To be..... or not to be.

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” 

Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky.

After avoiding it for two months, I just spent over six hours today ironing and sorting out the biggest pile of clothes I have ever seen. The reason I had to finally had to sort it out is the new job coming up this Monday; I’ve never been this terrified in my life.

It’s like the first day of school..... Trying to get everything ready and wondering if your classmates will be total wankers or if the teachers will be total arse whipping dictators.

I’ve spent the last few weeks anxious and jelly-bellied. As the days have whooshed by my farting has increased tremmmmmmmmmmmmendously and it is solely due to the new job. That’s how scared I am.

I’d hate saying that I am an intrepid person, because I am not. I am scared of change and being in unfamiliar territory. I don’t like chasing waterfalls and would rather stick to my glass of water to be honest..... So I find everything that has been happening rather overwhelming in so many ways.

The new job is my biggest fear at the moment, because as important as it is to me, I don’t know how I’ll settle into the place. Could it be the fact that I will be working for a big financial giant and am afraid of under-performing hence getting fired hence not being able to save up enough money for my new mortgage? 

I could say that it’s like being thrown in the deep end, but I can handle deep ends.....this is in a league of its own.

(And to make matter worse, a friend of mine recently told me that black people need to work ten times harder than white people in order to stand out..... chuckle. Now I get it.)

I learnt a lot during my last job, and in some way it brought one point to my attention; familiarity breeds contempt.

I was a very happy and open book that didn’t mind being read; but with time, people got so used to my happiness and any negative phase I was going through was a phenomenon in the office. They probably thought I was bluffing and gave me the kind of reaction given to that boy who cried wolf.

So how will I approach my new workplace? Everybody is telling me “Tinda, just be yourself.”..... Not this time round, I think to myself.

I am intending on working harder, being more serious, and…… a bit more private. Try my best to hold my cards close to my chest and not to put much about my life out there.

I am afraid that people will ask me the kind of stupid and straightforward questions I'd ask a stranger I just met.

“Are you married?”

“And..... are you allergic to rings?”

“Where is he from and where did you guys meet?”

My friend Lillian says “Only you can ask that Tinda, nobody else can. They really don’t care.”

I would disagree with her, and if two weeks go by without someone asking me such kind of questions, I’ll then know that I am a totally abnormal and utterly rude human being.

And after a lot of thinking and unthinking, I come to the conclusion that not being myself means that I’ll just be like one of THEM, so why bother? I’ll just deal with the inevitable and be what everyone is telling me to be..... ME.

Underneath it all.

“The problem is, we don’t want to comprehend another’s capacity for evil. Our mind naturally twists away from the unpalatable truth. This is possibly why many early warning signs of abuse are interpreted in a romantic, rosy way by society: the adorable idea of the man who loves “his woman” so much he can’t bear to be without her for a second. He’s jealous, possessive, passionate(euphemism of the day) only because he cares.”

 Nigella.....Just like a Swan on water,  calm and serene on the surface, but paddling like crazy underneath.

Looking at her from the comforts of my couch, I would have sworn that the very flirtatious “Domestic Goddess” a.k.a Nigella Lawson had a picture-perfect life.

She maintained that her lifestyle was "normal" and although the droolable kitchen on her TV show is not her own, the children running in and out of the room to scoff down her freshly made Christmas bonbons and mini pavlovas baked by their picture-perfect mother were definitely hers.

I enviously pictured her getting a foot rub from her husband every night, as a token of appreciation for bringing such wonderfulness into his life.

Until I saw a photo of him clenching his hands around her neck and her eyes full of tears and fear..... and just like that, she has gone from domestic goddess to the face of domestic violence.

He later claimed that the photos of him with his hands around his wife's throat merely caught them in the middle of a “playful tiff”.

Of course, we are all stunned that this can happen to our domestic goddess. But what makes us assume that successful and confident women don’t go through domestic abuse?

According to some recent articles, many people think that domestic violence is "the grubby problem of the inarticulate and poorly educated, who can't eloquently express their frustration, who are not self-aware or emotionally intelligent enough to thrash out their differences via a civilized heart-to-heart, rather than simply with a thrashing". And as ignorant as that statement seems, it isn’t as farfetched as I’d expect it to be.

There are people who think that domestic violence is confined in high-rise council buildings or third world countries. Wrong.

So what would our reaction be if one day Nigella’s husband walked into Nigella’s knife several times? Would we believe it if she said that it was in ‘self-defense’ and revealed that her husband was a violent person?

I know a few people who are or have been victims of domestic violence; in-fact, a few days ago someone close to me revealed that she attempted stabbing her ex-husband because he was violent towards her; it broke my heart and I was very disappointed to know that his behavior almost drove her to do the unthinkable. She is one of the lucky few who have been able to walk away from a relationship that could have ended on a very bad or bloody note, but there are many men and women who unfortunately decide to stay on and suffer the consequences in the name of "Love".

To sum it up, I will use a paragraph from the Telegraph.

----So class or status is irrelevant, but we persist in our naivety. It’s a defence mechanism, of course; we’re desperate to find a cast-iron reason that will distance us from the miserable fate suffered by someone unnervingly similar to our comfortable little selves; because we don’t want to believe that it could happen to us.

We cannot tolerate the thought that we are not safe. And from this weaselly position of “I’d never get myself into that situation”, it’s a short, shameful step to blaming the victim: why does she stay with him? Why does she put up with it?----

I don’t do lɐɯɹoN

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”

― Maya Angelou.

While leaving Bethany on a chilly day in spring, a very short tempered Jesus was craving for fruit (figs to be precise) and he went to a fig tree but when he looked up, there were no juicy figs waiting for him (probably because fig trees only bear figs in summer.duh!)

So in anger, Mr.Jesus said to the tree “No man eat fruit from you henceforth for ever!”

He doomed the fig tree to perpetual fruitlessness, i.e., death because it didn’t have the juicy fruit he was craving for and alas! by the next morning, the poor tree had withered from the roots to the tip. 

I might be the only one who thinks that Jesus was a tad unfair to curse the poor tree instead of abracadabra-ing it to produce the biggest juiciest figs ever seen to man.

Moral of the story is, everything needs to live up to its purpose in life..... so just as that fig tree was meant to create oxygen, pull down rain and to provide the son of God with big nyummy juicy figs, I too should have a purpose in life..... so what is my purpose of being a human being? 

Is there something specific I was born to do, or was I just born to love the people close to me, look good and be merry?

In a recent deep conversation with my sister in-law, I asked her whether she would encourage my nieces to have children 

“Of course I want them to have NORMAL lives and would like them to have families of their own. Tamar is always talking about how many kids she will have.” She said.

Tamar is seven, at seven I never knew how children were ‘created’ leave alone how many I wanted.

Now I’d like to assume that most parents want the best for their kids..... and I guess that since my sister in-law has been such an exceptional mother to her children, it is understandable that she wishes the same beautiful experience for her children. Her biggest purpose in life was to be a great mum and encourage her kids to be the same; and I appreciate that.

So what is normal?

A nuclear family living in their picket fenced house in suburbia? A family living in a shack in a slum? or maybe a polygamous family living together

in a little village in the middle of the jungle?

I guess ‘normal’ means different things to different people; it just depends on experience or circumstances, but  like most freethinking people, what I’ve always perceived as ‘normal’ has constantly changed with growth and time. If you’d ask me, some of the things I called normal two years ago are not the same things I’d call normal today. 

For example, I recently decided that it is not normal to be constantly unhappy and do nothing about it, it is not normal to live my life surrounded by doubt and regret, and for safety reasons it is not normal to try and fix something that’s broken as I might end up with a seriously deep gash in an attempt to fix it.

Whatever my purpose as a human being is, it is certainly not to do what is deemed as ‘normal’, I would rather go against the grain but never feel like I sold myself short at any point of my life. But that’s just me..... I am too young and free to get stuck in any ways.

And as scary as my immediate future looks, I’d seriously detest finding myself dealing with the same demons I’m dealing with today ten years from now. Life is too precious to linger over the same old things; if something constantly bothers me, I would rather get rid of it permanently and move onto the next phase.

So no matter how subtle or crude our objectives in life are, there is no normal life, there’s just life. So get on with it.

Some will, Some won't, So what?

If I had a £ for every time I've had an argument with my mother about when I will “give her grandchildren”, I would have a P.A to do this bloody blogging for me.

The last time she tried to start an ‘OCCUPY TINDA’S UTERUS’ movement, I told her that I will rip my uterus off and feed it to the neighbourhood stray cats. (No kidding.)

I love children (well behaved ones) and before I go on blabbing about the hows and whys, let me proclaim that I’m not an old woman with a wrinkled crotch and sand filled mammary glands; I am in my late twenties and my ovaries are constantly telling me that they produce fresh-as-daisies-ovum. Does that make me want to have kids? NO.

Six years ago, having a baby was all I could think about..... Reason being I wanted to quickly sprint through the “child-bearing-phase” while I was still young and tight. They say that the younger you are when you push your melon/s, the quicker you bounce back to your sexy body.

I bought cute neutral coloured baby clothes, fleece blankets, bottles and pacifiers in preparation to getting pregnant; but as time went by and my knees turned to jelly, I gave them all to my sister in-law for her second baby.

After a long while my hormones kicked in right before I got married; and I started getting obsessed about the fact that my “fertility shop” was not going to stay open forever, so I took vitamins and minerals with an aim of increasing my chances of getting pregnant..... My significant other at the time never knew that I was trying to get pregnant, but it was only after I got married that I realised that kids (chuckle) were never my thing. I ran to the gynecologist for my 4 year contraceptive implant.

So what drives women into the sudden rush into maternity?

Is it driven by age, society, or the speed to get things ‘over and done with’?

I was driven by the latter...... I knew that I was about to settle down in a society where taking care of kids is quite expensive and wanted to get it out of my way before settling into my career.

Had things gone as I had mapped out, I'd be at such a sad place right now…… just like Isabella Dutton is.

Isabella is a Bri’ish woman whose honesty was cursed by some and applauded by most (Including me). She wrote an article ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2303588/The-mother-says-having-children-biggest-regret-life.html#addComment ) which expressed how having two children is the biggest regret of her life. She never intended on having children, but like most women, she felt that her circumstance (marriage) expected her to push out one melon after another.

Now I'd ask why she had the second one if she already regretted having the first one, but just like many women, she thought that having one child would be selfish and probably wanted a ‘play-mate’ for her son. (sigh)

   

 'What I valued most in my life was time on my own; to reflect, read and enjoy my own company and peace of mind. 

And suddenly that peace and solitude wasn't there any more. 

There were two small interlopers intruding on it. And I've never got that peace back.'

 Isabella Dutton

For ages children have been used as 'play-mates' for their sibling, to pass on genes, to "save" failing marriages and they are the "glue" that keeps most people together. It is admittedly easier to walk away from a bad relationship if there are no kids involved. A huge plus+ I'd say.

So do I think that people with children have a better quality of life and are happier than I am? NO. If anything I have gotten to a point where I feel sorry for people who have children. Having observed people I know bringing up their children and imagining the worry they have to endure while trying to provide the best for their children and the blame they put on themselves every time their children are unsuccessful, I'd count myself lucky to have known better. Only one friend has ever admitted that if she was given the chance to do it over again, SHE WOULDN'T.

'I resented the time my children consumed. 

Like parasites, they took from me and didn't give back'

Isabella Dutton

Thing is, your children are not yours till they turn 18, they are yours till death parts you..... and while you lay on your death bed, you will still be thinking about their well-being and the legacy (if any) you've left behind for them.

To me, the sacrifice of laying my lifelong plans around children is not worth it.....I will forever be thankful that something deep within me held me back from making what would be the biggest mistake of my life. But screw regretting..... I’ll just renew my implant when the time comes, buy myself a well deserved pair of shoes and stick a diaper on them! (GRIN)

  'I know there are millions who will consider me heinously cold-blooded and unnatural, 

but I believe there will also be those who secretly feel the same'.

 Isabella Dutton

And when it’s all said and done, Some will, Some won’t, So what?

       

The things I love.

I've walked past this back alley wall many times, and I've always wondered what whomever wrote these words was feeling..... "They must have been at such a bad place" I thought to myself.
Then I walked past it yesterday and I immediately related to what whomever wrote those words was feeling.
I now know..... and more than anything, I now understand.