Mozambique, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, Namibia, Burkina Faso, Zambia, and several other African countries were well represented. Three were from the USA. One was from the UK and one was from Canada.
We were a collection of pastors and counselors, writers, journalists, and artists. Two were television journalists who covered little known wars. I was aware of at least 1 engineer.
I heard people speaking English, Portuguese, Xhosa, and several languages I could not identify.
While I have no way of knowing anyone’s net worth it became clear from multiple conversations that some lived on very very little while others have all they’ll ever need.
Several people among us had buried their children, faced wars, famine and experienced violence first hand.
Some had faced forced removals and had to resettle in areas unknown. At least 2 had endured brutal torture.
For 10 days we lived together, shared meals, and talked. We learned. We laughed. We listened. Some cried.
Over the days it became clear that happiness and peace and goodwill all come from within and defy purchase. We learned, some for the first time and some again, that it’s not where someone lives that delivers contentment, but always how.
I’m in South Africa for a brief visit and I’m enjoying your gorgeous country.
Resilience and friendliness and hope within the hearts of the people I’ve met apparently far exceeds the surrounding community and national stressors.
I’m frequently reminded in casual conversations that America — I live in the USA — is widely idealized by South Africans. “North America” includes the USA, Mexico, and Canada.
Load-shedding* is obviously a challenge to all South Africans.
I’m amazed at how people appear to adjust to it, embrace it, arrange their lives and programmes around it and simply go on.
Given such a necessity in the USA there’d be outrage and people would take to the streets and refuse to accommodate the inconvenience.
They’d feel picked on and singled and express it without reserve.
The USA is generally highly efficient. Things work. Attention is usually somewhat immediate when things don’t — but, we are far from a perfect nation.
Selfishness abounds.
Entitlement persists.
Political turmoil is rampant and is often hate driven.
Crime is a significant problem and many inner city areas are veritable war zones.
Yes, you’ll hear of South African immigrants in the USA who brag about leaving their houses unlocked and have no home security system and so forth, but, they have joined the privileged.
Lots of areas of our country are deeply troubled and we could do with a lot more of your friendly and humble attitude all round.
* Power (electrical) shedding — electricity shuts down for up to 4 hours a day in stages across the nation. There’s an app that informs the population when power will be off and reconnected in your area. This means traffic lights are off and some malls and banks have to shut downSome establishments have installed generators and so they are unaffected by load shedding.
Caring for another, a neighbor, a friend, during an illness or while grieving a loss is an art.
Caring too much — overdoing caring — damages both the recipient of the “care” and he or she who offers it.
Caring offhandedly or indifferently is no care at all.
Then, it’s a tricky business trying to care for one who needs no care or thinks he or she needs no care.
Striking a balance of caring for another without compromising oneself is a delicate art form.
But, it’s possible.
It can be learned and practiced and perfected. Then, when errors are made, the errors can teach valuable lessons so they are unlikely to be repeated.
Among the first errors is the belief that caring for another is easy, requires little or no thought, training, or preparation. Another is agreeing or deciding too quickly.
Long term care for another, costs. It’s an enormous investment of time and love and commitment requiring that other facets of the carer’s life will require reassessment. Long term care for one will mean others in the carer’s broader circle of relationships will also require readjustments.
Self-care comes first or the “care” offered will probably begin well but spiral down to acts of begrudged favors and feel both for the carer and recipient like a really bad marriage.
Anger, hatred, the desire for revenge, are strong emotions but are often the just and appropriate feelings of many who have been wronged.
Just, and appropriate, as they may well be, they are destructive to the host.
A person who enduringly hosts such emotions without a means to address them will be stewed in bitterness and even ill health. No matter how sadly and well earned, these emotions will, bit by bitter bit, destroy the host.
If you are craving revenge for yourself or others, if hatred wells within you, if you have outbursts of rage where the intensity of your rage blinds you and distances you from reason, please, seek counseling.
Seek a wise guide to lead you out of your multiple traps. A wise counselor will be able to assist you to tabulate your grievances, asses your degree (if any) of responsibility for the feelings you face, and devise with you a plan to negotiate your way to a free, or at least a free-er, future,
No one benefits when continuing to live under the demands of revenge, hatred and anger, all of which will prove to be rather exacting and demanding and unrelenting task masters.
Say “please” and “thank you” and “well done” and “nice to see you” and look people in the eyes when you say these golden words. Make this a practice and you’ll be a one-in-a-million kind of person and others will consider you extraordinary. Not only that, your lens with which you see the world will shift to see beauty and kindness where you previously may have missed or ignored it.
Evaluate and solidify your core values and then perhaps decide you will return to no one evil for evil or unkindness for unkindness. Rather you will respond to selfishness and deceit and indifference with engagement and generosity and offer goodness. This will make you extraordinary and enhance your days and bring you unadulterated and lasting peace.
Decide who and what you are —- this will take extended alone time and a pencil and a few sheets of lined paper — and then slowly begin to declare who and what you are by living out your values. This act — always unfinished — will make you extraordinaryily self-assured and you will become a rock of confidence both to yourself and those seeking stability and guidance.
I enjoy moments when life places me with people of diverse cultures. I love it when individuals are sufficiently comfortable to discuss the power that culture has in shaping our lives and our perceptions.
Mary is amazed that Anvi met her husband for the first time at their wedding. Mary is further surprised that Anvi says she is happily married. Anvi tells Mary she could never have been brave enough to pursue a “love marriage.” Anvi says her parents, whom she does trust, know her better than she knows herself and therefore knew what kind of man she would want to marry.
John is amazed to hear that I’m willing to respect women leaders. John is even more surprised to hear I raised two babies without women to change their nappies (diapers). He tells me I insulted the men of his culture by doing “women’s work.”
Sunmi is confused at hearing June is unwilling to give up her career to take care of her aging mother-in-law. She expresses that such a choice in her culture would be considered unusual.
A child, to the annoyance of some of the adults, interrupte his mother while his mother is talking. The mother considers it perfectly “normal” for a child to exhibit such behavior and is unaware that a child interrupting an adult in many cultures is considered gross disrespect.
Do your part to make the mountains you face become molehills
One day at a time, the Twelve Step mantra is really helpful. Not everything you face has to be faced today.
Learning to “hold onto yourself” is a skill really worth developing and will reap huge benefits.
Gaining some distance to improve perspective is always helpful.
Listen more than you speak. When you listen for what people are really saying rather than what you hope they are saying. Our hopes can distort what others are trying to tell us.
How people treat any one person is how they can treat everyone. Watch out for those who treat others poorly. You may be, you probably are, next in line.
We see the world and others not as the world is and as others are but as we are. The lens you use is always in your pocket.
The best thing you can do for the people you most love is to take care of yourself. If you do not, no one else will.
Watch how people behave rather than listen to what they say. If the two don’t seem to match each other it is a signal that you ought to be aware.
Plan tough meetings in great detail. Flying by the seat of your pants will result in others taking you to the cleaners.
With no wish to “rain on anyone’s parade” – an American phrase I found rather fascinating when I landed in this great country three decades ago – I do want to write a few things about mothers and motherhood in the wake of Mother’s Day weekend which is so correctly and widely celebrated.
Please join me in acknowledging:
Mothers who try to hold families together “for the children” whether you or I agree with such a necessity or not. Every family and every family issue is unique. When women “stay for the children” the women deserves respect and support for their choices.
Mothers who love with an illogical and irrational love and appear to be supporting or enabling an addiction or the poor choices of a son or daughter – or a spouse. Women have their reasons. Judgement and ridicule from outsiders are painful and unhelpful.
Mothers (and fathers) who have buried a child and for whom the wounds of grief are brutally fresh and, it seems, it will always be as if the death occurred this very morning.
Women who’d give anything to have or have had a fruitful womb but now must observe with dignified reserve those who shower them with platitudes.
Women who chose adoption (and often secrecy) for one – or two or three – babies born to them and now for whom these people are growing, grown, distant and unknown.
Gut wrenching for the Smiths from a dozen angles while also displaying a vast array of flowers, tropical, indoor-outdoor whites, greens, shades of purple, yellows, sturdy, strong and luscious, endless developing beauty — reaching for sunlight, proclaiming life and charisma — even within our motherless home.
It’s the early 2000s and Mother’s Day: the boys wake, wander into my room, at least one son is aware of the day given the many things he had to draw, cut, glue and color at school for me, his dad-mom. He’s also performed in “Mother’s Day Bunny” where I was the only dad in attendance. The school’s admirable efforts to include us, or rather efforts to never exclude us, get a little ridiculous but I play along lest some real mother get whiff that my children be faced with the truth that they don’t know their mothers, a reality from which we, in the privacy of our home, have always openly addressed. Blanket strewn over his shoulders and with an inspiring attempt at positivity, he says, “Happy Mama-Day, Dadda,” and I embrace him and then his brother trailing dutifully behind and I leave it at that.
We meander through the morning, sometimes sluggishly, but with momentary caffeine-stirred urges to “make it memorable for the boys.”
At lunch the restaurant tables are packed with girls-and-boys-with-mothers and flowers and gifts piled high with color and sweetness. Octogenarian mothers swoop in to hug multiple generations vying for hug-inclusion as raucous laughter buzzes through the air.
Friends see us and platitudes flow as they do when people don’t know how to talk about loss or abandonment or death while attempting kindness to quell their glaring uneasiness.
“You’re in a better place.”
“God knew your dad could be both.”
“You know it’s extra special to be ‘chosen,’” a mother says to my son as if she’s the first to offer adoption this spin.
I’m uncertain. Should I laugh, cry or lead the boys out the door and flee the overload display of all my boys don’t have?
Instead, we’re three-strand strong, and face it as if nothing can touch the Smith-bulwark.
It’s Mother’s Day and about 2015: my first-born off-handedly reports he’s going to make a gift for his mom and, his car loaded with equipment, he leaves. Mid-afternoon he returns, buries himself in his room to emerge hours later with a 4-or-so minute movie that still blows my mind every time I watch it. I don’t know if his mother ever saw her gift on YouTube but within 24 hours he was interviewed on a local news station and his “letter” had traveled the world. I have a hunch his mother did see it but I know she did not respond. A few years later he reached out very directly to her to be firmly and gently rebuffed.
“Adoption is a very powerful tool,” I whispered into his ear as I tried to comfort my distraught son as he sobbed and sobbed.
“Thank you for the choice you made. I didn’t mean to upset you,” he wrote, time-stamped seconds after his biological mother expressed her wish not to hear from him again. The boy was ashen, disoriented, for days.
Yes. Adoption is a powerful tool.
Rest assured, my boys’ mothers, despite their physical absence, have been more than present in our lives. They are not sitting proud at our all-male out-of-the-way Mother’s Day table, but they are ever-present guests as we steel ourselves for life together.
Nate did not learn his gentleness from me. He did not get his unflappable nature from me. I’ve spent much of my life in a hurry, and, apart from when on sports fields or a basketball court, he’s never rushed a moment in his life, not even when chasing the dog. I didn’t teach him to anticipate when I’m not feeling well and to silently — late in the night — enter my bedroom and place ice water next to my bed in the event I may want it.
I like to think we as a family are generally kind people, but, I tell you, Thulani’s natural kindness cannot be taught, tutored or trained.
He was born kind.
Kindness tumbled down through generations of his kin despite the traumas and brutality they knew. Kindness flowed into my boy from unknown generations like the mother’s milk he never tasted.
My sons’ mothers may not be at the table with us on Mother’s Day but I meet them every day in the beauty with which each of the generous women stamped their claim on the lives of our shared, fabulous sons.
Had I an opportunity to reunite with my sons’ mothers I’d say a deep and welled up “thank you” for the gifts of two magnificent humans with whom I’ve shared the last 25 years. I’d say “thank you” for the bravery it took each woman to make her generous choice.
I salute you, your bravery, your untold story, your capacity to engage in enduring, long-distance and painful, love.
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