Turn Up The Love
Healing the hurt before it happens!
Like kernels in a popcorn cooker, the word "love" is bounced around. It is tossed from one extreme to the next, from place to place, person-to-person, laying dormant or exploding based on the stage of the cooking cycle. "Love", a word that is often not held accountable to anyone as long as the words, “I love you” are spoken.
However, there is one love in which we should all find safety, especially when we are young — the love of our parents.
Unfortunately, all too often, children get swept up in the emotional chaos of their parent’s romantic relationship — happy-times when the relationship is good and troubled times when the relationship is not so good. In the wrong place at the wrong time, the child is an innocent bystander who get’s wounded by stray conflicts, and scarred in clashes intended for adults. Without fully realizing the impact of their words and actions, some people get it twisted, your romantic relationship is about you; parenting is about the child. Two totally separate yet co-dependent relationships.
In this book we explore passive love-lessons some have lived and others have learned by the way their parents lived and the way they loved. Take a look at your life. Take a look at your love. Do you truly love your child, or is that just popcorn-love too? If children cannot trust their parent’s love, what love can they trust? Betraying a child’s love-trust can set them up for a lifetime of failure to thrive. Anyone can say the words, but for the sake of the child, and the child inside of you, what are you willing to do to Turn Up The Love?
Foreword
Great intellectual effort has been made to show that humans are thoughtful, rational beings with an almost limitless ability to learn. Yet, we know through experience that despite our intelligence as a species, it is our most primitive impulses that move us.
Our human responses to hunger, thirst, and yes, even sexual compulsions are hardwired, and have often overridden the early and ever-present indoctrination of family and faith. If it were not so, the fear of mating without marriage would be a potent deterrent to a rising number of people willing to engage in irresponsible intercourse and, by extension, to suffer the consequences thereof.
Even for those in committed relationships, procreation is treated like a side order on passion's plate—considered not configured. So, when the relationship ends, as it sometimes does, the child or children are left one parent short of a pair.
Turn Up the Love reminds us that children should be protected from the collateral damage of hurt and disappointment they played no part in creating. With this goal in mind, Colette does more than hint to us that parenting is a sacred stewardship — she unapologetically screams it.
Her insight is a hammer that transforms weak possibilities into strong probabilities of leading the lost to safe harbors, where they can dock in the arms of the people privileged and purposed to love them. As a son and father of divorce, I have been on both sides of the equation. I only wished that this compelling and sensitive work had been available to me when those challenges came. It could have, and would have, made all the difference in the world to the family I was born into as well as the family I created.
For individuals and couples of all ages, this must-read is present help in the time of need!
Todd Atkins, RN, MBA
About The Author
I wish I could say that I've done extensive research on human relationships involving parents and their children. I wish I had some super impressive credentials that would intimidate readers into pondering the scenarios in my book, assessing their own situations, and then highly motivating every person to make changes in their lives. In all honesty, I wish it were not necessary to write this book at all.
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After numerous conversations with various people – family, friends, and complete strangers – it became painfully obvious that the destruction of future generations may not totally be their fault.
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I am not a child psychologist. I am not a writer. I am a mother, a daughter, an auntie, a cousin, a Villager; a human being who sees a need to help.
My motivation for writing this book is all about children! There are too many children wandering aimlessly through life, lovesick and betrayed, they yearn for the love and attention of their parents. If there is only one child who can be spared the heartache and pain that often accompanies divorce, separation, or dysfunctional family dynamics, I'll be satisfied. If there is one family member that opens the lines of communication that leads to mending broken pieces, then my writing will not be in vain.
I’ve been warned that some people will rip this manuscript apart, but I’ll risk it all. Nothing will deter me from offering what I can to help our children. It's time for all of us to give what we have - big or small - to Turn Up The Love!
