from doing this. I found a safety pin lying around my house. Without sterilizing it at all or anything, or even cleaning my hands I was just messing about with it. Then I decided to see how hard I could pushing it to my ear until it hurt. It didn't really hurt... and I pierced my ear. Needless to say (excuse the pun) my parents were not impressed. I was told that I was not allowed to get any more piercing until I left school, in this country that is 18. I was extremely lucky that I did not get an infection.  My school did not allow more than one piercing but I somehow got around this by wearing only one in each lobe at a time, and then I just put the others in when I got home. I do remember when I was 13 I had a teacher that scolded me and told me that I was stupid to make so many holes in my ears because I could not possibly know now what I would want when I was an adult. I spoke back to her and got some more snide remarks in return but I can thankfully say that I am still very happy with all my piercings and although I may regret my methods I do not regret the result one bit!
When I was 16 I managed to convince my mother to let me get a third piercing in my right ear to match the third one in my left. This one was also done with a gun.
When I was 17 I did my next stupid thing. It was doubly stupid because it was against my mother and also because it was done incorrectly. My friend was going to get her ears pierced and she asked me to go with her and get something done too as moral support. So I decided to get my right cartilage done. Because we were going to a jewelers they only had the gun there, and neither I nor the girl with the gun knew that it is really not good to get your cartilage done with the gun. they are just not made to do that, and if done wrong they can cause the structural integrity to be compromised. Once again I was super lucky and nothing went wrong with my piercing, I did not get an infection and I did not have any problems with the cartilage. I hid my piercing from my mom and from my school by wearing two plaits.... and then 6 months later I got so very sick of wearing the same hairstyle, so I told my mom that I had disobeyed her. Lucky for me my mother was not too upset and I promised to wait until I was 18 for anymore piercings.
Then finally this year, 22 years old, I did the right thing for my ears and got another cartilage piercing. This time in my left ear and this time with a surgical needle at a reputable piercer. (Wildfire)

I can't remember how long my lobe piercings took to heal but I do remember that cartilage piercings are supposed to take about 9 months to heal. I think that mine actually took about 5-6 months to be fully healed. But I do heal quickly. My current cartilage piercing is 4/5 weeks old and it does not hurt, or bleed, or crust. I am just continuing to clean it because I know that that is the correct thing to do.  I want to get another one in my left again because I don't like symmetry too much. Also I just thing a couple of rings in the cartilage looks pretty.

That is it from me for today.
Keep drinking tea!
Diella

Xxx

To be updated/ future piercing posts:

Diella on Piercings
Morag on Piercings
General piercing guide
Lobe and Cartilage piercings (you are here)
Navel Piercing
Septum Piercing

  

The day Diella pierced her own ear (a mother's perspective)

I remember thinking that I had given Diella lots of freedom to pierce at a young age.

"Mom, I want another piercing", she had announced.
"No, I think two sets of holes is enough for now," I answered.

She had also showed interest in piercing her own ear. I had told her not to do it. Then one afternoon I come home to meet Diella in HIGH spirits – In actual fact, it felt like she was on a high. When I found out what she had done I was confused and bewildered by her behavior. She had pierced her own ear with a safety pin! The atmosphere in the home had become charged with emotion (her excitement and my anger). She was 13 years old at the time and as a mother, I felt enraged. 

I didn't know how to handle it and I paced the floor quietly seething. 
“How much more freedom does she need?” I asked myself.

The more important issue in my mind was that she had gone against my expressed wishes. I was also unnerved at the ”high” she was experiencing. I had this notion that, “people hurt themselves to experience an altered state of mind” (not that I knew much about self-harm at the time). I was scared and felt out of control as I wasn’t only worried about septicemia but also what the future might hold if we continued in this direction.  It slowly dawned on me: that “teen-dom” had crept up behind us and was about to flatten us and it was a horrible feeling. 

My reaction when I feel enraged is to withdraw to a place in myself in order to re-group. My concern is that if I don’t do this I might say or do something I will regret. It is my type of damage control. As I withdrew I realized that it is important to consider Diella’s heart and intentions. Apart from asking yourself what the motivation might be; also ask yourself what you both might learn from the situation.

I realized that I needed to be firm about safety issues so I put boundaries in place. How one communicates is important. Acceptance and understanding are things we all look for from others. I needed to be mindful and respectful of Diella’s feelings. Badly expressed anger can cause deep shame in the recipient. This does not build self-esteem. By communicating in respectful manner we teach them how they can respect themselves.

A child's growth.
My overall aim for my children is to develop self-esteem and interdependence. Ihis is a lifelong journey of self-discovery  and growth.They will discover that they are not always in charge of their emotions and actions; this can be quite bewildering to both parent and child as they find their way in mastering their emotions. Somebody once told me that I need to stand firm like a bulwark that weathers the waves crashing against it. While it is challenging to remain calm and self-controlled, as the parent, it is our duty to model the behavior we want to see our children eventually displaying as adults. Maneuvering through the minefields of this journey can bring up some really tricky stuff for parents as we are continually reminded of our own youth.

Keep pondering while you drink your tea.

A warm smile,

Morag