Positively positive: the buck stops here

There are many different theories floating around out there about the meaning of life, why we are here, what the hell forty-two has to do with any of it, et cetera.

Whatever your personal or religious beliefs, whether you are a by-the-book religious type, a New Age spiritual sort, a hedonistic atheist or anything inbetween, I think the one thing we cannot possibly argue with is that life is hard. It sucks sometimes. Of course, then sometimes it doesn’t, but there’s always that moment when you think, “really? Does it really have to be this stupidly hard?”

Perhaps it would be better to think of life as a great video game, filled with tough challenges and levels. Only you don’t get given a bazooka to blow up anybody that irritates you and sadly, you only have one life.

Whether you live in a shack or a mansion, you will be faced with challenges and burdens. No-one has the right to say that their life is harder than the next person’s. It is also stupidly pointless to play the blame game. We could all blame our parents for traumatising us beyond repair by making us listen to Billy Ray Cyrus singing “Achy Breaky Heart” on repeat in the car all the time. All the time!

But this is not about me. Whatever gave you that silly idea?

If someone did something to hurt you in the past, you can’t carry on living your life until you have truly forgiven that person. Some things can’t be changed. Sometimes we have to accept a reality that we don’t like.

If you live with any bitterness or hatred in your heart for any person, situation or event, it begins to define who you are, and the negativity slowly seeps through into every aspect of your life, your being and your attitude.

We may not be able to change what has happened in the past, but we can change how we react to it. It is not an easy process, and may take years to successfully achieve.

There will always be negative people in the world out there. You will come into contact with them, you will work with them, you may even have the misfortune of living with them.

Negativity is a chain reaction. Let’s say this morning you woke up and found that your neighbour (who found out a week ago that his wife was cheating on him with her best friend’s husband) smashed your car’s windscreen and put a sizeable dent in the bonnet with the half-brick he threw over your fence to shut your dog up in the wee hours of the morning. You get into a screaming match with him, he tells you he’s not paying for the damage and you go to work fuming.

During the course of your day, you get a quote for the damage to your car, which is astronomical. You snap on the phone to your colleagues, you bite the cashier’s head off at the bank because the queue was long, there was a big sweaty fat guy who had just eaten what smelled like a steak and kidney pie breathing down your neck while you were in said queue and your lunch break was over half an hour ago. Then, when you get home, you pick on your kids because they haven’t done their homework and get into a fight with your spouse because he’s not sympathetic enough when you start bitching about what a crap day you had.

All those people who you acted negatively towards during the course of the day, will in turn feel very wronged and injured and will proceed to take it out on the people whose paths cross theirs. Then those people will take it out on other people. And lo and behold, you have just spread a tsunami of low-grade negativity over the whole city in just one day. Happy now? Who can you blame it on? The neighbour? The neighbour’s wife?

The wave can stop with you. Only you can decide not to pass on the negativity to others by calming down, looking at the problem objectively and deciding that you are not going to allow it to turn your day into something brown and smelly.

You can do it – put a smile on that face and kill ‘em with kindness, charm and wit… and if you are having a rough day, just remind yourself that it takes thirty-six muscles to frown and none whatsoever to think to yourself “you’ll be dead from a heart attack in two years’ time, asshole”.

Restless nights

It has been my second night straight without any sleep and about two or three weeks since I knew a proper night’s slumber. Yes, I have been bitten by the fiendish insomnia bug. The bags under my eyes are now large enough to accommodate all of Mariah Carey’s luggage, and I have changed my Facebook picture to that of a rather attractive-looking donkey. Yes, sleep is a fickle thing indeed.

The romantic in me suggests that during these restless nights I should be true to the writer’s stereotype and sit up until the wee hours of the morning, a double scotch in hand, cat on my shoulder and a shotgun on my lap, hacking away feverishly at the keys, but I don’t drink, the cat can be homicidally averse to being awoken from his carefree night-time slumber and I am sadly lacking in the shotgun department.

It is also challenging to be properly eccentric when you share a house with non-writers. The desire to sit up nights and slump into the horizontal position during the day may oft be looked at askance by the people and children in the house who expect to be fed at regular intervals during the day. Their clothes stand in ridiculously frequent need of washing, hanging and ironing, their dirty dishes pile up in the sink begging to be washed. This is the pitiful impasse of the female writer who is reasonably cognisant that her offspring should preferably not be removed by Social Services.

It is thus that I remain in bed all night, trying hour after dolorous, humdrum hour to find new joints to crack in a reasonably loud and satisfying manner, a myriad of inconsequential and mediocre thoughts stampeding inconsiderately through my echoing cranium. And when the birds begin their pre-dawn song and the call to morning prayer sounds, I may perchance thereafter fall into an inert, dreamless unconsciousness, only to awaken abruptly as the morning’s clamour begins.

To be a truly great writer, one should preferably be a convicted criminal and one should die an honourable writer's death - suicide, syphilis or consumption. I am working myself up towards all of these lofty goals, but in the interim I hope to get some sleep first.

Weak bladders, hot tempers and servitude

Sometimes when you are married and living in domestic bliss you get these moments where you could just drop what you are holding and move to another country. Change your name. Dye your hair. The little things that have been grinding you down build up to a point where you feel one day, “fuck it, this is not what I signed up for”. At least if I murdered all of them I would probably be out in five years. This is South Africa.

Now let me do the cliché thing and tell you that I love my husband. I certainly love my daughter more than anything else in life. And Lord, shoot me for bothering, but I love my step-daughter too. We have a fairly peaceful, happy home, all things considered.

Then WHY do they all make me so stressed I can feel my hair greying when they are at home? Why do I feel my boobs begin to sag after one hour around them? Why do I feel I can never win?

And no, it’s not that time of the month. I checked.

Every day I calmly tell myself that today I am going to be as cool as a cucumber. I’m going to be happy and walk around with a big smile. No matter what any of them say to me, I will not react negatively. I am a fucking island. It usually lasts five minutes.

Yesterday it all started when I went to pick up my daughter from school. Aayah is a total dreamer. She got into trouble previously because she forgets to go to the toilet at break and then asks to go during class. Then she will muck around in the bathroom, dreaming and singing to herself for perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes. Eventually when she gets back to class she has missed the whole lesson and the teacher and class get disrupted on her account.

So I did what any good mother would do - I threatened her on pain of… well, pain, that if she didn’t stop it there would be Consequences. And all was well in the land of Aayah for a while.

However, this afternoon, as I arrived to collect her, she was on her way back from the bathroom and the teacher informed me that she had again been going to the toilet during class constantly. I gave her a lecture in the car and we headed off to the library. As soon as we got there she started performing for the toilet again – even though she had just gone about ten minutes before. So she had to go to the public library toilet which smells of urine and in which there is no toilet tissue. OK. So now I’m at boiling point. After the library we went straight to Pick n’ Pay to buy bread.

“Mummy, I need the toilet again. I need it really badly.”

Wow. Add to that the everyday homework drama where half an hour of homework is transformed into three hours of telling her every five minutes to concentrate on her work and stop dreaming, punctuated by about ten trips to the toilet, and we have a mother that is ready to jump off a handy bridge.

So I ask myself: does she really have some kind of a problem with her bladder or is this kid just winding me up?

Then I come to the realisation that I am the bad one here. I just have no patience. Is there some kind of magical elixir, a pill perhaps, that I can swallow? “Patience in 5 minutes – guaranteed!” Wouldn’t that be deliciously easy…

Kids are just kids, and I need to admit that I have issues with anger.

The same hot temper gets fired up when my husband gets home. Everything he says to me, I want to jump down his throat for, and make him see that he is wrong and I am right. When I look at my own behaviour afterwards I see a fishwife staring me in the face.

I’m not saying they don’t all have their faults. But my need for control overpowers everyone, even the person I am inside. It’s as if I need everything to be so perfect it could be straight out of a magazine. I suppose that my past has left me with such strong feelings of helplessness that now I want to exert my will and authority over everyone to make sure I am never treated badly again. I expect Aayah to be perfect because I want her to grow up not making the mistakes I made.

Every night after I have put Aayah to bed I regret the harsh words I have spoken to her. I ask myself: today did I build my child up or did I break her down? Did I shatter her self-confidence? Did my kind words, hugs and kisses outweigh my shouts and criticisms? Just about every night I fall lower in my estimation as a good parent.

Today it has been a full hour since she came home from school and I have not yet shouted. I have calmly and patiently asked her to do her work quickly, promising to read her a story if she finishes before 5pm.

Wish me luck.