Is motherhood really so rewarding?

I was thinking last night about what is it really that feels so good about being a parent. That makes me say over and over again how rewarding the journey has been and how amazing motherhood is.

I mean kids just finish all your money, and everything that usually requires a lot of spending usually involves them. From my own personal experience a lot of consideration had to be taken with my son in mind of where I would live, when I should purchase a car,  how much I'm spending on groceries, how often I buy clothes etc etc. Of course one can argue that some of the decisions I made I could have lived without and I'm grateful that I had the luxury of making them but you get my point, having a child impacts your finances quite dramatically. Well, it's impacted mine anyway because I find myself spending more money on him than I do myself. I could literally walk into a store to get myself new clothes and leave that store with one item (if any) for me and a bag full of clothes for my kid. I don't know how it happens but it happens all the time. My mom tells me it's normal, she was the same way with me and my brother. So I'll pretty much go broke for him and I won't even be upset.

So I wondered, is buying stuff for my son what makes motherhood so amazing? And as much as I enjoy it, that really isn't quite it.

I mean my whole life has pretty much revolved around him since he was born. My mom told me when he was born that for the first two years of his life I must just forget about going out. And she was mostly right, if I didn't have someone helping me with him this would be 100% true but for me it's 80% true because he has a nanny so every now and again I do get to interact with adults outside of work hours LOL *he's two now but I don't see this changing anytime soon*

So it dawned on me tonight as I lay in bed thinking over and over about the moment my son grabbed his book and started reading, his usual baby talk at first, then he said "two boots" which he already knew how to say but tonight he flipped the page and said "Ti burds" (which is three birds). And my heart was just beaming with pride and I clapped so hard for him, and he smiled and clapped with me. As I was playing this moment over and over in my head I realised that it was this that made motherhood so amazing. That it doesn't take much to make me happy anymore, the smallest thing he accomplishes will leave me smiling for days. Everytime he learns a new word or demonstrates understanding when I'm talking to him just fills me with this...JOY!

And don't get me wrong, raising  a child is definitely not chocolates and rainbows, it's really challenging, even more so as a single mother I think. And I mean single in that I'm not married but me and his father are still together, although we see him often, we don't live with him. If we're friends on Facebook you'll see how often I share about not having another child soon or ever again because it's hard and also because I don't realistically think I can afford to have another child by my standards of affording. I know we are different and someone can look at me and think I'm being silly and I could because all kids need is love blah blah But that's a topic for another day.

The point I'm trying to make though, without oversimplifying it, is that those happy moments really far outweigh the temper tantrums and general chaos caused by toddlers because in the next five minutes the tantrum would have been forgotten as we hug and kiss and make up but the joy of the good times will resonate with me for a very long time.

So the answer is yes, it really is amazing and more and there's nothing like it! And if I had a do-over I'd do it again, I'd still choose him.

Captain Adorable :-)

Growing babies in your tummy: what nobody tells you.

I've decided to chronicle the last few weeks of my pregnancy (yes, I'm gonna be a mommy),  the only way I know how, by blogging about it. I'm in my 31st week now but most people don't know that I'm with child unless I've specifically told them. Mainly because I haven't Facebooked about it Lol but also because I generally don't look pregnant. Two weeks ago I went to the emergency room coz I had flu (being pregnant will put the fear of death in you, I read on Google that if you're pregnant flu can easily turn into pneumonia & you can die) & the doctor asked me when I HAD my baby :-/ So if I had wanted to keep this a secret from my mom I could have easily done so. Twelve years ago when we were much younger my cousin was in a similar position,  she was pregnant but nobody could tell until she went into labour & gave birth to who is now my favourite little boy in the world. Of course this served her purpose because she was actually trying to hide it coz she was scared of her parents :)

Anyway I get rather upset that I have to remind people that I have a tummy dweller who doesn't drink alcohol,  will not tolerate second hand smoke, stand for long periods of time, enjoys to pee, who hurts his mommy's back if sitting on uncomfortable church chairs for more than two hours & generally just needs to lie down alot. By the way I'm typing this on my phone at 4am coz I've been up since 3am coz "we" had to pee and now we're hungry so we can't go back to sleep. I just feel like nobody tells you about a whole bunch of stuff about being pregnant. It's always highly romanticised and pretty in their accounts...

Like nobody tells you that you pee yourself everytime you sneeze or cough (I was like what part of the game is this?! Of course my friends find this hilarious,  I don't.) And on the subject of pee, man is there alot of peeing involved. I could pee now, go back to bed and 10 minutes later I need to pee again!!! And do you know why this happens? Because your bladder will be pressing you like you just drank 10 litres of water and you will rush to the toilet and all that comes out is a small drop in the proverbial ocean. And your bladder will continue to empty itself in this itty little bitty manner until it's empty (if it's ever empty). And all this happens because the cute tummy dweller growing inside you is pressing on your bladder.

And then there's the hunger that will strike at odd hours of the morning & you can try to ignore it coz you realise how silly it is waking up at 4am to eat but good luck getting any sleep after that. Your stomach will growl like you haven't eaten in days. The cuteness will be awake also at this time in your tummy and they will kick you and make you feel so guilty for not getting up right away to make a sandwich. I have been guilt tripped many atime in this here pregnancy into making sandwiches in the middle of the night. When I went for my checkup a few weeks ago and my doctor said I'm not gaining any weight I told him how that is impossible coz I'm hungry ALOT which means I eat ALOT.

*wait, I need to pee again*

Oh and say goodbye to comfortable sleeping positions coz not many exist, at  the moment for me I actually have ZERO. A few weeks ago I had like one, I slept on my left side but now I can't do that either coz the cuteness will move around so much in my tummy I'm pretty sure I must be squashing him. So I just generally just sleep facing up. And pillows are like my best friends, I usually have one stuck between my legs (I don't know why that's comfortable but it is) and another one propping up my tummy on the side I'm trying to face and one supporting my back *sigh*. I've also recently found putting one under my legs feels pretty nice as well :)

And when the little bundle of joy decides that we have to sleep, little if nothing will stop us, and apparently that time is NOW ;) So goodni...............................................

The definition of beautiful

I was reading an article this morning that spoke about the newly crowned Miss America and all the debate that was surrounding her winning the crowd as she is Indian-America. The author of this article pointed out how this woman would have never actually won a Miss India beauty contest in India because she wasn't what was deemed to be a beautiful Indian woman, which is apparently someone who is light-skinned first & foremost. The reason this article interested me was because I wasn't aware that being light-skinned was also an issue in other communities. According to this article this occurred in the Indian community as a result of an ancient divide that separated darker skinned Indians and 'created' lighter skinned Indians when Aryans invaded India way back then. You might recall the Aryan race was what Hitler deemed to be the Master Race: blonde hair, blue eyes and obviously white. 

Most black women are aware of the "Yellow-bone" craze that's currently dominating social networks, that is, the obsession with light-skinned women being the definition of beauty. It's just one of those things that has been brainwashed into our brains that a light skin equates to beauty, like undoubtedly. If you are fair, you are pretty, no questions asked. You would perhaps also hear things along the lines of: Oh, she's only pretty because she has a light complexion. Or even worse, some people would even go as far as saying to someone who isn't fair: Oh you're pretty for a dark-skinned girl. <insert shock, horror, gasp> No wonder then that the skin-lightening cream industry is booming...I'm sure, I don't know the statistics but by the amount of black ladies you see with damaged/burned skin or by women you know that became a lighter complexion overnight using lightening creams I would imagine it is.

It seems to me like an awful lot has been invested into making other ethnic groups believe that looking more...white basically is the ideal measure of beauty. The article I spoke about above mentioned how the "most beautiful woman in the world" & and a former Miss India, Aishwarya Rai, looks anything but Indian with "barely-olive skin, brown hair and green eyes." In the black community so many famous black women have also undergone skin-lightening procedures, have weaves (I mean the weave industry has taken black communities by storm), or have undergone facial reconstruction surgeries to make them look less like themselves basically. 

I guess we can blame the media for generally making us believe that "whiteness" is the beauty ideal to aspire to or maybe we can blame colonization for the many years of brainwashing into making us think that "white" is superior, "white" is better, "white" is nearer to perfection than you'll ever be. White is what you need to be to be beautiful. So the lighter your skin, the straighter and longer your hair, the less you look like your ethnic self the more beautiful you are. It's a sad reality and actually a really difficult topic to navigate because there is just so much that is wrong with this. 

I mean, it's not like we have a shortage of BEAUTIFUL dark-skinned women in the world, so what will it take to change this mindset? When will the definition of beautiful incorporate all colours of the spectrum? In this lifetime maybe? Yes?! No?!

Tears dry on their own.

We meet so many people along the way, some we think we are going to know forever and some you realise from the on-set that you're not gonna know them for very long.  With others you can misjudge the depth of your relationship and you could end being closer to them than you thought.  But generally I think with romantic relationships most of us don't generally assume the worst. You hope for the best, wonder if they are the one you're gonna be with forever, if you believe in that sorta thing.  So when things don't turn out as planned or hoped you can feel so cheated of the time you feel you wasted on that person and you count all the sacrifices you made and you resent them.
Breakups are generally always bad, someone always walks away from a breakup feeling disgruntled.  Some breakups can be exceptionally bad and it can take a while to put the proverbial pieces back together. Some people can obviously bounce right back and move on while for others it can be a more lengthy process that involves a lot of resentment and unhappiness. They still feel wronged by that person and have a hard time letting it go.

There is no formula to "get over it". We all have our own way of dealing with things but I think more than anything you need to forgive.

A few years ago I ended a relationship on not so very good terms. I was angry, I was hurt and I really thought I hated this guy. I continued to feel like this for a very long time. He tried on numerous occasions to make peace with me but I rejected him over and over again because even the thought of breathing the same air as him vexed me beyond words. The thought of him made my insides boil...well you get the picture. And I really thought I would feel like this forever. But the truth is, I didn't.  I don't know if it happened overnight or if it was a gradual buildup somewhere in my heart or psyche that just told me to forgive him.

I can honestly say that it took me like three years to get to this point, and, there was something so liberating about this forgiveness that made me smile. That made my heart smile. That I no longer wished he would get hit by a bus, multiple times Lol
He reminded me a few times how we were once friends & he didn't believe that we couldn't at least get back to that.  Although this idea seemed laughable at the time, after I forgave him I was able to see him as a human being again that makes mistakes like I do.  And more than anything, there is something so liberating about not living in the past. You give your heart more room to give other people more love once the shackles of that hate and resentment are lifted.

Forgiveness is a truly beautiful thing. You should consider it.

This is why you can't get your ex to fall in love with you again

So someone commented on a blog post I wrote a while ago and suggested I watch their videoblog on how to get my ex back. They wrote this in response to the blog post titled "When I got dumped". I thought it was peculiar that they would suggest that & I read that blog post again to see if somewhere it sounded like I wanted to get back together with my ex. But I guess generally if someone you love you stops loving you, you would resolve to try and get them back?!

When the person you love stops loving you, your first instinct is to think that something is wrong with you, that you must have done something for this to happen. Because you want to rationalize it in your brain, have physical evidence of what it was that flipped their switch, to go from loving you one minute & thinking they want to spend the rest of their life with you to you being a stranger to them, and possibly even being repelled by you. You wonder if maybe you are not pretty enough, smart enough for them, aren't funny enough, or maybe you're just a boring person. And your mind keeps  going over all the possible reasons of why this person has stopped loving you. You just don't understand. And I guess some of us will even actively try to get them back, try to win them over again, try to get them to remember maybe that they love you.

But the honest truth is, there's probably little you can do to convince someone to love you again after they just don't anymore. Because love is there, until it's not. And you will understand this once you stop loving someone who still loved you, once YOU BREAK SOMEONE ELSE'S heart. It will all suddenly make sense because you will understand how little the process had to do with you. That you could have rocked up the next day looking like Halle Berry and they still wouldn't love you because the switch went off, just like it went off with you. Like you know that if that ex boyfriend of yours came back a billionaire that looked like Terrence J, you would still tell them that you just don't love them anymore because you just don't. People really do just outgrow each other at times. Or there will just be this one thing that you can't put your finger on of why this person just isn't the one. In any case, love isn't always rational or reasonable now is it?!

And as much as it will suck having to break someone else's heart, you will feel so liberated when you finally understand what it was that your ex went through when they left you. When you get that physical evidence that your mind needed to rationalize everything. It can have everything to do with you or absolutely nothing to do with you.

That's not to say that people don't get back together, of course they do. Some people are even stuck in a pattern of break-ups and make-ups but those people generally both still loved each other, I would think. 

If someone has stopped loving you, just let them go. Someone else WILL love you again. If you've broken someone else's heart you will know that guilt you feel when you speak to this person and they want to get back together & you have nothing new to tell them except that you don't want to be with them. You will try to be nice about it, and say it in the kindest of words of why you don't want them. You might even lie because you are so wrecked with guilt at how you ruined someone else's life. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if you would want someone to put you through that?! 

Envy: The art of counting another person's blessings instead of your own

It's a rather difficult thing to do at times, not to envy someone else for what they've got. Because you look at them and they seem to really have it together you know, probably have the next to perfect life that you dream about and you wonder why it's not happening for you. You think to yourself how they have this perfect boyfriend or husband who buys them a Mercedes for their birthday and buys them flowers every other day and tells them they look cute all the time and...they generally just look like they have their shit together. But the operative word here is "LOOK"...because you're on the outside looking in, you don't get to see the behind-the-scenes of Instagram and Facebook pictures, nobody twitpics those. Nobody posts about the real deal that goes into making relationships work or marriages work. And I'm not talking about the generic answers here of how to snag a man, I mean the real things like forgiveness, compromise and how sometimes the person you love can hurt you in ways you couldn't imagine. 

Me and my mom have gotten to that age in our relationship where we talk about pretty much everything and every now and again she will remind me that "Ungabo yihhalela into yomuntu" which roughly translates to "Don't yearn for what another person has..." We are usually discussing relationships though when this crops up. It's happened more times than I can mention when a couple who seemed near perfect suddenly loses it all and we're shocked because from the outside everything looked like heaven. So I have always understood it as her reminding me to be present in my own life and appreciate the good things about it, always. You will always fall short if you compare yourself or situation to another person. I'm not saying it's not good to aspire to the goodness you see in others but you must always remember that just as much as you are envying someone else, someone else is envying you and wishing they had what you had. So why count the blessings of another person instead of your own? It's an insult to yourself actually....

Another important thing I have learned is that we are all on different journeys in this life. I would hate to think there is some template we should follow for our lives. How boring would that be?! 

A simple illustration of this always came up with my own mother. I got an opportunity to study abroad for six months and I would be complaining to my mom on the phone at times how I desperately wanted to come home and she would laugh at me because she would remind me how so many people wished they were me, in Switzerland, doing what I do. And that would always put things in perspective for me. Perspective is everything. 

I mean, it's not a competition. If you make it one, you will see yourself as losing when good things happen to other people and that will lead to envy and hate etc. You will be incapable of being happy for that person. Don't get me wrong, it's good to want good things for yourself and see qualities in other people that you aspire to, but be careful not to compare and contrast and sink yourself into a deep depression in the process. 

And also, don't be this guy LOL 

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.

So this blog post was inspired by something that recently happened to a friend of mine. An ex girlfriend of her current boyfriend sent her an email saying she must be careful of her man coz he was going to unleash a world of hurt onto her. It really got me thinking about what would possess someone to do such a thing. How would what they did not be interpreted as just someone who is bitter,trying to cause trouble?! What I'm struggling with, more than anything, is that well, why would they feel the need to take it upon themselves to caution someone, a stranger, to not date somebody? I mean, from every angle I look at it, I don't get it. We've all had our fair share of exes that we think were completely crazy coz of the messed up things they did or because they turned out to be horrible human beings but I have never felt the need to caution who ever dates them next that hey, that man is crazy, he is a liar and he is an all-round bad person. Does this make me a bad person? That I don't care about a stranger?

Firstly, my reasoning is that it's possible that I brought out the crazy in that person, lawd knows there are people out there that have brought out not such good things out of me, just like some people are capable of bringing out the best in me. Another thing is that, maybe, just maybe that person has changed, maybe they found Jesus after realizing it's not right to mess up other kids lives. So who am I to deny that person another chance at being happy? Especially if nobody asked me. Even if that persons girlfriend did ask me, I doubt I would be like they suck, stay away from them, just because I want nothing to do with them. 
So why do some people feel the need to perform this public service? What are they hoping to achieve? That that person wises up and takes their advice and writes them a thank you letter? What exactly?!

Every relationship between two people is unique, unique in its badness and unique in its goodness. No one can presume to understand a couples brand of insanity, as hard as you might try looking from the outside. You can judge, point fingers, give unsolicited or solicited advice but you can never predict the outcome unless you are in it. How many times have you given a friend advice on their relationship and watched them do the exact opposite?! Or say things like how you would never stand for what is happening in their relationship yet your friend is still there, in it, because frankly you don't know what their heart and mind signed up for when they started dating that person. So who on earth would listen to a strangers UNSOLICITED advice?!

I don't know, maybe I'm the crazy person, but I don't imagine anything good can come out of it without you looking like a crazy, bitter ex who can't get over stuff. Even if you are right about all the things you say, my honest advice is save it, coz nobody cares.