Posts Tagged ‘choices’
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
I met a woman at a bar – The Bombay Bicycle Club in Cape Town. I was wearing a big red bow on my head – I found it weaving my way back from the bathroom; a friend was speaking Swedish to anyone who would listen; her boyfriend was inhaling his Fettucini Fantasia, and this new friend and I were playing a divorce ditty on the bell above the bar.
Somehow surrounded by people who have all been going through divorce – one guy as young as twenty-eight! – it was polled that the grief and heartbreak you experience when getting divorced or splitting from your significant long-term partner is nowhere near the broken-hearted mess you become after the person directly afterwards leaves you. And my new friend decided, after talking to me, that she just might want to avoid falling in love again altogether … and with my manic grieving process who the hell can blame her!
It ultimately all boils down to those choices. I had choices when breaking up my marriage. I could have let go immediately but I chose to fight for years before realizing I was never going to be chosen and my stubborn side refused to believe it for so long that I delayed the inevitable and caused myself (and probably my whole family) a hell of a lot of unnecessary trauma in the process. We’d been together since god was a child; he was my best friend, and I kinda thought it would look bad if I had a failed marriage on top of having recently thrown in my career towel when I couldn’t come to grips with how depressed I was being a mother. I was attached and, yes, maybe the attachment was to several too many of the wrong things. The relationship had, after all, been fizzling out for a few years when it became all too clear that the power had shifted and I was not as significant an Other as I desired.
In an attempt to let him go, I wrote, I partied, I ran (and then some), I rang the bell and I slept out at friends more often than at home.
I have come full circle, except this time the heartache is more acute, having broken up at the explosion of love rather than in the smoky aftermath. It took a friend of mine recently to point out that I just don’t do things in half measures – all or nothing – and a little retrospective look revealed how I had been trying to squeeze myself into little spaces he had created for me in his life. My life, in contrast, was wide open to him and he chose not to fill any of the space.
So I have just repeated the pattern: I chose a new man to love who had tiny spaces in his life which I just never fit into … You think maybe it’s because my wings just got too big? 
Maybe I just want to be picked for the team or maybe the reason I run is because I don’t want to not be picked.
And, having come full circle, I repeat my process with the exact same coping mechanisms: again I write, I party, I run (and then some), I ring the bell and I sleep out at friends as often as possible in an attempt to wrap myself in the love I am perhaps recognizing finally as the more sustainable and worthwhile reflection of love there is. My coping mechanisms may have stayed the same but the grieving process is happening far quicker … no doubt because my lover is halfway across the world with his family and Absence does not, in my case, make the Heart Fonder … especially under the circumstances.
A friend said it was time to fall in love with myself and the rest would follow. It’s all about practice. You learn what you can handle, you learn what’s in your best interests and you just ‘lite’n up. Am I learning to let go easier or am I simply recognizing that when others let go, I need to accept defeat and walk away. It hurts to walk away from bliss … but when the split happens, it’s time to acknowledge that the bliss is now simply living in yesterdays that no longer exist. There is a time when all romance has to make way for reality.
The journey is all I have now to remember … it’s all I have and it will have to be enough. The destination may not be the one I chose but it’s the place I’m meant to be.
Tags: Bombay Bicycle, career, choices, divorce, friendship, love, marriage, relationships, running, spaces
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Friday, August 5th, 2011
“After we made love I knew it was over. Did I ever really love Big or was I addicted to the pain? The exquisite pain of wanting someone so unattainable?” – Carrie (Sex & the City)
So, in the interests of having a new blog post, I put myself on the couch yesterday to find this ‘Pain Body’ Eckhart Tolle and a friend of mine speak of … trying to figure out if indeed it has something to do with my attachments and my reluctance to let go.
The astrologer who last year predicted not only the demise of my marriage but also the end of my romance, suggested I document my grieving process photographically. But my rawness seems more appropriately exposed in my words rather than my image which, as my life takes a new shape, manages to conjure the joys of life even as those closest to me throw me safety ropes and pull me out of the gaping holes in the earth beneath my feet.
It took three years, a separation and a love affair before I could make a tiny bit of sense of why my marriage failed. It is only now, during this current grieving process over my Mr Big, that I have come remotely close to gaining clarity and a path back to the knowledge I was nowhere near ready to harness previously. It was only once I managed to disengage from my husband that I could access the parts of me that could grow from the experience … and it wasn’t so much the disengagement from the man that was so difficult as the disengagement from all the stuff that eighteen years naturally brings to a relationship.
As I now try and let go of my One, I see that there was nothing outside of the intense connection; the very core of knowing I was Destined to be with him. The purity of this attachment to only the Man somehow makes it feel harder. But I let go of him in the knowledge that there was nothing in the relationship other than a hope of a future that was never real and the fear of losing someone who was never mine. I have learned that being Destined to be Together does not automatically make it so, but comes with Choices that Enable it to happen. I fell in love with the unattainable. But, like Carrie, I was probably just addicted to the pain of not having the One thing I truly wanted. After all, I get to keep the love and just let go of the man.
But there’s something inside of me that just doesn’t want to. And this is perhaps the ‘Pain Body‘ I have been trying to figure out … that part of me that aches to feel the pain just a little bit more; that part that doesn’t want to forget how it felt to rest my head in that perfect place on his chest; the part that wants to remember the feeling of safety when wrapped in his arms; the part that hoped unrealistically that I would be his One too. As I torture myself over photos, emails and text messages, the pain speaks to me and feeds off the agony of not being chosen.
Would it be too easy to let go and move one? Or would moving on and letting go of the pain, also liberate me from the joy of having known such intense bliss? Can we even have the one without the other? Like the pendulum, the left is countered by the right … back and forth with moments of balance at the centre point. Grief and joy need not necessarily be opposites but conspirators to a fulfilled and balanced life.
I’m deleting photos and emails one by one. The journals and notes get gradually burned on the fire and I again sit down with Archangel Michael in his skimpy shorts, and seek the assistance of his big sword to sever those ties that connect my heart so steadily to that of my One. Once I have disengaged I will be in a better position to assess what this is all about. Who says you have to stay friends with ex-husbands and ex-lovers anyway?
Penelope van Maasdyk, you need to lie down on the couch again …
Tags: addiction, Archangel Michael, attachment, balance, choices, disengagement, divorce, Eckhart Tolle, grief, hope, joy, love, marriage, Mr Big, pain, Pain Body, relationships, Sex & the City, the One
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Sunday, May 15th, 2011
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.”
- Richard Bach
Just over six years ago I found out I was growing a son. And, in an instant, it was as though the personality slate was wiped clean … my life split in two – I went one way and the person I was before that moment, went another.
Parents say their lives change, they gush about motherhood and how they wouldn’t want it any other way, and they give childless people a tough time when they make a conscious choice not to go that route. They sever themselves from the people they were and blindly take on a new role and a new personality. A brave choice? The only way to survive? Who can say? … we all have our self-preservation tactics. But I have never been able to sever myself from the knowledge – and, yes, occasional envy – of that parallel dweller who took my life at the crossroads and left me with a stranger in the shape of my baby; my husband in the shape of a stranger, and no manual on how to deal with either.
And that diversion led me to the next intersection.
Divorce Ahead, the sign read. But no one was paying attention. Usual story – one person is texting and the other is changing the channel on the radio … you lose concentration and before you even look up, the ten-ton truck has mowed down the SUV and no one knows what’s hit them until they’re in ICU figuring out who’s going to pay for the mess.
But then you start the rehabilitation part … and you get a chance to nip and tuck. You get rid of pieces and you find bits to fix, and you discover all the parts you were always told you had to fix … well, they actually weren’t broken at all.
I have been to so much therapy in the post-baby years – I’ve been to counsellors who have told me to guard myself by donning cloaks of protection, I’ve seen healers who have told me to shed said cloaks and live with truth, I have been to therapists who have told me to live with authenticity and those who have encouraged me to compromise myself for the sake of my relationships. And at the end of that road, the only real choice I had was to just shed it all and emerge openhearted … and with a lot of raw nerves. Not fragile, just exposed.
So who is this parallel dweller I wonder and would I even like her, now that I see her from this perspective? I can tell you she is obsessive, controlling, fixated on money, job and investing for the future. She works hard and long, trains to the point of obsession and never compromises on her desires. She gets what she wants, when she wants and is incredibly lucky because she gets away with it all. She is so guarded that she takes life’s knocks like spandex and is unaffected by the attitudes and opinions of others. She doesn’t take compliments because they make her weak and she needs no one … ever. She is a stand-alone deal and she is invincible. She’s got a huge bitch button and it’s dangerously close to the one that sends her out of control. I’m not sure I like her but I miss her sometimes because she’s so much stronger than the person she left behind, a person I recognise so vaguely since it is all so new.
You can’t stay a caterpillar forever. You have to trap yourself in a cocoon for a while in order to emerge one day as a butterfly. I have stripped away the parts that were there for others, I have exposed the parts that were locked away because others couldn’t handle them and I have taken off the protective cloaks that shielded me from the parts in others that threatened to damage me. All the shielding, guarding and pleasing has been replaced with authenticity and trust that the people who love me are the ones that can handle this bare truth that lies within. The relationships I keep are those that allow me to expose the parts of myself that scare even me.
I’m just waiting now for my wings to unfurl and then I will see if I can fly.
Tags: choices, cocoon, diversion, divorce, parallel life, parenthood, rehabilitation, therapy
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Monday, May 2nd, 2011
I was speaking to a friend about long-term relationships. We got onto routine and how it’s supposedly normal for a couple to settle into something that feels comfortable for both of them and it’s fine to just accept this as it is and allow the boredom to creep in.
We all live within the confines of social boundaries and I can’t help thinking that the branding that comes with marriage, child, house, dogs, car, etc. is what drove me to divorce. Did it have less to do with wanting a divorce and more to do with wanting freedom … freedom from this cramped box of conformity that’s wrapped up in the illusion of this family vibe? Lately I’ve been taking a look at families from a different perspective. I see the way people in a couple fold in upon themselves … they buckle to pressures that require them to be something different for their partners and their children and their friends. They give up little pieces of themselves in order to be accepted by the people in their lives who help define them.
Where I disagreed with my friend was in the breaking of the norms. Sure, couples settle into a routine and sure that is a socially acceptable norm and one that brings so much comfort to so many people. But what if you are the type to doggedly resist that by trying to break the seemingly unbreakable mould of social conformity?
In the same way I backpack (wanting to move as soon as I have settled into a new place), I resist settling as soon as things become too normal. Getting married, having babies, buying houses … these are all milestones people use to settle even deeper into normality and routine, benchmarks around which they measure their movement towards successful human lives.
And then you get people like me. I wrote on my recent travels about not wanting to be defined by the place my roots sink into the ground but rather by the sky my branches are reaching towards. I want to climb mountains, sleep under the stars, swim in the Ganges and never use assets and responsibilities as an excuse to have anything less than an extra-ordinary life. I don’t want to be just another ordinary package holiday; I want to be unchartered territory. And I realise more than anything that I don’t have to be ok for everybody; I just have to be ok for me.
Tags: babies, backpacking, choices, conformity, crossroads, divorce, marriage, normality, relationships, routine, society
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Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
She asked me if I was jinxed … she mentioned that I had been talking a lot about handing out my mediator’s number to female friends on the precipice of divorce. She even jokingly said she probably shouldn’t see so much of me in case it rubbed off on her, and I’m still not so sure her laughter was to do with humor or nerves.
My friend has a point. Since I started the divorce process, I now know a multitude of couples either attending therapy, seeking mediation, getting separated or in the full throws of divorce. Is it purely because I am now privy to the private lives of others going through the same thing I too am experiencing … or am I caught in some kind of supernatural chain reaction that begins with one, and then gradually makes the next person more comfortable with the idea.
If I think back to my parents’ day when we were freakishly sheltered from such talk of the unmentionable breaking of God’s eternal union, I can’t help but wonder what hugely fundamental thing has changed that it is now almost acceptable to engage in the drama of divorce.
Can I blame it on Hollywood, Jerry Springer and the scourge of social networks … or are we just floundering about trying to find our way because we’ve done away with the rules? As relatively areligious beings, do we have too many choices outside of The Book? Biblically minded people still have guidelines to follow but as so many people move beyond the confines of this norm, we charter a territory where we are forced to forge new pathways where others can follow.
Of all the friends of mine who are navigating and following, there is one who is still clear about her boundaries, one who has it all mapped out because of her religion. The rules are still clear for her. The guilt is there to ensure she suffers through her decision and she asks God regularly to tell her when – or if – she should get divorced. Sure it makes things a little simpler when someone else can take the responsibility for your actions … but she’s got my mediator’s number just in case God doesn’t take her call.
Tags: choices, divorce, influence, mediator, Religion, separation
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Sunday, December 12th, 2010
I have written before about the choices we are faced with and the deliberating we do as a result. The do-we-don’t-we-have-a-baby? … The what-if-it’s-not-enough-not-having-one? … The will-I-regret-it-if-I don’t? … The pressure, the peers, the drama and the confusion … that doesn’t go away until you eventually just have the damn baby and deal with the consequences. Except consequences are never quite what you expect.
Life can either just continue to be the same or you can mix it up a bit and hope for the best. And, until you just do it, you will always wonder.
Now that I sit on the brink of divorce, I go through the same … the pressure, the peers, the drama and the confusion. The deliberating is the same really since I will wonder what it will be like to be divorced … until I just do it. Not that that helps in the slightest since I know what happened last time I took the plunge and things haven’t exactly been pretty ever since.
I love my child so much it hurts sometimes. But that doesn’t mean I am still not acutely aware of the person I would be without him, the life I would be leading and the relationships I would be having. I wouldn’t change a thing but I am fully aware of my parallel dweller living the life I could have had (Note: not should have had since my path is MY path and it is how it is and as it should be). So what of the other choices to be made?
Like those childless couples I listen to lament with tangible indecision about their need to procreate … or not … will I forever wonder about whether to divorce … or not. The first thing I always say when people say they want to start trying for a baby … followed quickly with the usual back-peddling about timing and differing opinions on the subject … is, “Listen, guys, until you just fall pregnant, you will always talk about whether or not you should. Once you have the baby, however, you will never again have this conversation because whether you are happy with your decision or not, the social pressure will never allow you to utter your dissatisfaction with your decision since that would diminish the life of the baby you are obligated to love from the moment it comes out of you … even though you may as well invite a perfect stranger off the street to live with you and be expected to love it with all your heart. Whether you plan it or not, it’s a huge fucken surprise when baby arrives.”
But then I have a lot to say on the subject … almost 60,000 words worth in fact … which has always been half the problem.
Does the fork in the road prompt the decision or does the decision create the fork in the road? Who knows? I wish I had the answers but you’re not going to get them here … these are just the overactive ramblings of a woman clearly in the throws of your possibly not-so-typical midlife crisis.
Tags: baby, choices, decisions, divorce, midlife crisis, paths, regret
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Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
My mother asked me what my next move would be. She was referring to the next step in the process of taking myself and my child through a divorce after my husband’s decision to fight for our marriage was followed swiftly by amnesia.
“To go for a run,” I replied.
On the brink of something so huge, I can no longer think in terms of years, months or weeks … sometimes even a day ahead is a stretch … so I think as far as the next few hours, and the only steps I can think of are small … and usually involve running. It ties up quite nicely with my intention to run a full marathon before the age of forty, a milestone that is fast approaching and one that I intend to reach in clichéd fabulousness. It means I can take all these next steps in a positive strength-gaining manner and achieve something solid when everything around me is tumbling down.
Or is it?
There is something to be said about rights of passage, something that begs the question on the outset: Is this really necessary? As it is with climbing mountains, the view from the top always surpasses the obscured view at base camp and the feeling of getting to the other side shifts all previous protestations into cries of, “That was so worth it!” So why are some mountains so damn difficult to climb? Is it because of the baggage we’re dragging … or the people?
Adapt or die. Is that the thing it boils down to? It’s taken me five years to adapt to life back in South Africa; five years to find my way to the life path I was searching for during the money-spinning days of London’s investment world; five years to turn my world on its head and redefine my life and who I am. Adapting to save a marriage would be devolving … it would be like both adapting and dying simultaneously.
I embarked on a spiritual journey just over a year ago. It is not a conventional journey but one that has led me to make choices such as giving up alcohol, caffeine and certain foods. Peer pressure aside, it has been relatively easy because I have come out with a greater sense of clarity, a strong, healthy body and energy I so desperately need to summit the next peak, baggage in tow. The feeling that I have gained from this journey has made my decision relatively simple. Not easy – never easy – just simple. I have realised if someone can choose a house, a bedroom, the TV, a bag of crisps and a pint of beer ahead of a marriage, then not choosing those things to the detriment of the marriage should also be acceptable.
But then in divorce no one is right. I desperately wish it wasn’t over but I am doing what I am being pushed to do – I am forking off down the road less travelled where my pioneering skills will lead me to a place of no mountains for a while. Or perhaps I will just have to go climb a real one.
Tags: adapting, choices, climbing, divorce, marriage, process, rights of passage, running
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Part 3:
There are no guarantees. You can chose to have or chose to not have but either way these things just take their natural course. I still have no idea how my child managed to find his way into my life when I think how one moment in a then 13-year relationship changed my entire life … and then turned it upside down.
A very old friend of mine shared her story of how she spent years choosing to not have a baby. When she got married she decided to try and their precious baby arrived within the year – something that is almost unheard of these days. After being so lucky the first time around, she and her husband faced the enormous decision of whether to have a second. The answer was a resounding YES (YES, YES … !) That was over three years ago.
You can’t control these things; you just have to live your life as best you can without any regrets. This whole vibe is just some kind of surreal journey that takes us down random routes … and without even a GPS.
Tags: choices, control, direction, regrets, relationship
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Thursday, January 28th, 2010
In true Gemini fashion, I change my mind, my outlook and my opinions on a seemingly daily basis and often when I read over some of the material I have posted, I am shocked to discover that it is 100% original material and it came out of the recesses of my dark and cavernous mind.
Something that keeps coming up amongst my peers is the decision to work full time or not. I know what it feels like on the inside – believe me I have been there, desperate to have more of everything good, terrified of giving up anything in case I need it later and paranoid about not being able to provide for the future. But, looking in now from the outside, I have so much faith in the process of a holistic lifestyle. I can’t consume what I don’t have and can’t waste what I don’t have. My choices are more limited but my enjoyment of life totally unrestricted. There is a calmness as though life is slower, more meaningful and less inhibited than before. It seems the more one has, the higher and nearer we place the boundaries … and when you have less, there is no end to the potential you can achieve.
I was chatting to a friend (you know, the ones we non-working mums meet up with for play dates) about ambition and success. Her father-in-law had a simple life and a regular 9-5 job, put all his children through tertiary education and was a respected and loved man. Compared to a man in a powerful executive job who hardly saw his children, apart from annual family holidays, we were weighing up the benchmarks of success. I’m sure if there were a vote the outcome would be more or less equal based on the perspective of the person voting. As for my vote … it’s pretty obvious what it would be – success means nothing unless it has a positive impact on the significant people in that person’s life. What’s the point otherwise? If the choice boils down to a simple education thing, is it better to be able to afford to put your child through ’varsity or is it better to see him and help nurture him before then so he is better able to put himself through ’varsity? My child is still little so I choose to see him – I might, however, change my mind when he becomes a teenager J I see so many parents torn between their need to see their children and their neurosis about their nest egg and recently a lot of people have lost their nest egg despite their choice to grown that instead of their children. Obviously there are people who don’t have the choice and have to be a double-income family. But if no one’s going to die if things are downscaled, then surely the choice is a simple one. This isn’t a judgement of people who want more as I totally get it – I get ambition and the freedom money can buy – I just need to make the point that all choices come with compromise and it’s best to be certain you can live with whatever that compromise may be.
Sure it’s always going to be scary – what important choice is ever not scary? – but it’s a matter of going to the edge and taking the leap of faith to see if flight is possible. There would be no reason to live if it weren’t for the challenges in life – after all, it is the challenges that make life what it is in the first place.
I don’t know anyone so far who hasn’t jumped first and then made the choice to fly.
Tags: availability, career, choices, education, lifestyle
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Friday, November 13th, 2009
This made me think about a friend of mine who, on discovering she was pregnant, went to every clinic in town to hunt down one that would give her the abortion pill. But on finding one, decided there must be a reason it had been so difficult to find it in the first place that she couldn’t go through with it after all. She now has this bright and bubbly child who comes with her fair share of trials and troubles but who fills the house with light and joy. It’s hard to imagine there would ever be regret … and I don’t even ask because it is so unimportant now.
Becoming a mother was the biggest shock of my life and learning to love the child I claimed had ruined my life was a tough journey indeed with many a tortuous mountain peak. I now find that the love I have developed for him over the years has grown like a tumour around my heart and to get rid of that love would mean ripping my entire heart out of my chest.
So, although I feel guilty and wonder if he’ll ever forgive me for not wanting him to start with, there is no cell in my body that would want it any other way. Sure there are times when I hate my role and wish I could be untethered again … but, this child: he is meant to be here for reasons I am, as yet, incapable of explaining.
Tags: abortion, children, choices, gift, parenting
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Thursday, November 5th, 2009
I find myself breaking out in a sweat whenever the school topic comes up at dinner parties. I might actually be forced into home schooling as the very thought of trawling through school grounds and interviewing teachers who really couldn’t care one way or the other whether the child who is my prince attends his school or not makes me want to break the parenting deal that requires me to educate to the best of my ability.
My child is four. He is perfect in every way … like everyone’s child, of course. I wanted to give him away for the first two years of his life and am only really getting to know him now that he has wormed him way into my blood like a parasite I am now loathe to get rid of because I would die without it.
Now, when I watch him sleeping, I realise the significance of what has been entrusted to me and it is enough to make me feel suffocated with the pressure of being the perfect mother to this perfect human child.
He changes every day and it the most incredible human being I have ever met so the thought of leaving him in the care of an institution each day, terrifies me. I don’t have great memories of school – and the ones I do have are tainted by too much booze and Tippex thinners – so I need to know my child so much better before I can feel qualified to pick an appropriate schooling system. Of course, I am fully aware of the fact that he won’t get in anywhere now because most people pick the school for their child while they are in the act of procreation.
So, now what? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know how to chose something so fundamentally important – something that will have such a huge impact on this person who is relying on me so heavily to do good by him.
Which brings me to the next post …
Tags: career, choices, home schooling, job, life choices, parenting, schooling, schools
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Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
I think I know why it is so difficult for woman to give up their careers to look after their children. I wasn’t aware of it until I visited where I used to have the same issues. Before I had a child, and even in the first years of having him, I was extremely critical of anyone who could just give up their life to stay at home with their child/ren. I thought it was a cop-out, the easy option and a weak choice. And now that I’m on the other side, I see more intensely the friction between working and non-working mums as I feel the contempt that comes with my perceived lifestyle of non-contribution and laziness. Sure, it’s not necessarily directed at me … but at people who have made the same choices as I have … Regardless, it’s a tough pill to swallow since I am now on the other side and I have the great perspective of having tried both options. Perspective counts for naught though when you can’t categorically state which is better.
It’s just got to be better for you and not just a better view for others.
Tags: career, choices, job, life choices, lifestyle, parenting, working mum
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Friday, October 30th, 2009
I crossed over into the life of my parallel dweller. It was temporary – 10 days – and it was fabulous. I booked to travel to Paris and London to run a race, visit friends and stroll the High Streets of my heyday. I counted down the weeks, days, hours and minutes to my departure, planning everything in minute detail so as to not miss out on anything I had been hankering for.
I have a friend who won’t leave her child for a night and I have friends who will leave happily for three weeks and I have friends who have varying levels of tolerance for staying away from their kids … somewhere between those two extremes. I don’t yet know where I fit.
Leaving my husband and child was filled with mixed feelings of ‘get me out of here’ and ‘I’m a terrible mother for wanting to leave so badly’. It was made worse by the call I got while going through passport control – my child was in a state because he was under the impression that I was leaving forever (perhaps he just knows me well enough to realise what a fine line I was traversing trying to connect with ‘the other side’).
I had pangs of wanting to take my child with me on my mini-adventure and a small amount of separation anxiety – a direct result of his having formed so much a part of my identity for so long now. But, once on that plane, I had shunned my mothering comfort zone and assumed my old identity – I was a free agent, meeting people as a confident, independent woman; a person I thought I had lost. The next ten days, as you can well imagine, were a whirlwind of plugging back into the grid of soul connections and lifestyle adjustments. I rode the rollercoaster of hating every minute and never wanting it to end. I was high on adrenalin and I almost valued my fix enough to call home and say I was staying. Instead … well, I’m back after tearful farewells and aching hellos … and it’s as though I haven’t quite left the fairground, but everyone’s packed up and gone home.
I feel now like I have an overloaded system of unprocessed information and things undone. I have launched myself into a state of limbo between lives; between choices; and I find myself pining again for what might have been. I have one foot in my parallel dweller’s life and it feels like she wants to keep it there – perhaps out of spite for what she sees I have … so much of what she will never have.
Tags: career, choices, job, life choices, parenting
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
In my latest therapy session we discussed all the many ways my life has changed. Could I say I regret having had a child or would it be more accurate to say that he has got me to where I am today and contributed to the person I am right now?
I have always been aware of that sassy chick in my parallel universe who has a great job earning a great salary that allows her to buy the things she wants and enables her to travel to Japan and Brazil on a whim. She is confident because her clothes aren’t always in a state, she can still wear heels and her stomach muscles are still as taut as when she was thirteen.
There’s no doubt I am still aware of her but I now look at her with admiration, not envy. She possesses a lifestyle of different choices and though some may seem so much better from where I’m standing, I am certain my choices show a lifestyle just as enviable to someone on her side.
Tags: career, choices, job, life choices, parenting
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Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Something that keeps coming up amongst my peers is the decision to work full time or not. I know what it feels like on the inside – believe me I have been there, desperate to have more of everything good, terrified of giving up anything in case I need it later and paranoid about not being able to provide for the future. But, looking in now from the outside, I have so much faith in the process of a holistic lifestyle. I can’t consume what I don’t have and can’t waste what I don’t have. My choices are more limited but my enjoyment of life totally unrestricted. There is a calmness as though life is slower, more meaningful and less inhibited than before. It seems the more one has, the higher and nearer we place the boundaries … and when you have less, there is no end to the potential you can achieve.
I was chatting to a friend (you know, the ones we non-working mums meet up with for play dates) about ambition and success. Her father-in-law had a simple life and a regular 9-5 job, put all his children through tertiary education and was a respected and loved man. Compared to a man in a powerful executive job who hardly saw his children, apart from annual family holidays, we were weighing up the benchmarks of success. I’m sure if there were a vote the outcome would be more or less equal based on the perspective of the person voting. As for my vote … it’s pretty obvious what it would be – success means nothing unless it has a positive impact on the significant people in that person’s life. What’s the point otherwise? If the choice boils down to a simple education thing, is it better to be able to afford to put your child through ’varsity or is it better to see him and help nurture him before then so he is better able to put himself through ’varsity? My child is still little so I choose to see him – I might, however, change my mind when he becomes a teenager 
I see so many parents torn between their need to see their children and their neurosis about their nest egg and recently a lot of people have lost their nest egg despite their choice to grow that instead of their children. Obviously there are people who don’t have the choice and have to be a double-income family. But if no one’s going to die if things are downscaled, then surely the choice is a simple one. This isn’t a judgement of people who want more as I totally get it – I get ambition and the freedom money can buy – I just need to make the point that all choices come with compromise and it’s best to be certain you can live with whatever that compromise may be.
Sure it’s always going to be scary – what important choice is ever not scary? – but it’s a matter of going to the edge and taking the leap of faith to see if flight is possible. There would be no reason to live if it weren’t for the challenges in life – after all, it is the challenges that make life what it is in the first place.
I don’t know anyone so far who hasn’t jumped first and then made the choice to fly.
Tags: career, choices, education, life choices
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