is it wrong

for me to feel that when I see my nieces' boundaries being crossed, that my boundaries are being crossed?

I don't feel that I'm in the wrong for standing up for them, but what if the people who are nominally their parents* can't see that continually violating their childrens' sense of self-respect is not a good thing?

I guess I'm trying to figure out: When is it my business to intervene, and when is it not my business?

And when it is my business, how do I go about it?

***
How do I know when one of the girls' boundaries has been crossed in a way that requires intervention?

Well, I just feel it. After all the years of being completely out of touch with my own feelings and working so hard to get re-connected, I just know.

I trust this. I don't feel bad about my 'meddling'; I just feel bad that I handled it badly. In other words, there should have been a way to do it that didn't make my SIL feel bad about herself. I'm not blaming myself here - both of us handled it badly, as far as I'm concerned, and neither of us have stepped up to the plate to make amends.

I'm not feeling stubborn about this, particularly, but I'm recognizing that there's a halfway point, a point midway across the bridge between any two people where we should meet in order for the relationship to feel balanced. Or, as somebody else put it, we need to both be investing the same amount (roughly, plus or minus, on average over time) into the relationship in order for it to work, to be satisfying to both people.

I realize that I didn't choose SIL, and she didn't choose me; if it weren't for my brother, we probably wouldn't have met. We have very little in common except for the girls; we often seem to have little to talk about except the surface issues.

And yet, when we're together, we seem to get along ok. There just doesn't ever seem to be any real impetus to the thing, any forward motion - it always feels a bit forced and awkward to me, something that we both do because we know we should rather than because our hearts are in it.

Which is of course human nature: We gravitate to who we gravitate to, for whatever reasonse, explicable or not. Just like taste: No accounting for it.

We may grow to like each other better over time; or not, as this article suggests:

Familiarity breeds contempt
"...on the vast majority of occasions the less we know about someone the more we are inclined to like them. [...]ambiguity allows us to imagine that other people share our world-view, our personality traits or our sense of humour. Unfortunately as soon as we start to find out more about them, we're likely to find out how different they are to ourselves and, as a result, to dislike them."

There are a couple of sarcastic quotes from the article's lead-in, but I won't quote them here. I'm severely ambivalent about sarcasm these days - my general sense is that's it's simply wrong, and nearly always destructive; that certain kinds of teasing may serve to diffuse tension between two people who know each other really well and are respectful of, and careful with, each others' feelings.

But when sarcasm is used as a weapon (as it almost always was in my family), as a put-down, a way of mocking someone, then to me it is simply a bad thing. Period. There is no redeeming value to making another person feel bad about themselves.

Not sure how I feel about that last statement. Let it sit for a while and see if it rings true.


*'Nominally their parents': I think Americans are fairly unique in our perception of children as 'possessions', as I've mentioned before. I feel strongly enough about this to link to this article again: Many Mothers, Many Fathers: The Meaning of Parenting Around the World