Beasts Of Burden...

This has been doing the rounds...

More counting for nothing, or very little...

On a personal note...

I have four children, three from my first marriage and one from my second...

My daughters in my first family were 6.5 and 4.5 years old when their brother was born...

A few weeks before his birth, we were sitting in our lounge, with their paternal grandmother, looking through family photo albums, telling stories from the children's lives...

My mother-in-law opened her mouth and said:

"I hope it's a boy this time.   I like boy babies better than girls"...

I was gob-smacked...

WTF - here was a woman, telling her girl grandchildren in no uncertain terms, that they were lesser beings than boys and she really did not love them...

And then there was the time in 1990, when my father turned the responsibility/blame for his abuse of me back onto me.   When I asked him why he had done what he had done when I was a baby and then again when I was older, he told me that I had brought it all on myself because I "had always been a difficult child", in contrast to my younger sister who had always been quiet and compliant.   And when I asked him why he had not confronted my uncle about his abuse of me, he replied: "because he was my brother"... And I remember the stunned inner child (we all carry) inside, shouting silently: "BUT I WAS YOUR DAUGHTER!".   Years later, it clicked - if he had confronted his brother on his abuse of me, he would then have had to admit and own his own actions, and he could never do that...

And then there was my first husband, who did the same thing as my father had done - transferred the responsibility for his abuse of our second daughter onto her.   After we divorced, I challenged him about his behaviour.   He rationalised his  abuse of her by saying that from the moment she had been born, her cry had grated on him.   He went on to say (having just completed some psychology papers at university) that, according to family dynamics theory, she had come into the family and taken on the role of 'scapegoat' and he was just caught in and responding to that energetic/pattern of relationship...

Bloody hell...