Insulting Compliments?

My kiddos were away from me for 24 hours or so recently, spending some time with people they love, people they don't spend a lot of time with.

I have had some issues with these particular people in the past with my oldest lovie. Ohhhh...such as quizzing her, testing to see if she was up to par "academically", asking her investigative, nosey questions, attempts at religious indoctrination, even bad-mouthing me. So even though my "give a damn what you think" button is disabled by now, I still have some echoes that creep in when it comes to them having direct, unsupervised contact with my lovies.


So after this visit, I receive some compliments...delivered with a slight touch of ?shock? disbelief?...

Why? do people find it shocking when children or adults who do not play the traditional, mainstream Christian game display kind, loving, and generous attributes?

(I can read their minds: "Our prayers must be working, for those kids to be turning out so well in spite of their beer-drinking, swearing, home-churching, traditional-school-hatin', crazy-ass parents.") 

Neither myself nor my children need to a member of a Christian or any other church to have beautiful souls.

And.... PS - You shouldn't use prayer to try to *control* others.

I will not allow my head to swell up with parental pride when someone is impressed with my kiddos. They make their own decisions about how they want to be and how they want to treat others. It's no special parenting magic that I possess, it's no tight ship I keep, it's not a parenting book I read.

My children are not reflections of me, and I don't want them to be (even though I am quite fabulous if I say so myself...) We are autonomous, we are perfect, and we are imperfect. We just ARE what we ARE.

I must say. It is extremely liberating and like a breath of fresh air to be so genuinely complacent now when it comes to receiving approval from those I ridiculously wasted time begging for approval from for years.

OH! How could I forget...let the record show that they didn't even say any "bad words."  YAY! I'm going to place extra stars on their behavior charts right away!

"Bad words"....that's a whole 'nuther Blog entry.