Me 2.0

I had the most beautiful day today! I slept in til when I naturally woke up, I basically fluffed around this morning then got dressed and was picked up for lunch with a most beautiful friend :) :) we had a lovely day, shopping, and eating, and drinking coffee, and catching up on all the goss :)

One thing that happened to me today really struck me - as we were talking, my mobile phone rang. I looked down, took note of who it was, and something changed in me....I realised that I was having too much fun to interrupt it by answering the phone. So I didn't. And it turns out it was just as well I didn't. It felt good to take control over my time, and invest in people worth investing in.

Later today I also had the opportunity to put in some boundaries around my personal life vs my working life. And it felt really really really good :) :)

Then I was given a lovely compliment about work, and I felt even better...

Today I just felt really proud of who I am. I really like who I am when I am around the friend I spent time with today :) It's like I'm funny, and relaxed, and comfortable, and more MYSELF than I am around other people I know. I can be totally honest and confident that she's not going to take stuff the wrong way. I don't second guess myself when we're hanging out. I want more of THOSE kinds of friends - though I know they're rare! I think I can count the friends that truly make me feel like that on one hand!

Plus I feel proud of how far I've come. I have my ups and downs, and lately I've had more downs than ups, and I've lost a few people on the way which has blindsided me at times - but through it all I've learnt how to recognize good relationships from the not so good relationships, and I've realised that instead of opening myself up to everyone I come across, I can be selective with who I spend my time on, and how. I can say no and be ok. I can put boundaries in place and be ok - and if people don't like that, then they're not worth me knowing anyways.

I've learnt to really LISTEN to myself and to others. I've all of a sudden realised that people I thought were friends are really more interested in themselves than in anyone else. I've noticed that the equal give and take is just not there with some people. It's like, as soon as they've run out of things to say about themselves all of a sudden they gotta go.....yeah....right!

I've dissected my recently failed friendships and I've come to realise that at some point along the way I've seen red flags and felt a "kick" in my gut that should have told me that things were not right. I haven't listened to that, and as a result I've had my heart ripped out a couple of times. I could have saved myself a fair bit of heartache if I had listened to myself, so I'm committed to not having that happen to me again.

I haven't finished this journey yet, I've still got a LONG way to go, and I certainly haven't learnt how to really keep my emotions in check....but I do feel like I've grown a bit lately. I feel good knowing that I'm good at my job and I'm starting to rebuild myself into a more confident, healthier and more mentally harmonious person :)


Until next time!!

Between the stroke and the slap.....

Last night I was watching a documentary done by Louis Theroux where he was talking to paroled sex offenders in Los Angeles. These are people I read about every single day - deviant, deceptive people who prey on the young and innocent to gratify themselves with little or no regard for what their actions might do to others.

They're scum. Absolutely no doubt about it. How can I think anything else?

But one thing one of them said really struck me. He described his father as a "piece of shit" and his mother an "angel" and described being slapped on one side of his face and stroked upon the other. He broke down in tears, and in total anguish said " I'm tired of making decisions. I'm tired or not knowing which one's a stroke and which one's a slap."

It was one moment of total and complete honesty that really hit me, because in that moment I completely and totally understood what this man was talking about. He was describing my life.

Now dont get me wrong, there is NO excuse for this man's actions. None. Nada. Zip.

What I do identify with is this sense of complete and total confusion, uncertainty, bliss and pain. This was my childhood. On the one hand, I had a really lovely relationship with my grandparents, and lived a very privaledged existence in a way - I always had food on the table, a roof over my head, clothes, went to private school, and really had a very sheltered upbringing picking flowers and drawing rainbows.

And on the other hand, I had an alcoholic abusive father who beat up my mother verbally and physically, and after she left turned on me. As a child, I lived in constant fear, exacerbated even further by the persistent secret keeping between my parents and my grandparents - there was so many things I had to keep from my grandparents and vice versa, and any time I let slip something I shouldn't have said I would either dissolve into panic, or walk around with a sick, heavy, burning pain in my gut that sooner or later word would get back to the other and I'd be yelled at, belittled, slapped or hit. I was literally living between the stroke and the slap. I never knew what was coming next, I never knew what kind of mood my father and mother would be in.

As I got older and the abuse actively turned on me, this fear and panic deepened as the consequences got more serious and the violence became more frequent. I lived in a very lonely prison, and I was definitely not my own best friend.

I have come a LONG way since then, but every once in a while that panic and fear sets back in. And in little things too.....little worries, little fears. The other morning I accidentally broke a glass on the floor at work and just like I did when I was five I started apologising profusely and panicked a little...i pulled myself together, but it really took me straight back into that place. Sometimes I feel like I'm a world away from where I used to be, but in moments like that it's right there.

So what's my point? Well, I guess the point is that we abhor physical and sexual abuse, we are disgusted with violence against children. We condemn those who perpetrate bruises, broken bones, scratches, welts, sprains....I just wish that the same disgust could be shown for the true horror that is emotional, mental and spiritual abuse that is perpetrated upon children every single day through sheer uncertainty and instability in the home. I wish I could adequately describe for others the profound impact this kind of environment can have on a child, then on the pre teen, the teen, the young adult, the adult, the middle aged person, the old person. Children are sponges, they absorb the emotional life of their parents - when you take out your frustrations, pains, hurts onto your children, or ask them to keep secrets, you are creating permanent scars that no one can see. For you, it's one bad day. For them, it's a lifetime of confusion.

Sometimes it's not the stroke OR the slap that causes us pain - sometimes its having to live in between them both.

Oh Mother Where Art Thou?

As a married woman of nearly 11 years with no children, motherhood is something that still mystifies me a little bit. Of course, being my age and having been married a while I've long since been through the inevitable "so....when will you start a family?" "Are you thinking about it?" "if you are, what time line?" "Will you do IVF if you can't?" "What about fostering?" "Will you adopt?" - the list is endless!

A beautiful friend of mine posted something on Facebook the other day about time, and I noticed immediately someone else posted about not having any time because they have children - this got me thinking about how defensive we as women can become about motherhood and whether we have time or not. Most women who haven't had children would argue that their time is already pretty stretched, and I would definitely fall into that category - it always feels as if while I'm devoting time to one thing I'm neglecting something else. Kind of a like a juggler who has one more ball in the air then they can handle - you have to drop one, or you risk dropping them all!

Now, if you talk to women who HAVE had one or more children, they of course would argue that as a childless woman they had HEAPS more time then they do with children. And of course I have no doubt that it seems that way - though I'd argue that perhaps its more about a priority SHIFT rather than the addition of more time sucking activities! The defense of our right to choose whether we have children or not is so wrapped up in our identity of being a woman that it's really hard to comfortably sit with either choice. On the one hand you have women who have children. They talk endlessly about first words, first steps, behaviour management, stain removal, craft projects, car pools and soccer games. They wear joggers and sweats and pull their hair back in ponytails and barely manage a touch of lip gloss. They swap recipes, and have a role in society that is easily categorised and accepted. They are the pictures of love, and patience, and have some kind of innate patience that childless women cannot understand. They swirl for me in an aura of importance - in a mist of mothers instinct that somehow they got impregnated with the moment they gave birth - an instinct that I for some unknown reason have never possessed. They know true pain. They are the warriors who worry, pray, clean and cook their way through life and who have to give up certain things in order to pay attention to their children and thereby are left with the vacume of the life unlived - the balls that have to drop.....

Hobbies....plop.......self care......plop......date nights......plop......coffee with friends (dare I say especially with friends who DONT have children).....plop......sense of identity outside of being a mother....plop.....careers......plop......

Then there's the rest of us, those that for whatever reason have not shed the 'fruits of our loins' (ha ha!). We disenfranchised few who hover at the edges of womanhood...even if you're married its impossible to escape the endless questions and the pitying head nods and blanched smiles at the quiet "no, no children" that inevitably follows. Those with children envy our project rooms, our craft activities, our scrapbooking, singing, rehearsals, yoga classes, gym sessions, coffee dates and late night dinners. Our time is, in some contexts, viewed as less valuable than those with blossoming families - after all, a woman with children asking for time off to deal with a sick child, or to spend Christmas with her thriving clan has all the legitimacy in the world.....but take a woman with no children needing time off to tend to a sick friend or spend Christmas with their parents and somehow that is slightly less powerful. More than once I've been at work and have heard someone or other being nominated to go out on a late night job because they dont have children, and it always makes my blood boil just a little. Not because I necessarily disagree that tending to your children should take precedence - I don't - not even a little bit. What I do object to however is the idea of putting someone up for the job JUST because they don't have kids. After all, time is time, whether you have children or not, and we all don't have enough. And, just like women who HAVE children, we have our own balls that drop......

Playdates with friends who DO have kids.....plop.......the laughter and fulfilment that comes with children....plop.....societal expectations.......plop.......mother's groups.......plop......passing on your legacy to the next generation......plop.....preconcieved ideas of the role of a woman.....plop......the unconditional love of a child......plop

It's powerful stuff to think of a life without children. I don't see one or the other choice as better or worse than each other, just really different. Both carry their own regrets, their own sense of loss, their own pros and cons. The reality is I don't know whether I can have children or not. I may not be able to. The jury is still well and truly out - I can't even try for children for another 8+ months. I don't know what set of balls I have to drop yet, and I don't know whether I want to drop either. But inevitably I cannot keep all the balls in the air - either I'll grow too old to have children, or my body will reach a weight where I do fall pregnant, or I'll find out at some point in the future that motherhood will not happen for me.

The only thing I know for sure is that time, like many things, is relative,  and this morning while a saucepan of milk on the stove boiled over while I was trying to make coffee and I was moving my puking cat from the carpet to the tiles and then consequently clean up cat puke from my floor I was reminded yet again that even without children sometimes we just don't have the ability to keep the balls in the air.

So I cleaned up the cat puke, and the boiled over milk, I took a moment to thank God for the fact that I DON'T yet have children, and I accepted the notion that sometimes the balls have to drop. The most important thing is not whether you let things drop, but whether you pick them back up and carry on!