MikeH

I'm Catholic, 62 years old, and my entire family attended Catholic grammer school, so you need to put this into that perspective. But I'm constantly amazed, when reading this forum, about how our feelings were not respected as a child. I'm curious as to whether you think this is funny...

Because I was the 2nd child, and oldest boy, of 9 kids, I might have taken the worst of it because of my "Family dynamics": ... but here goes:

Nephew graduates this last weekend from UC Santa Cruz. Most of the family lives in Southern California and 4 of us make the trip up to the San Francisco Bay area... One sister, husband & 3 kids live in the Bay area.

My sister Ellen: oldest, (I'm 2nd by 2 years): has a Marriage & Family Therapist license. Let's see: this is a Masters, + 2,000 clinical hours under the supervision of a licensed therapist??? Correct??

The sister underneath me (by 1 1/2 years) (Mary T.) marries a guy who has gone through ROTC in college and is stuck in the military for 6 years to pay back the college tuition that they paid for him. He becomes a pilot, gets stationed in Little Rock for 5 years. My sister, with an R.N. and little to do in Little Rock, starts working on a doctorate in Psychiatric Nursing. Finishes it when they finally move near UC Berkeley.

OK - this weekend Mary T. is talking about 1st or 2nd grade in grammar school and how the nuns talked about: make sure you listen in case God is calling you to be a priest or nun. So, Mary T. figures, if God might call her to be a nun, and she didn't want to be - well, she just won't answer the phone in case it's God calling... I'm rolling on the floor laughing right now... She NEVER thinks about talking to her parents about it..

Here's the deal: I mention to both of my sisters (Reminder here: one's a PhD & the other an MFT) that a normal child would *automatically* mention to their parents about being afraid to answer the phone because God might be calling them to be a nun... and neither of them understand what I'm telling them!!!

I'm wondering how many of you might have had something like this happen in your family? Or am I all wet??? :-) And if I'm all wet, I'd like to hear it! Wouldn't most children in a normal, healthy family tell their parents about this fear?

DesertEyes

Hello there Mike

I am Catholic too, and I totally understand the joke. No, I don't think you are all wet. As far as your professional siblings, clearly they have specialized in non-dysfunctional families

( that's a Therapist's joke, to add to your Catholic joke )

Mike

Kialua

LOL Mike. I was going to say, you might have asked the wrong crowd, I wouldn't know normal if it hit me in the face! I thought a long time about your question and didn't know the answer. I guess normal kids would tell their parents. But my kid was raised in a "normal" home and now I'm finding out plenty that she never told me, little stuff like her friend going to the bathroom in our cat box! ha ha not really frightening stuff. But I know that I never told anyone about being beat daily, even as an 18 year old. Never crossed my mind to tell on my Dad.

DavidG

Short answer- no.

I was a stickie lil proddie... my parents went to Sunday School- held on Sunday mornings at the back bar of the pub.

So being a rebellious little tyke, I went to the church down the road in the gully.

I liked the singing, and the people there weren't drunk. [On Sundays, anyway.]

They used to sing" :Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

And so I thought the Bible was an old man with a long beard
who sat on a lazy-boy up on one of those clouds.