Blindsided

Ever watch Survivor? The person that gets voted out at tribal council talks to the camera afterwards and says "I never saw it coming, I was totally blindsided" and then they talk about feeling betrayed and mention things like wind being taken out of their sails etc. While you shake your head, tsk-tsk and pretend to understand.

I never understood, not really, till I had the same thing done to me. It's feels like you've been punched in the gut, so hard that it makes your eyes water and you can't actually breathe really well and then you think to yourself: how the HELL did I not see this coming?

"Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised" - F Duc de La Rochefoucauld

What if your vice is your friends? That would automatically mean that your virtues are based on the strengh of your friendships. So if you found out that one of your dearest (which doesn't mean longest) friendships was a farce? If the person on the other end of this relationship, because friendships ARE relationships, supposedly without all the shitty feelings that a love-relationship has, didn't trust you enough to tell you a secret. A secret that, if you'd known sooner, you could have prepared for. A secret that left you feeling like you've been made a fool of, slapped through the face, had your chest ripped open and had said friend shit on your lungs, just for good measure?

A secret, that if told on time, so to speak, could have saved you more or less a million embarrassing words, which were wrenched out of you, cause you needed to make your friend feel better, needed to make friend believe that "it" is not as bad as 'it' thinks it is. And then you share your dreams with it and it just sits there and licks it up like the dog that it is, because it has forgotten that it is also human and needs to feel wanted just like the rest of us.

This secret would've been better told about two weeks ago. Can I explain why? Yes I can. Do I know why this hurts so much? Yes. Do I want to blog it? No.

"To be once in doubt is once to be resol'd" - Shakespear, Othello

Once you start doubting your friends, the friendship crumbles. The very pillars of friendship are, after all, trust, honesty and love (the brotherly kind).

What I would like to do is point some facts out to those people who take trust and friendship for granted.

1. Don't let your friends make fools out of themselves so you can soothe your fucking fragile ego; the other person has feeling too and in my case as in many others, hearing my secrets helped to boost YOUR ego and left me feeling like a fool, no not a fool, a FUCKING idiot;
   
2. Don't let your friends feel that you used them and now that you've gotten out of life what it is you THINK that you want, you push them aside. Mark my words - K A R M A - the wheel turns and this will come back to bite your ass. Probably also when you least see it coming.
   
3. Don't expect an honest answer from them once you've hurt them.

The worst part of the whole experience was the way 'friend' thought by coming clean there is absolution to be had and that the 'well-wishes' that rolled from me automatically were sincere.

Who is the biggest fool? Me for the automatic "wishing well" or friend for actually believing it and not realising that whatever there was died in that instant, along with the tiniest little microscopic piece of my soul where our friendship used to shine.

Hope y'all have a fucking spectacular weekend - I'm sure mine will be. Ha-ha. Seriously - I wish I could drink, but that's life and he's (life) a bastard!!

I wish there was only one.....

In my case make that secrets.....

It's always when you least expect it

Last night was just like any other, rush home from work, feed little people, get them to have a bath, check homework, vegetate with them in front of the telly.

They were watching this really predictable soapie, really South African and really boring, when the story line took a turn for the worst. A baby died.

Once something like that happens to you for real, you no longer have sympathy when it happens to a character on the tube. On the contrary, it pisses you off. How can the writers of these silly stories decide to kill a child just to try to hook more viewers? How DARE they?

Anyone who's ever had the experience knows that it catches up with you when you least expect it. A glimpse of a smell that reminds you, the distant crying of another child that sounds, for a fraction of a second, like the one you know can't possibly be uttering it, a stupid storyline on a silly soapie, an unexpected line in a book... it's hardly ever the BIG things.

Sure the anniversaries are hard and sure you got those people that say "It's been so long, why does it still affect you?" or "Why didn't you just have another child?" or the infamous, thanks to my sister "Stop using that as an excuse to be depressed." Uhm, alrighty then, try talking to me again when (and I hope it NEVER does) happened to you.

I am here to answer these questions. It's never been so long, it is always there, just under the surface, ready to pounce on you when you don't see it coming. Grieving over a child never gets easier or less painful, you just learn to deal with it, little by little and hide it where no-one can find it. It is like a secret treasure that only you know where to find and ever so often, you need to take it out and unwrap it to make sure that it is still there and that it really happened.

As for having a 'replacement' child... that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Each person is unique, you love all your children equally, but for different reasons.

I have twins, so I am commonly faced with questions such as: do you love one more than the other? No, I love them in different ways. Explain?

The eldest is a softy, she goes wherever the wind blows her and tries to please everyone. As long as everyone around her is happy, so is she. As soon as the delicate balance of happiness shifts, her whole universe implodes. She needs to be protected and nurtured and that is how I love her. She smells like pink marshmallows and can sleep till noon if you let her. She is NOT a morning person and trying to have any sort of meaningfull conversation with her before she's had her tea is just plainly a waste of time. I can relate to her, what she is feeling and why, I can comfort her and reassure her. I have a little letter on my PC that she wrote to me it reads: Dear Mom, I love you and always will. Thank you for putting me on to this world. That is what she is like, no hesitation to show love and complete shock when the realisation strikes that sometimes, no matter how hard YOU love, it doesn't make the other person love you back. You can't EARN someones love by trying to love enough for both of you. She is learning this, very painfully and excrusiatingly slowly. Her morals and values are flexible and apapts and changes on a daily basis to accommodate and validate her circumstances. Like I said before - a people pleaser... I wish I could protect her from everyone that doesn't have the same capacity to love that she possesses, but most of all, I wish I could protect her from herself. Her name means "Bright One" and that she is! I love her just the way she is and wouldn't change her even if I could.

My youngest is a tough cookie, she takes ages to make up her mind, she needs to analyse everything and she trusts select few people. She smells like spiced cookies, cinnamon and cloves. If you have dared to hurt her, or for that matter, anyone that she cares about, it will take a giantic effort and hard work from you to get her to tolerate you, then 9 times out of 10 she still will not trust you. She couldn't really give a shit if you like her or not, unless you have an important role to fulfill in her life, such as a family member, a teacher or a best friend. If you get into her inner circle of trust, she is shattered if you violate the trust she has placed in you and no amount of consoling helps, she needs to work through it on her own, at her own pace and with her own rules. She is independent and lives up to the meaning of her name "Protector of Men". She fights her sister's battles along with her own and if I give her half a chance she'd fight mine too. She has, on many occasions, asked why her sister and I are so easy to trust people, can't we see behind the lies? Deep words for a 10 year old. I love her just the way she is and wouldn't change her even if I could.

The baby was also, in the short while that she was borrowed to me, full of her own quirks. She smelt like cookie dough :o) She hated the feel of any form of lotion or oil on her hands, she cringed when you violated that. She liked her bath to be hot, hot, hot. No lukewarm like other babies. She didn't cry, she meowed, like a kitten. She woke up, without fail, 5 minutes before her dad would come home from work (he worked irregular hours, so it wasn't a routine thing) and lie watching the door till he said hallo and then she'd go right back to sleep. I love (d) her the way she is (was) and wouldn't change her even if I could.

You'll notice that the last line of all the paragraphs are the same (more or less), because that is just the way that parents love. Are they interchangeable? No. This is why you can't replace one child with another.

This positive lesson that I learnt from doing this post: it might not mean anything to anyone out there, but it means a lot to me to have had the opportunity to immortalise my kids this way.

And even though it pisses me off that I had to loose one of them while millions of people out there abuse and throw away their kids, I am blessed for having any at all and for being allowed to be a spectator in the play that is their lives.

My Secret

I've never logged onto Postsecret without finding at least one postcard that I can relate to.

Grim Reaper Chapter (dunno, lost count)

I took the weekend off. Turned off the mobile, stayed indoors, except to leave the sanctuary of my little nest to watch the rugby. Worst game I've seen in all my life, seriously. I effectively wasted 80 minutes of my life watching South Africa get THRASHED. I should have known that the rugby was an omen for worse things to come....

The doctor decided that we should change my sleeping tablets, a bit of variety in my normal cocktail. I was given these new ones with strict instructions to try them out over a weekend, just in case. I am sure that I could've, quite calmly, killed my doc on Sunday morning at about 12:30... Obviously, the new ones don't work. After a struggle to catch some ZZZZ's till about 1am, I got pissed off and took the old ones on top of the new 'miracle' tab that did nothing. Saying it did nothing is not correct - it did everything, except waht it was supposed to do.

Keep in mind, July is mid winter for us lucky ones in SA. Instead of curling up under my blankets with my teeth chattering as they should be, I was sweating like a pig, felt like the middle of a tropical heatwave in my room. Other than that - I was awake. I hate being awake after 10:00, somehow it reminds me that the rest of the world is 'normal' and are falling asleep without any pills, unlike me.

Word to the wise, if you're cold and you need a warm-up, mail me and I'll send you the name of those stupid, useless pills.

Low and behold: 2:00 the Reaper called. He decided since HE (the Royal Highness of DickheadAsshole country, situated between the Magic Kingdom of Cunt and the Enchanted Fuckface County) couldn't get hold of me on my mobile, OBVIOUSLY something must be wrong.

Doesn't matter how 'worried' he was it doesn't justify breaking and entering!!!! I woke up to find him in my BEDROOM shaking me awake. He broke in through the kitchen windows. I feel pretty violated right now, not to mention the paranoia that I am not 'safe' in my own home anymore.

Two questions spring to mind immediatly: why does it worry him NOW, after the fact, if I'm ok? What makes him think that I was okay and safe all the nights he went out drinking and only came home at 04:00 in the morning? The mind boggles - again.

If things carry on like this I will have to get a restraining order. I don't want to take such extreme measures, because I don't want to be the cause of someone being stuck with a criminal offence against their name. I KNOW even if I get the order, it will mean nothing, he will violate it and then if I have him arrested he will have a criminal record.

Where do you draw the line between not fucking up someone else's life and stopping them from fucking up yours?