LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER

I wish many things for you,  success, health and a meaningful life but above all I hope that you grow up to be a strong and firm woman.
My reason for that is because I have seen how cruel life can be, just how difficult things can be and I know that despite how much I love you, I cannot always be there to protect you and as much as I would love to carry your burdens for you, I won't always be able to do that.

 

So I hope that if I can get anything right in this life,  that it be how I taught you that there is nothing you can't overcome. I can never prepare you enough,  because no matter how many times we face challenges in our lives, they still hit us with the same intensity and we never feel prepared. But never forget the power that lies within you and the strength that you possess because that will ensure you are never tempted to quit no matter what you come across.

 

You will fail and that's okay, I didn't make it this far in life by always getting it right. Sometimes we have to fall flat on our faces to learn whatever it is that we need to learn. Failure is a teacher, it gives you experience that you can never get from books. When you fall know that it is not the end, get up and shake the dirt off and look forward still to life and all the beauty in it. Failure should never make you afraid to try again, to put yourself out there and continue on your race. If and when you do fail at something, that shouldn't be the scale you use to weigh your worth but rather it should be an opportunity to look at alternatives that you didn't see before, to try other methods till you get it right. The lessons you gather from your failures will make you a better person and yes it won't always feel that way but trust me,  I know that for a fact.

 

You will get hurt and your heart will get broken, sometimes so bad that even taking your next breath seems difficult. That's okay too. Sometimes we need to hurt in order to re-invent ourselves. When it feels like all the pieces off your heart are scattered on the floor, you have the advantage of picking them up and putting them back together in a way that suits you. That means, you get another chance to choose the person that you want to be. Hurt will come in many forms and some instances will hurt way more than others but you will always heal. Trust me again on this one, I know. Just as people will hurt you, you too will hurt others, some intentionally but most times without even being aware. That's okay, we all have flaws and make mistakes. Forgive yourself and don't hold on to the guilt and shame, ask for forgiveness and receive it from God even if the person you have hurt chooses not to give it to you. We live and we learn.

 

Be you. Whatever you is or means. Not everyone will embrace you or accept you and that's okay. Remain true to what you feel and stand firm in your beliefs. We seldom have to change for the people who genuinely love us so always believe that by being completely and honestly you, the right people will gravitate towards you and love what they get when they arrive. Society will always have rules on how you should live and what you should do, if anything feels vaguely uncomfortable to you, choose to disregard it. Make choices that you can live with,  not ones that make you popular. If you can go to bed at night knowing that you did your best and put no one in harm's way, you would have done your part.

 

I said in the beginning life is cruel but the truth is life is beautiful. Just not always packaged in a way that we agree with. Doesn't matter what cards you are dealt, wake up everyday and show up with a smile and always give to life what you want it to give back to you.

 

I love you Miss Universe

DONT FALL IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN WHO READS

I came across this poem on the internet and just had to share. The original version was written in Spanish and someone else took the time to translate it for our reading pleasure. I did not get who the original writer is:

Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads, who feels intensely, a women who writes…..

Don’t fall in love with an educated, magical, delirious, or crazy woman.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks, who understands what she knows and also knows how to fly, a woman sure of herself.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who laughs or cries while making love,
That knows how to turn into spirit her flesh, let alone one that loves poetry (those are the most dangerous), or one that spends half an hour contemplating a painting and doesn’t know how to live without music.
Don’t fall in love with a woman interested in politics, is rebellious, and
Feels an immense horror from injustices. One that doesn’t like TV at all.
Nor a woman who is beautiful, regardless of the features of her face or her body.
Don’t fall in love with an intense, playful, lucid, and irreverent woman. You don’t want to fall in love with a woman like that, because when you fall in
Love with a woman like that, whether she stays with you or not, whether she loves you or not,
From a woman like that you never recover.

TRIBUTE TO MAMA

Today my late mother would have celebrated her birthday. I wrote a little something in her memory:

I still remember the last day I saw
A vision so vivid it was feels like yesterday
If only I knew that it would be the last time I see you
What would I have done differently?
What would I have said?
Time gone by but the memories still fresh
How I wish God would have granted us just a little bit more time together
So far away yet so near in my heart
The place where you still live and reside
Didn't they tell me time heals all wounds
They lied. They lie.  They don't know what they speak off
Time doesn't heal
Only makes it bearable to live without you
But the void ever large in my life
Nothing has even began to fill the space you left
So many questions and no one to pose them to
Are you proud of the woman I have become?
Are you proud of the mother that I am to your grandchild?
Are you proud of the way I have lived my life?
I will never know
The answers I will never find
But through the pain I wake up everyday
And hope to be half the woman you were
I continue to celebrate you
Because I am only because you were
You live on
In our spirits and the bonds we continue to share
You died but through us you live eternally

HURT PEOPLE HURT OTHERS

I once heard Bishop T.D Jakes preaching on this specific topic but it didn’t make sense to me at the time. You would think that someone who has been hurt is in a better position to love and nurture the next person because they know the pain of being hurt and wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone else. That is sometimes the case but not always the norm. Hurt people hurt others.

Take someone who has grown up in an abusive family, they grow up watching their parents fight and in more cases than not, the fights are physical. This person grows up seeing this as a norm therefore to them, this is the way that people live, this is the way that life is supposed to be and this is how people in love treat eachother. Because this is seen as normal and internalised from a young age, they are more likely to go into an abusive relationship themselves, either as the perpetrator or the victim. As a perpetrator this is how they exert their control, this is how they maintain the “status quo” and as a victim, they rationalise that I grew up seeing my mom or dad take this from their partner so this is part of the dynamics of a relationship.

There are no set signs to spot an abusive person and sometimes you never even see it coming until it hits you (literally). We all say it will never happen to me until you find yourself in that situation and don’t have the courage to walk away. All the things that you ever told yourself about how you would react to it should it happen are soon forgotten and you find yourself taking it. Abusers are usually very clever and manipulative and long before it even gets physical you realise that, the abuse had been there all along but in the emotional form.

They isolate you from your family and friends and tell you all these things that break down your self-esteem, so that when it gets to the physical part, you don’t have what it takes to walk away and you believe that you deserve the treatment that they are giving you. Your self-worth is compromised if not already non-existent and it is that much more difficult to walk away because nothing in you believes that it deserves better.

Abuse carries with it a vicious cycle that is often to hard to curb. You see it, then you experience it and leave only to turn around and turn from victim to perpetrator. This is how hurt people hurt others. They haven’t dealt with the demons of their past and that makes it difficult for them to thrive and grow in a normal relationship. So they create drama and pick fights, just so they can have something to ignite their anger. The sad thing is that, the anger seldom has anything to do with the person that they are with now, but more to do with unresolved issues from their previous relationship.

It is important to understand that, one does not just leave an unstable or abusive relationship and pick up the pieces of their heart and go on as if nothing happened. The anger and bitterness and hurt of that relationship may not show themselves until later on. Then it finds ways to manifest itself in other ways in your life, conflict with others, constantly looking for fights where they aren’t any, misplaced anger etc. Everything that we do not deal with in the present always finds its way back to us in the future. When it first happens, you may not even recognise where it comes from until you retrace your steps and look back.

Abuse has devastating effects on those who are affected and it is not just a matter of walking away and thinking that you are ready to move on. It is advisable to seek help, to deal with what has happened to you, how the abuse affected you emotionally and your current state of mind. Once you have worked through the past and made peace with it, you can truly try to be in another relationship. Abuse affects the way that you see yourself and what you think about yourself and those are but some of the issues that you need to deal with before you attempt to even love someone else or be in another relationship.

If you do not deal with the hurt of the past, you will find yourself in a situation where you cant even embrace love from another should you find it. You may end up hurting the next person because you have not dealt with your hurt.

SEEK CHRIST

A friend of mine send me a piece today that she wrote and wanted to know what I thought about it. So many thoughts crossed my mind as I was reading it and for a second there it felt like she had written down my exact thoughts. 

 How many of us can proudly and honestly say that our life is grounded in Christ? I sadly can't say that, the last few years I have been going to church, being actively involved in church activities and even prayed but the truth is, when I look at it now I realise that my life was not rooted in Him.
What I mean is that life was so good that I forgot to seek Him in the things that I was doing and the decisions I was making. I went with what felt right instead of praying that I was doing what He wanted me to do with my life. I lost my focus and instead I turned to the world to find my happiness and what I thought was joy in this life.  And for a second I was in control and I needed nothing from Him or so I thought.

 It's only when you sit down and realise what you have lost that you now begin to trace back your steps to see where you went wrong. I found that place where I tripped and fell and was not even aware that is how I was failing. I began to walk in front of God and believed that I knew better and in the process I made decisions I was not supposed to make and did things that were totally out of character. I look back in disappointment at the person I had become but never hopeless that once we accept our wrongdoings we are now in a better position to change things and change ourselves.
It is easy to run to God when we have messed up but the sad reality is that when we back on the wagon, we soon forget about Him again. But I learnt a lesson that I will carry with me for the rest of my life and that is to seek Christ at all times,  whether good or bad.

 It's to get to a point where all I do is rooted in Him as a foundation. Where I find myself in His love and act from His principles. We can never take back the past, but we can change the present and therefore the future. By seeking Christ and never moving away from His wisdom and presence, it's acknowledging that we don't know it all and that we need Him in our lives.

 I am seeking Christ, to heal and to live once again as the woman He had always intended me to be. I am seeking Christ to be my peace and to be the voice that guides my actions from here onwards. And I am seeking Christ to build such a strong relationship with Him that I never default again in being His child.

I am seeking Christ, to heal and to live once again as the woman He had always intended me to be. I am seeking Christ to be my peace and to be the voice that guides my actions from here onwards. And I am seeking Christ to build such a strong relationship with Him that I never default again in being His child

FAILURE IS NOT FINAL

We have all at a point in our lives tried to do something but failed, but failure is not final. It is only final when we stop trying and give up.

The truth is failure is a learning curve, it is life’s way of teaching us what we need to know so that we may be better people and better equipped to deal with the things that life throws at us. We have all gone through failure, whether it be in business, relationships or other areas of our lives. It can be devastating to deal with, it can even make one hopeless because you believe that, you will never get right, whatever it is that you are trying to achieve.

The truth is some of the most valuable lessons we will ever learn, we learn from failure. And when we don’t let that define who we are, we then gain experience that we wouldn’t have otherwise learned from life.

Failure is a lesson. A chance to try again, knowing now what you didn’t know when you started out before. Failure is a chance to change direction, when we realise that we have been travelling on the wrong road. Failure is an opportunity not a rejection. Failure is what you go through, not who you are. Just because you failed at something doesn’t mean that you are a failure.

Anything that we want in life is never handed over to us, we have to fight for it and work for it. Along the way, we encounter failures, we trip and we fall and things do not work out the way that we planned. Sometimes we make the wrong choices and that is what leads us to fail. Our dreams and aspirations should be so firm that not even failure or the fear of failure stops us from pursuing the things that we want. Sometimes we do not even fail in the literal sense but we fail in our heads, we convince ourselves that our dreams are too big for us and that we don’t have what it takes to achieve and accomplish the things that we want.

When you encounter failure in any area of your life. Here are 3 things that you need to do:

1.    Reflect

We are usually quick to write ourselves off or become despondent because things have not worked out the way that we hoped. We concentrate solely on what went wrong that we miss the lesson that is carried in the experience. So the next time, you are faced with failure in your life. Sit and take the time to reflect, what went wrong? What choices could I have made differently? What lesson can I take from this experience?

2.    Make a decision

Once you have reflected and gathered whatever information lies in your failure, you are now equipped with experience and the know how that you did not have before. Now you are ready to make a decision, plot a way forward. Where will you go from here? What will you do differently to ensure that you do not fail again? What lessons will you embrace from this experience?

3.    Get up and try again

When you are done reflecting, you have looked back and seen where you went wrong, you have made a decision to try a new method or new way to do what you want. Now you get up and try again. Not with the attitude of a failure but as a completely different person, one who now knows all the things you didn’t know before. And you tell yourself that failure is not an option.

None of us sitting here today can say we don’t know what it feels like to fail or to try something out but it doesn’t work out. We have all gone through that road and we know the feelings that come with not getting things right. But we should also realise that without falling as we did in the past, none of us would be the women that we are today. We have the strength and experience that we have today because we failed at something and learned from the experience.

Whatever failure you are facing today, embrace the process with a smile because you will not be the same person that you were before your storm. You will emerge refined and you will be a better person for having faced what you did. Failure is not final, it is only final when we give up and stop trying.

BEING FAR AWAY FROM HOME

I recently started a new job, recently meaning that I have only been in this post for 2 weeks. It was clear from the beginning that the position would involve a lot of travelling and me loving new scenery and exploring, it appeared that this was the perfect job for me. That has not changed, I still believe that I am in the right place, doing exactly what I want to do.

What I did miss to think through with the travelling ofcourse is the amount of time I would be spending away from home. In the 2 weeks that I have been in this job, 5 days have been spent away from home. Shu! I was not prepared for that and I know that in time I will get used to it but at the moment it is just so surreal. I take my hat off in respect to all the parents out there for who work far away from home. That is a major sacrifice and certainly not an easy decision to make.

I miss seeing my hubby at the end of the day and being curled up in his arms, I miss my little girl and her antics, the energy with which she can just get up to mischief and not listen when I say no. I miss going home to cook for them and then having the pleasure of seeing them going to bed full and happy. It is amazing how all the small things that seem tedious as you do them, turn out to be the very things that you miss when you are away from home.

Weird how we get home and start chatting on whatsapp, doing this and that yet when you are alone in a hotel room with all the time in the world, all you want is to be home and have someone to talk to, to laugh with and to vent to about your day. Somehow phone conversations, no matter how attached we are to our phones, are not the same as actually having someone there and talking to them.

It is going to take some getting used to but I love my job and wouldn't want to change anything about it. I just have to keep reminding myself of the reason why I am here and that I am ultimately doing this for my family.