::::::::::::::::::::: News flash :::::::::::::::::::::
Every year in January, I do a Reset to focus myself for the new year. It’s not goal-setting. It’s orientation. Where am I now? Is what I wanted lasted year the same as what I want now?
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Dateline: Doha
Population: 2,795 million
Distance from Cape Town: 11 647km
Arrival date: 28 November 2023
Temperature: 26 Deg Celcius (at midnight)
Actually quite sore
The other day, my daughter said she was so glad I was leaving a whole whack of journals behind when I die. For years, I used to ask my bestie from school to make sure she gets hold of my journals and destroys them the minute she receives word of my death. Eventually, I figured I’d be dead and beyond embarrassment, and I don’t really mind too much what the children find there. When I had to have an emergency operation during Covid, I told Jules that if I died, she could have the journals. (She asked.)
She recently told me that she found it comforting that the journals would be there for her after I’d died.
I said she’d find them incredibly boring. In the first decade of regular journaling, I whined about one problem and in the second decade I whined about a problem that arose from solving the first problem.
‘No joy at your amazing children?’ she wanted to know.
I’ve never worked out how to give expression to the strangeness of creating brand new, completely independent human life out of your body. Just the biology and physicality of it are strange enough – if your DNA is involved – without considering the parenting aspect of it, which is the truly mad part: being tasked with looking after little people when you’ve had zero training.
My children have a very young half-sibling. Jules said she’s tried to write about her sister but that she couldn’t, so she understood.
‘Also,’ she said in the next message, ‘it’s actually sore to love someone that much.’
If the gods of the ether allow, this mail will be coming to you at around the moment I see my two children again for the first time in eight months.
I’ll also see my mother on Saturday. We’ll be celebrating her 80th birthday.
I’ve spent a year feeling like not-a-daughter and not-a-mother.
I am ready to be hooked up to my context again.
Would you like to know what ten things I learned from my year of gallivanting?
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