How do you make God laugh?

Tell him your plan.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a ‘joke’ that was so close to the truth.

‘The Plan’ growing up was always to meet someone, get married, have a couple of kids and live happily ever after.

I stuck to this so closely that I stayed in two of my three major relationships way longer than I would have if I had perhaps decided to scrap this plan. The last one I spent more time worrying about him giving me the kids I wanted so badly, that I didn’t really give myself time to get to know him. Luckily for me, he gave me a second chance after I had effectively got my ‘head out of my arse’ (his favourite piece of advice!).

But as I reflect on my life I am grateful it didn’t happen the way I had planned.

If I had have had kids in my 20s, I would have probably resented them for taking away my freedom. I was still a very selfish person in my 20s, but I didn’t realise just how much until my 30s. Even though I put all of my energy into working towards the ‘dream’, if I had have achieved it then, I would have been miserable.

The men I was with in my 20s were also completely unsuitable – one was a dead beat druggo with no real zest for life and the other was a functioning alcoholic with a very 1950s attitude towards family and relationships. Either was not desirable to me once I realised who they were and would have been disastrous with a kid in the mix!

Then there is my current state of financial security. If I hadn’t decided to get my degree in my 20s I wouldn’t be where I am now. My degree gave me a very secure job that pays maternity leave. If I hadn’t decided to fill the time I had until I had kids with getting an education, I would not be in a very good place financially.

Ok, I’ll say it. I’d be poor. The kid would be poor. And we would probably both be miserable. I know I would have been worse off emotionally, because I have always stressed about money. I would not be good at starting my own business because the lack of security would do my head in. I know money isn’t everything, but when you don’t have it, life is a lot harder and your opportunities are very limited.

But now, because of the ‘I haven’t got kids yet, so what do I do with my life?’ conversation I had with myself, I am in a much better position to be financially independent.

Then, if the father of my child and I had have followed the ‘traditional’ way of doing things, we would also be miserable. As I said, I didn’t initially take the time to get to know who he really was. Now that I have, I understand more about why doing things the nuclear way would have destroyed us. I won’t go into too much detail here, but suffice it to say we have a much better relationship now that we see each other for exactly who we are, and by ‘we’ I mostly mean ‘me’. It never would have worked the other way for so many reasons that hindsight has shown me and we would have ended up another statistic in family breakdowns. Worse, I wouldn’t be with the man I openly call my soul mate, or to him, my Hoo-man.

It seems that at almost 40 years of age I have realised that the universe has a plan that we have little to no control over. Call it a soul contract if you will, but things have worked out better for me than I could ever have imagined with my own limited view of the possibilities.

I still have to have a ‘plan’, because that is how I work. Maybe it’s my anxiety or maybe it’s my ruling 4 with a soul urge of a 4 that desires order, predictability, routine and security, who knows?

What I do know is that I am learning to be flexible with my plans, allowing them to change as the circumstances change and not forcing anything if it isn’t ‘meant to happen’.

What I have learned is this – if it’s too hard and you have to force it, it isn’t meant to be. Recognising the difference between a growth obstacle and a ‘wrong way, go back’ sign is the next step!

Surrender your ‘plans’ to the universe and get on living the life you have.

How the world doesn’t cater to plus-size

I just finished Stephanie Yeboah’s book, Fattily Ever After, and it really opened my eyes to the world around me. I totally understood how she felt growing up dealing with her weight and attempts fit into the ‘ideal’.

I can’t say I’ve ever actually been ‘obese’, but I have certainly had the mentality she shared about my own body – hating the shape of my body, not looking after it and punishing it because it wasn’t ‘prefect’. Descending into fits of depression because I wasn’t as thin as I was told I should be and binge eating after periods of restrictive eating or as punishment for not going on the walk I ‘should’ have. Binge eating disorder (BED) is an actual thing apparently…

It might be the book or it could be my current situation being 9 months pregnant, but I’ve noticed just how much the world isn’t made for larger people. There is definitely an ideal body type, even where height is concerned, that the world is made for and I’m noticing more and more how restrictive and unrealistic this actually is! Especially since I am now noticing the different body types of men and women around me and how many of us actually fit the ‘ideal’ in reality.

Here is a list of some of the things I’ve noticed in the last few weeks:

1. Public toilets. Even with my somewhat small belly at what is considered full term, I often find myself having to squeeze into the stall. How anyone over a size 18 fits into them, I’ll never know! I know it’s more about space sometimes, but come on!

2. Fitting rooms. Yet another one with the same issue! While they are larger than toilets, there often isn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre in there, especially if you’re trying on a particularly troublesome bra!

3. Clothing. Why on earth we need a ‘curves’ or ‘plus-size’ section is beyond me! The clothes in there are often very plain and boring, as if fat (or pregnant) people don’t deserve to feel and look good or sexy. It must be our punishment for not being a size 8! One thing I will say is that the lingerie has gotten a little better in the last decade or so, but we still don’t get the pretty patterns or colours of the smaller bra sizes. And the matching underwear is often very unflattering. Why can’t I have a pretty blue g-string to go with my bra? Huh?? This might be a female-centric one, but I just don’t seem to see the male ‘plus size’ clothing being that different from the rest…

4. Carparks. Especially when someone parks super close next to you, I find myself even more aware of what my door edge or side mirror is doing.

I know this list isn’t in any way exhaustive, but it has given me a new appreciation of what people with bigger bodies go through on a daily basis. Again, it isn’t us that has to change, it’s the system. This pressure to look a certain way leads to a lot of mental and physical health problems that could be avoided by simply changing our expectations of what a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ should look like. The toilets thing could lead to an increase in ladies’ lines, but maybe prioritising this as important space would be a start to changing our perceptions of what is important in life.

It’s not how we look, it’s how we feel and what we do that matters.

Entering the Mother Phase

As some of you are aware, I’m about to pop at any minute with my first child. It has been such an overwhelming, beautiful, thankfully easy, amazing and awe inspiring experience. I have been most shocked at how little I’ve had to ‘do’ once the baby was transferred. Both the baby and my body know exactly what to do, and ‘I’ don’t have to do a thing.

I have just finished looking at some of the other blogs I read and came across one by Book of Eucalypt called, In between Maiden and Mother. I read it as if for the first time, but looking at the comments below it, it wasn’t my first time. Back then I was drawn to the idea of myself as Mother through both my as an educator and role as an Aunty.

Now though, I am realising that there is something very different in being an Aunty and/or care giver to other people’s children and your own.

I have no idea what to do once this kid comes out, except wipe its butt, wash it and it’s clothes, and hope I understand which cry means ‘food’ and which one ‘pain’.

I’m entering into a whole new life and it’s overwhelming and scary and wonderful all at the same time. I know am ready, at 38 and after a round of IVF I would hope to be, but I don’t feel ready. I don’t feel as if anything inside of ‘me’ has changed.

I don’t feel this massive energy shift from carefree young woman to responsible mother like I thought I would.

Maybe it’s early days, and maybe it will change in the coming months once the kid is here and I’m more physically responsible for it than eating healthy and getting appropriate amounts of rest and exercise (activities which I feel are inherently in conflict with each other).

Part of the blog mentioned the need to have some kind of ritual for women who choose not to have children to mark their own transition from maiden to mother, which is a concept I agree with. If I have already shifted into the mother energy, which is why I’m not noticing any major changes now, then when did it happen? What triggered it? Was there one trigger or many? Was I already in this energy years before choosing to do IVF, or was it the IVF process and decision to have child that triggered it? Could it be as simple as my career choice?

How can we be aware of these changing phases of our lives and mark them with an appropriate ritual or celebration like we do our 21st birthday or our first period?

Can we choose to step into the next phase or does it happen naturally?

Am I thinking too deeply about all of this again?

Probably. But perhaps the answer can be found within my own exploration of the archetypes and how they relate to my own experiences. By getting to know the goddesses associated with each page and forming a relationship with them, I can get to know my own self and life cycles better?

Still, this whole process of pregnancy has been so easy, I am grateful. I am also thinking it was the perfect timing and the right decision for me in the end.

Perhaps part of it being so ‘easy’ is because I’ve already embraced my mother phase, leaving the physical child a last stage in confirming the shift.

But again, what for women who choose not to have their own children? How can they become more aware of the shift and embrace it for themselves?

Something else to ponder as I prepare for my own final phase shifting experience.

Why the little things also count in changing rape-culture

I don’t really know how to start this, but I know the message I want to send, the story I want to tell.

In a world that focusses on the big loss of power a woman experiences when she is raped or sexually molested, I want to tell of the little times it happens. The small instances where we acquiesce to keep the peace. Where we accept the small violation to avoid the major one.

I went on a date a few years ago. It went well, and we talked for hours. At some point though, my intuition told me something wasn’t right.

Maybe it was the fact he was a bit more drunk than I would have liked on a first date, coupled with a declaration of past issues with alcohol. Maybe it was the sleaziness with which he ‘checked me out’. Maybe my gut was just telling me he wasn’t the one, I don’t know.

Soon, it was time to leave. I had decided I didn’t want to kiss him good night. A simple, friendly hug would suffice. I wasn’t feeling emotionally connected to him and had no inclination to make it physical.

I did however, feel it necessary to hug him goodbye. I’m a nice person, that’s what ‘nice’ people do. So, against my screaming intuition, I hugged him.

But he didn’t let me go.

He held me so tightly there was no polite way to end the hug.

Then he said ‘I am going to kiss you now.’

His version of the story is that he said ‘I want to kiss you now’ like this makes it better.

Regardless, there was no question there. No respectful request.

Coupled with the embrace I couldn’t get out of, I felt trapped. I felt like I had no choice.

But I did make a choice. I made a choice out of fear and self-preservation. It was better to let him kiss me than to refuse and risk him becoming violent. It was better to accept the kiss, hope he would be happy with that, than be dragged off into the bushes and have something worse happen.

Better the devil you know, right?

It was the worst kiss I have ever had. Not completely because of the fact I didn’t want to do it in the first place.

Needless to say, I cried all the way home, not really sure why I was crying. It was only a kiss! It wasn’t like he even tried to feel me up, why was I crying?

I struggled with the sadness, anger and sense of violation for quite a while after.

Many women have had much worse, and continue to have much worse, so why was I behaving this way? Why was I not all right? Why was I not ok? Why was I not happy it didn’t get worse for me?

It took me almost a week to actually accept what happened and to allow myself to be angry at him. To stop blaming myself for ‘letting’ it happen in the first place.

Now, I’ve been quite vocal about our need as women to speak up and say no. I am always telling younger females that they need to remember to be vocal about their desires and wishes and not let fear stop them.

Now, I’ve done the very thing I’m telling others not to. I felt like a hypocrite, which only added to my sense of shame and guilt.

It seems that 30+ years of being told to just be polite and don’t rock the boat or cause a scene or upset anyone is harder than a few strong words and a few months of healing can overcome.

My point is this. Behind everything, two fundamental truths should be understood.

1. Men need to actually ask a woman permission. It shouldn’t be implied or passed over. It should be spoken plainly, in a way that allows for a refusal, and consent received. Women need to feel safe enough to say no and men need to be strong enough to accept it. This sense of safety doesn’t come from within the woman, but the environment created by the man.
2. It doesn’t matter how you got there, trauma is trauma. One of the first things I heard during first year psychology (and I am aware one year of study does not a psychologist make) was that people report similar emotional responses to trauma regardless of what happened to them. I’m not saying what happened to me is as bad as what happened to others who were raped or worse. What I’m saying is the emotional responses are the same. This has been shown in study after study. People, myself especially, need to stop grading our emotional responses to personal trauma based on the severity of perceived causes. Trauma is trauma, and we need to acknowledge it equally.

I know it’s a case of ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ and ‘one cause at a time’, however, I just don’t want us to forget the little things. The times when we have given in to keep the peace. The times when we have given in to the request of a man (or another person) to save ourselves from a worse fate. The times where we have given up our own agency and bodily autonomy to please someone else, even that weird relative you don’t want to hug but keep getting told to because ‘it’s not nice’. These all add up. These instances make it hard to trust men in general. These small things are done by the ‘good men’ because they don’t know any better.

My hope is to educate both sides, but also make it clear to the ‘good men’ out there that they also have a responsibility to make sure the women in their lives are safe and free to be themselves and to articulate their desires.

This issue runs far deeper than most people, women included, can fathom at this point.