The Misinterpretation of Dreams

I don’t really have a place I call home, I’m homeless! Since I’ve started working I have lived on hospital property. While there are many advantages to this, it doesn’t REALLY feel homey.

The advantages of living on hospital property: (besides having ready access to governmental healthcare)

1. You are only a walk away from work, so you never use petrol getting to work (big advantage these days with the petrol price the way it is!) and you never have to deal with rush hour traffic.
2. Rent is government subsidised! There’s nowhere else where you can get a two bedroom house in a decent neighbourhood for around R500 per month!
3. We’re never affected by loadshedding, a few seconds after the Eskom supply cuts off, the hospital generator kicks in.
4. The grounds are always well cared for at the hospital’s cost. I got back from work on Thursday afternoon to find my lawn neatly manicured, and on Friday there was another group of people raking up the leaves!
5. You can always come home for lunch, no need to use precious time packing a lunch in the morning and no need to buy overpriced greasy food from some take away.
6. You can always drink at colleagues’ parties cos home is just a walk away, not on public roads and no driving involved.
7. When anything malfunctions in the house (plugs, fridge, oven) you just call on the hospital maintenance and it’s usually fixed within the next two working days!

So the working situation is pretty bad in rural hospitals if we have all these advantages PLUS a rural allowance of up to 22% of your salary, and the hospitals are STILL short of doctors!

But even with all these advantages I still don’t feel like the house I’m living in is my home. I’m not sure where I want home to be, first of all. I do have a house in Durban, but I bought it as an investment. Not sure if I really want to live there and make it my home. I think I would love to live in Cape Town, but all the homes there are not within my price range, at least not for now.

I think I’m just going to have to continue being homeless for a while. With the money I’m saving on petrol, surely I’ll be able to afford a small down payment on a one room place (and I mean one ROOM, not one bedroom!) somewhere in Cape Town, not Llandudno or anything like that, but maybe Gardens. Who am I kidding, I still wouldn’t be able to afford Gardens, maybe Woodstock. I hear it’s an up and coming neighbourhood. The thing with investing in property is that you have to have vision, it’s a long term thing. The neighbourhood might not be exactly like you want it to be, but if there are lots of new developments in the surrounds, you can be sure the property will at least double in value within the next few years.

So, here’s to finding a home in the not too distant future. For now, I’ll carry my home on my back!

All my friends are telling me how brave I am, to have broken up with my boyfriend after nearly 4 years together. (Tomorrow would’ve been 4 years.) But I’m wondering, is it bravery or just fear? Fear of going the whole nine yards and still not having a happily ever after.

My problem is that I’m a control freak who worries too much. At a young age I remember my mother trying to convince me not to worry by telling me that if you don’t worry you die and if you worry you still die, so why worry? That never made sense to me, I thought the conclusion should be that you should start worrying or you’d probably die sooner! And if you’re gonna die either way, then you might as well worry away and not spend so much effort trying not to worry!
There’s this whole buzz about living in the moment, apparently it’s the solution to all the world’s problems. But if we don’t worry about the future, then what will become of it? We have to think about tomorrow! And the next day and the next!

The thing is that the future is uncertain, and uncertainty is scary. It’s scary enough when you have someone you love beside you all the way. When you’re alone, I’m afraid it might be unbearable. I don’t want to be an old spinster. I wish I had foresight so I could be certain I was making the right decisions when I come to a fork in the road. Decisions are so easy to analyze in hindsight. I know that I don’t want to be a lonely spinster, but I’m just as certain that I don’t want an unhappy relationship. I also don’t want to become one of those unbalanced workaholics. I’m afraid I’m heading in that direction.

In my bed at the moment I have books, I keep piling them up next to me. I have:

1. The South African Pocket Oxford Dictionary (not sure who’s pocket it would fit into!)
2. Paediatrics and Child Health, A Manual for Health Professionals in the Third World
3. Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine
4. Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black (a collection of short stories by Nadine Gordimer)
5. Advanced Paediatric Life Support Manual
6. Textbook of Psychiatry for Southern Africa

All piled up on the bed next to me. There’s also a box of tissues (I actually sneeze A LOT!) and most of the time I fall asleep with my computer on the bed next to me! Am I just trying to distract myself or am I wallowing in self pity?
While watching Born Romantic (the Friday 8pm movie on SABC 3 this evening) I also had this thought that maybe I should go into work tomorrow and just check on my ward, do a quick ward round, even though I’m not working!! This might seem diligent and praiseworthy, but I DON’T want work to become my life! I don’t want to become one of those women who puts on blinkers and pursues her career relentlessly, forsaking all else. When she lifts her head, she finds that 25 years have passed and she hasn’t had a life!

I want balance, as I’ve said before, but how and where do I find it? Is there some proven formula? Is there a ratio for how much time a woman should put into her career to how much time she should put into her personal life in order to be successful? What if she has no real personal life by no choice of her own? Can a woman be considered successful if she never has a family of her own? How much admiration do 50 year old spinsters get? Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a “Top Ten Most Eligible Spinsters over 50″ list!

I want to live in the movies. A romantic comedy to be exact. Everyone has their perfect lines, they always know what to say at the perfect moment. They make the perfect decisions. The bad boy always turns out to be just the man he was supposed to be when he finds the right woman. Is it any surprise then that we are disappointed when things don’t turn out like that? We’re told that LOVE is all you need. Bullshit! I say: DEFINE LOVE!

In the past, love was not fashionable. People married for practical reasons, a woman was not thought capable of making the decision for herself. Her family, the males in her family, made the decision for her. She then, hopefully, learnt to love the man she had married, or suffered through his or her lifetime with him. Now, we decide first if we actually love someone, before maybe deciding to move in with them and then maybe marrying them, or not. But how do we know that the feeling we have for them is actually love? And if we believe we love someone with everything we have, then is that enough to build a lasting relationship on? What about practicality? What about spiritual, emotional, intellectual compatability? Does all this come as a package deal with love?

Well, in the movies, none of this matters. The man is always rich, handsome and freelancing without settling down. The woman is beautiful and virtuous, and maybe a little quirky. The man gets to know her and realises he can’t live without her, he becomes an upright member of society, forgets all about the other women and starts donating regularly to a worthy charity. It’s the old story of the princess and the frog. All a man needs is the right woman. If only life was like the movies.

I am almost a perfectionist. (Which also means that I am anxious about a lot of things a lot of the time.) While this may seem like a good thing, it means that I do not like doing things that I don’t think I can do well. It means that learning to do something new is always a challenge for me. It means that I don’t actually challenge myself enough, for fear of failure. It means that a lot of the time when doing something new, I am always thinking about what can go wrong.

In the practice of medicine, this can be an excellent attribute. You need to know what you’re capable of, know your limitations and always strive to attain the perfect physiological state as far as possible. (Unless you’re a surgeon; then you need to have the guts to open up, not knowing quite what you’re gonna find once you’re inside a lot of the time!)
However; in life, the pursuit of perfection is not always the best thing. If I’m always afraid to challenge myself for fear of failure, then I will never know what I am really capable of. If I’m always anxious about everything being perfect, then I actually experience fewer perfect moments.

A few things that make me anxious:

1. When swimming in the ocean, I still hear my mother’s voice telling me to be careful, because a wave can take me out to sea before I know it. So I only ever swim in the ocean for short bursts. Then I go back to the shore, just to make sure that I can get back. Then I go back in for a short while and then back out.
2. When diving, I’m constantly thinking about all the things that could possibly go wrong. As the boat is going out, I think about it capsizing. While I’m underwater I’m thinking about shark attacks. (I watched too many movies about how dangerous sharks are before watching the National Geographic documentaries about how harmless sharks are!)
3. When going for a cycle I’m always afraid that if I go too far, I won’t be able to make it back! As I’m going down a hill, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get back up the hill on the way back. So I only ever go a certain distance before turning back. I’ve been going the same distance since the beginning of the year and never further. I know that I can make it so far and back, so I won’t risk anything further.
4. Cutting people open. E.g. A caesarean section is something which I can technically do, but because I feel that my hands are not doing exactly what I want them to do with the instruments, and my sutures never turn out quite as perfect as I picture them turning out, I avoid doing caesars if at all possible. In fact I avoid all surgical procedures.

But on my afternoon cycle today, I was kinda dragged a further 3km along the road! (Actually I was dragged right off the tar road and onto the dirt roads!) There were so many more downhills, that I lost count of how many I’d have to do on the way back! And guess what, I made it back in one piece!! I may not have done it effortlessly, I may have panted and puffed and my butt and legs may have been on fire, but nothing’s broken, not even on my bike.

So I’m thinking, maybe I don’t have to do everything perfectly everytime and everyday! I don’t mean I’m going to slack off in my quest for perfect physiology in patients (although, some patients are just way beyond redemption, no matter what you do for them!), but maybe I can be out of breath more often, maybe I can dance more freely, maybe I can make more attempts at awkward conversation with strangers. I might even be pleasantly surprised by how seldom my fears actually come true!

I have come to the realisation that I am selfish. And I ask: Is this a bad thing? All the women’s magazines are saying that, as women, we need to be more self aware, we need to look after ourselves before we can properly look after anyone else. How can a mother be there for her children 100% if she’s never feeling 100% healthy in mind, body and soul? But I ask myself: where does “self awareness” become just plain old selfishness?

I think women are just coded to be more selfless than men, constantly giving, rarely taking and even then, feeling guilty. However; I am not this way at all, maybe something got messed up in my coding.
This weekend I spent a lot of time with my 5 year old cousin, and while I found her extremely cute and entertaining for the most part (she’s at the age where she says exactly what pops into her head), there were also times when she was just plain annoying and I wished I could turn her switch to off so I could just get some peace and quiet for 5 minutes! And that’s me, when I want peace and quiet, I want it now! And it’s like that with everything: I want what I want when I want it!!
Unfortunately, this pattern is reinforced at work. When I say to the sister: “Draw up 1 amp of adrenaline, NOW!” it’s completely unacceptable if she tells me to just wait a few minutes while she finishes off something else. Granted, it is to save a patient’s life, but sometimes I think that that’s the way things need to work outside of work too.

So how do I become a balanced self aware individual without becoming selfish? Because I really don’t feel balanced right now, not according to acceptable norms.

Yesterday I decided that maybe spending 2 hours with a child and giving all my attention to the child for that time would be a good place to start. So I started with what I knew was a low maintenance child: a little boy of about 8 months old, whose mother died of HIV related disease a few days after giving birth to him. He’s spent more of his life in hospital, so far, than out of it. So he’s the least troublesome baby you can find. He’s learnt that crying doesn’t really bring much gratification when in an understaffed hospital, so there are very few reasons that he cries. And, as an added bonus, he’s quite cute. He has quite a significant forehead for his little body and huge eyes. So after work I passed through the Paediatric ward and picked him up. I lasted with him for all of 90minutes. During which time I did not check my email, I did not put on the TV, I did not go online and chat with friends, I did not make any phone calls, I did not send any sms, I did not wash any dishes, I did not lie down on my bed and read or any of the other things I might enjoy, or need to do normally when getting home from work.

At present I know that I am completely incapable of being a mother. I am even too selfish to have a boyfriend! I enjoy making decisions on my own without having to take anyone else into consideration! (Well, I enjoy it most of the time, except when I make a bad decision and there’s no one to turn to.) I enjoy that when I leave work, my time is mine and mine alone. I like that I can decide not to go to the braai with all my work colleagues, because I just want to stay at home and not talk to anyone for the whole evening. I even sometimes get annoyed when I hear a knock on the door, because there are times when I really don’t like the company of others. Socialising feels like a chore, quite often, lately. Is it normal to enjoy my own company so much? Is it bad to be so selfish?

Tonight, by a stroke of luck, I stumbled upon the most wonderful movie I’ve seen on TV in a long time. (I didn’t know they played the good movies in the middle of the week these days.) It was called The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn and starred Sidney Poitier. (Did you know that he’s been the Bahamian ambassador to Japan since 1997?) It was one of those typical feel good old timer movies. And I love those movies, because if your entertainment can’t make you feel good, then what can?
Nevertheless, the movie is about an old carpenter (Noah Dearborn/ Sidney Poitier) who lives on his own in a little town, on this beautiful property which has been passed down to him by his father. Of course, some investors are now looking into building a mall in the area and are wanting to buy his property, which he is not willing to sell. The potential buyers decide that having him declared mentally incompetent is the answer to their problems. One of the conveyancers has a girlfriend who is a clinical psychologist and he lures her down to the little town under false pretences, hoping that he can convince her to declare Mr Dearborn mentally incompetent. Needless to say, she gets to know Mr Dearborn and, of course, he changes her life forever.
There was one line in the movie that got me. The clinical psychologist happens to be tagging along with Mr Dearborn on what she thinks is one of his chores. He stops at the home of a woman with lots of children and no husband in sight. He fixes her screen door and leaves her crates of apples and baskets of other food stuff. In return she gives him a glass of lemonade. As they’re driving away from the woman’s house the clinical psychologist asks Mr Dearborn how long he’s been doing this. His reply: “As long as I’ve been growing more than I could eat.” !!!
That line just stopped me dead. Oh my word, have we lost sight of what is important! When did enough start being too little? We’re all caught up in this race. We want, want , want: success, houses, cars, holidays, the good life. But  we no longer know what the good life really is.

Yes, you may say, but it’s the society we live in. If I want a simple wooden house on a decent piece of land, in or near a pretty little town, with enough space for a few horses and cows, with maybe a dam or a river on the property, I would need around R3 million. So how do we avoid being part of the rat race?

I don’t have the answer to that question. All I know is, that I want to decide today, to be satisfied with what I do have more often and think about all the things I still want less often. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying ambition or wise investments in your future are bad things, but we shouldn’t trade our dreams for empty promises. What we’re all dreaming of is health and happiness, true wealth. Without  health and happiness, what use are riches? However; holding onto my dreams, is so much more difficult than I ever anticipated!

Being single and living in Ingwavuma (the middle of nowhere!!) makes me somewhat prone to staying in alone on a Friday night. On one such night I decided to indulge on the decadent viewing offered up by SABC1. I was enjoying myself so much, that the time just flew by and before I knew it, it was around 00h00 and it was time for Music Lounge. (Previously ,similar programs in this slot were Simunye Grooves and Chanel O.)
Who did they decide to play? Usher! Oh dam, did that take me back. I used to be completely in love with Usher! Come to think of it, my first loves were all stars, unreachable, pure fantasy:

• The first poster I put up (and I wasn’t the poster putting up kinda girl) was of James Small! It didn’t go on the wall, it went on the inside of my wardrobe door. Yes, he was a short white man, but it was 1994; the year of light headed South African optimism.
• The first time I heard Usher sing, I couldn’t get enough of him. The first time I saw him dance was just overwhelming. “You make me wanna…”
• The first time I heard the Fugees! Killing me softly, oh baby!
• The first time I saw a Snoop Dogg music video and found out about low riders and hydraulics.
• The next white guy I was in love with was Eminem. He definitely didn’t sound white. I knew all the lyrics!
• Then there was Leonardo Di Caprio: the skinny boy next door who made a rich girl cry. Oh my, oh my!

And all of the fantasy seemed so real. I was convinced I would one day meet Leo. Come to think of it, one of my early real life crushes was also named Leo, I took him to my grade 11 dance!

Oh, for the days when love was simple, when possibility was endless, fantasy was attainable and optimism was not yet called denial.