The haters

The Naysayers, the pessimistic, the jerks, the negative influences in your life; the guy that always has negative banter, a piss poor attitude, complains excessively and is always downbeat. You know him or her - everyone has someone like this in their life and everyone deals with them in their own way.
Naysayers hate on others for all sorts of reasons: jealousy, personal insecurities, intimidation, their own effed up personality issue; but mostly they are projecting their own fears.

I am at a stage in my life – well I’ve actually been working on this stage for five years now – it’s definitely been a hard work in progress – which I am trying to become immune to the naysayers, cut them out, flick them right out of my life. I don’t want people around me that are going to try and scare me from moving forward with my life, my passions, my career, my marriage, my parenting.

I don’t know everything, hell the more I learn the more I realize I hardly have scratched the surface of worldly knowledge. I’ve noticed that naysayers are know-it-alls that hardly know anything; they project to know everything – they’ve been there and done that and it didn’t work for them and you should just sit and their shallow pool of poor me and wallow as well. But I’m not scared to learn and I’m not scared to admit I don’t know.

How do you deal with it? How do you deal with these people?

I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they have tried Paleo and when their family or friends or co-workers find out they are trying this lifestyle that they get ridiculed for it. Co-workers make it a point to bring donuts in to tempt them or family members berate them for not partaking in macaroni salad at the family picnic. Why? This is crazy – keep your failures to yourself naysayers.

I could be negative about my mom for hours– but it serves me no purpose. I’m an adult, I can control how much exposure I have with her and I can appreciate all the good about her without being disappointed in the relationship we have now.

My mom has a great smile – it’s contagious. When she smiles and laughs you cannot help but smile and laugh with her. When I was a kid my number one priority was to make my mom laugh and smile. I bent over backwards to complete my mission. My mom’s smile is so great that all the people in her life make this their mission.

When it was just me and my mom her favorite thing to do was go for late car rides with the sunroof open blaring music. My love of Rod Stewart, Phil Collins and Prince come from my mom. When she gave off her positive energy it was like a rainbow – it’d wash over me and gave me a ton of hope and make me look forward to the next day. We’d spend hours at the pool; she’d put baby oil on and bronze her skin – she was so beautiful. She has the best complexion and her hair was always in style – she knew how to dress to the “nines” and she was just beautiful to look at. She was the kind of woman that people paid attention to when she walked into a room.
These are the memories I keep and nurture in my mind and I let the bad stuff drain out so it doesn’t drain me.

I’m not good at relationships. I struggle with developing them and keeping them intact whether it’s with my parents, my siblings, my husband, my kids or friends. I work hard at my marriage every single day – because it is important to me. I am not foolish to think that my marriage is so strong that nothing can ruin it. It is strong because I actively DON’T let anything ruin it.

Parenting is hard – I struggle with new issues constantly – when the girls were little it was because I worked and they were in daycare, as they got a little bit older it was missing field trips with the school and when I could go in the mothers that were the class moms or never missed a field trip would snub their nose at me and make me feel like an outsider; I felt guilty because sometimes I just wanted to go out with my girlfriends and forget my responsibilities – drink too much, dance right out of my shoes and sleep my hang over off till noon (not wake up at 0530 to watch Blue’s Clues while dispensing Cheerios) but how can you be a good mom if you don’t want to be home with your kids in bed by 9 so you can be that fresh-faced ready to play mom?!! All these thoughts planted or expressed by the naysayers.

I live hours away from my siblings and I am also a lot older than them. It’s hard to find a balance of not being preachy and parental to being supportive and secretive. I still haven’t figured it out – just ask them =) my parents – well again I just choose to look at the good and ignore the rest – hating solves nothing.

So my question is how do YOU deal with the naysayers? Do you cut them out, do you let them win, or do you try and reason with them?