Family Obligations

~ Clarissa

I thought bitching about family obligations was passé but apparently some people still can’t let go of it. Everybody lives in the exact arrangement they want to live in. But some people like to pretend that somebody arranged their family lives for them.

This kind of thing is why I don’t have a great time in mommy circles. We are all supposed to put on these fake shows about how we are exasperated with our hopeless husbands. And I’d sit there thinking that at that exact moment I could be reading or painting, and instead I’m participating in an embarrassing activity.

Seriously, you can’t figure out a system of who buys presents? With your partner in life, the person who’s closest to you, you just absolutely can’t make it work? That’s ineptitude of extreme proportions.

Of course, they are not inept. They simply like the fake victim status.

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Published by Clarissa

18 thoughts on “Family Obligations”

  1. People who air their marital problems in public are disgusting. So are people who use their family for social media content.

    Watch me as I prank my 6 year old child and post her traumatized reaction on Facebook!

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  2. If true, holy shit! I’d actually worry about another assassination attempt…

    https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-853387#853387

    A Gulf diplomatic source, who declined to be named or disclose his position, told The Media Line, “President Donald Trump will issue a declaration regarding the State of Palestine and American recognition of it, and that there will be the establishment of a Palestinian state without the presence of Hamas.”

    The source also added, “If an announcement of American recognition of the State of Palestine is made, it will be the most important declaration that will change the balance of power in the Middle East, and more countries will join the Abraham Accords.”

    The source confirmed that economic agreements will certainly be present, but many of them have already been announced, and we may witness the Gulf states being exempted from tariffs.

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    1. I heard those rumors re Trump recognizing the State of Palestine, but hope they are false.

      What is true, however, is that Trump is not the greatest Israeli supporter, unlike many Israelis and many people on this blog had supposed.

      [8 May 2025] “Trump no longer demanding Saudis recognize Israel for nuclear deal with US”

      And this:

      [MAY 9, 2025] “US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has canceled his planned visit to Israel scheduled for next week, just days before President Donald Trump’s anticipated trip to the region, a source familiar with the matter told The Jerusalem Post on Friday.”

      AND [MAY 9, 2025]

      Just one week before Trump embarks on a high-profile trip to the Gulf—stopping in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, but notably skipping Israel—Trump revealed that Washington had reached an agreement with the Houthis. The deal: the US would halt its airstrikes on Yemen, and the Houthis would stop targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

      The announcement came only 48 hours after a Houthi ballistic missile landed near Ben-Gurion Airport, prompting airlines to once again cancel flights to Israel, and hours after the Israeli Air Force destroyed Sanaa’s international airport—and hit several other sites in Yemen’s capital—in retaliation.

      What stung even more in Jerusalem was the Houthis’ follow-up declaration that their operations against Israel would continue as long as the war in Gaza persisted.

      The impression in Jerusalem? That the US had secured its own interests, ensuring Red Sea commerce flows uninterrupted, while leaving Israel to deal with the Houthis alone. This wasn’t the first time. Just weeks earlier, the administration began quiet negotiations with Iran, once again against Israel’s wishes.

      From: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-853261

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    2. Who’s going to feed the State of Palestine? Are we on the hook for that again? Because the likelihood of these people doing it for themselves is non-existent. It’s a population specifically bred by international organizations to be dependent on handouts.

      I liked the plan where other Arab countries were going to take them.

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    3. \ Israel isn’t going to just let this happen. Hoaxes and assassination attempts are coming. Pray for Trump and his inner circle of patriots.

      \ If true, holy shit! I’d actually worry about another assassination attempt…

      I simply love how my country of all the world is accused in advance of assassinating the American president and his “inner circle of patriots.”

      It’s like the modern secular version of the blood libel.

      We Jews truly rule the world! /not

      Btw, I expect Trump to do smth similar to Ukraine too, if he considers it to be in USA interests.

      Just as an aside, delaying an armed conflict with Iran may result in a worse future situation with nuclear Iran destabilizing the entire Middle East in ways not seen before. How has pacifying the aggressor worked with Russia? Or being ‘anti-war’ and leaving Afghanistan? Has either of those two brought peace yet or made America stronger?

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      1. It’s not a far reach. Israel is generally believed to have been Epstein’s boss/backer, and nobody’s falling over themselves to disprove that one.

        Maybe you can’t see it from inside, but the general perception of ISR, and particularly of its intelligence agency, is kind of movie-supervillain stuff.

        I’m not saying I agree– I really don’t know– just that it’s a common-enough perception and IMO not totally unwarranted.

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  3. Makes sense to me.

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  4. I’m not the best at interpreting out of context, but the way that’s worded: “can you imagine” sounds like… husband is definitely *not* expected to do those things. It’s silly.

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  5. My husband likes to buy gifts throughout the year, as he thinks of them. I fill in the gaps. When a holiday or a birthday is approaching, I check the “gift closet” (a corner of our closet), and if there’s nothing there I go out and buy the gift myself. Then my husband wraps the gift or I put in a bag. Leaves minimal room for failure and resentment.

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  6. Good article “80 years after VE-Day, the West still has not learned to pre-empt disaster” :

    In the decades that followed victory in the Second World War, democracies returned to the policy of waiting on events, notwithstanding the tens of millions of lives the policy had cost.

    Perhaps the most repulsive example of this continued dawdling is the fate, indeed the very existence of, the Stalinist regime in North Korea. In the early 1990s, following the collapse of the regime’s Soviet sponsor, the West could have easily squashed the dictatorship of the Kim family and unified Korea. Instead, President Bill Clinton’s administration sent North Korea heavy fuel oil for its electricity plants, as well as food aid to help the regime recover from a famine which was the direct consequence of the Kim family’s misrule.

    The West has waited so long that it now faces a regime armed with hydrogen bombs, and one that is actively testing mobile solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which threaten multiple countries, including the United States. North Korea and Russia have also finally felt sufficiently confident to publicly announce a strategic partnership, an action rooted less in the common criminality of these two governments and more in the West’s endless patience, leading to endless failure.

    Today, in May 2025, the West is still waiting. Waiting for Russia’s agreement to some kind of declarative rather than substantive peace in Ukraine, which would allow Russia to keep all or most of the territory of Ukraine that it has seized over the course of more than a decade of military aggression. Waiting for some sort of agreement with Iran, which would definitely not end Iran’s nuclear program, since Iran publicly refuses to give up uranium enrichment.

    There is no possibility that the policy of conceding to Russian and Iranian demands will lead either to peace or to tranquillity. Until the West reverses the core premise of its policy, that passivity is preferable to action, it will continue to drift ever closer to disaster, just as Britain drifted until Churchill pulled it out of its nosedive and put it on a path to victory.

    https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sy1fohygxe

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  7. “With your partner in life, the person who’s closest to you, you just absolutely can’t make it work? That’s ineptitude of extreme proportions.”

    Well, that is the result of decades of TV commercials aimed at the sex that does most of the purchasing. And if those ads were not successful, they would not be repeated. Now, what that actually says about the average women, well… ;-D

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    1. To my shock, I found out today that many people disagree with the idea that if one person makes all of most of the money for the family, it falls to the other person to do all or most of the household duties. I thought that it was obvious but no.

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      1. Well, men and women are very different animals. But if you admire and respect each other, and can enjoy the differences as foibles, life is a lot easier. That said, the time that I washed my red hunting shirt with my underwear was the last time that I was ever allowed anywhere near the laundry ;-D

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    1. “Americans and victimology? Someone please explain it to me.”

      Short version (don’t have time for the longer version right now): It’s an American manifestation of English understatement combined with German Sturm and Drang self-dramatization (Germans were the most influential non-British immigrants).

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    2. It is not limited to Americans, I think all of the West used to be opposed to bullying. That has degenerated into support for victims, and there is a definite heirarchy of victims…and you, I, and Cliff are on the bottom of the totempole. Now both Cliff and myself have seen Shoresy, a foul, cursing, humorous, hockey show from The Great White North, who will clearly demonstrate who is on the top ;-D

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFPsGbSa0Sg&ab_channel=Shoresy

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  9. “bitching about family obligations”

    I checked the tweet and the point is that a woman asking her husband that questions seems ridiculous (it seemed very off to me) but a man asking his wife the very same question in the same context… seems kind of plausible.

    Still a major failure of communication and the poster is not someone most sane people would want to live with but… it is a point about something you’ve written about yourself: women take the lead in making families and their husbands just kind of go along.

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