The Misinterpretation of Dreams

Today was my first day back at work after nearly 3 weeks of holiday and I’m EXHAUSTED after actually having to use my brain all day, after so long!
Surprisingly enough, I was not dreading coming back to work. And even now I’m not unhappy to be back in Ingwavuma! I left Vancouver on Saturday evening, landed at Heathrow after an 8.5 hour flight and then had a 9 hour stop over! I used the time to explore London a bit and catch up with an old friend. Then had a terrible 11.5 hour flight to Jo’burg, during which I sat next to a corny middle aged white guy who tried to convince me how liberal he was in his views on race and how he’d ALWAYS had friends of colour.
I arrived in Jo’burg on Monday morning feeling very smelly and tired. I spent Monday evening in Jo’burg and saw friends and family and obviously didn’t sleep much because there were pictures and stories to share. Eventually got to sleep at around 1h30 on Tuesday morning and had to be up by 4h30 to be on time for my flight to Durban. In Durban there were more story-telling-picture-sharing sessions and then I started the 4 hour drive back to Ingwavuma! By the time I got to Ingwavuma around 18h35 I felt like I had just had the longest day EVER!

On the drive back I realised that my fears of becoming a farm doctor might have come true: I was happy to be coming back! The reason I’m afraid of becoming what I call “a farm doctor” is that, unfortunately, many doctors who work in rural areas become slack. There’s no one checking up on you, so if you’re not careful it’s very easy to fall into bad habits and become complacent and begin to give patients a suboptimal standard of care. I REALLY don’t want to become a complacent doctor, but I have to admit that I do enjoy working in this area, I don’t resent it at all. And I think that’s a good thing, I should be happy with what I’m doing and where I’m doing it.

So while I try my utmost best to avoid complacency, I think I can still enjoy the place I’m in at the moment. This is just such a beautiful place. As soon as I passed Hluhluwe, driving North on the N2, I started to see the beautiful fever trees. They’re a kind of luminous green/yellow that just stands out against the green of the KZN landscape. And then there were so many little monkeys scidadling along the road and sometimes across the road!
When I turned off the N2 and started to climb the mountain road to Jozini, the Pongola dam was on my left and I had to stop myself from stopping by the side of the road and taking pictures! (I already have too many pictures of the Pongola dam and if I had stopped it would have meant more time driving in bad light, the sun was starting to set.)
After Jozini the drive becomes even more interesting; once you cross over the Pongola dam wall, you have to drive with your eyes wide open to look out for potholes, goats and cows! Never mind that there are always children kicking a soccer ball or running a little bit too near to the road. But who wants to drive on boring, perfect first world roads anyway?

Anyway, my poor little credit card has not seen such high numbers in her life! (Yes my credit card is female. Only a female could be such a good shopping companion.) She doesn’t understand the whole rand/dollar exchange thing, and the rand definitely did a nose dive just before I went on holiday and continued downward throughout my holiday. So besides all the beauty I’m surrounded by, it’s good to be back because now R100 can actually buy me something in a shop and in Ingwavuma there aren’t many shops, so I won’t be parting with my money at as high a rate as I was in Vancouver!

For the past two weeks I’ve been on holiday and I’ve come to the conclusion, once again, that retirement has to be the best time of your life!! I’m happy while I’m on holiday. And my body is happy while I’m on holiday, I know this because my stools are the perfect consistency and regular. (Your stools can tell you a lot. If you don’t believe me just ask Dr Oz.) I’m stress-free!

This is the first real holiday I’ve had all year! In May I spent a week in Mozambique with my boyfriend and 7 friends, but it wasn’t like this. I was not stress-free.
For one, I was coming to grips with the fact that I had to break up with my boyfriend of almost 4 years. I was still trying my best to convince myself that I’d be able to spend my life with him. The truth was (and is) still so painful.
Also, being on holiday Mozambique-style (2 bedroom reed hut with eccentric electricity and hot water supply) with 7 friends is never easy when you’re bordering on obsessive compulsive.
So the combination of the two counteracted the soothing effect the sea and sun may have had on me and I got back from holiday feeling emotionally exhausted and broke up with my boyfriend over the phone the Monday I got back to work and worked a 29 hour shift!!

This holiday is different. I’m on holiday alone in Vancouver. Yes I’m staying with family, but this trip I made on my own and for myself. It’s my first time out of Africa. I was dreading the 20-something hours of flying, but I survived that and landed on the opposite end of the earth to be greeted by the most amazing season: Fall! The colours are absolutely amazing and I can’t get enough of them. I wake up when I want to and everyday I experience and see something new. The only thing I’m sure I’ll do everyday is take more pictures of trees! I really can’t get enough of the amazing reds and oranges and even shades of pink that the leaves are turning!

And I feel so healthy! I don’t think too much about HIV and poverty, I know that will still be waiting for me when I get back to work.
I’m back at work next Wednesday. I’m not unhappy about going back to work. I have short and long term goals: I will press onward towards my next holiday and eventually RETIREMENT!

Is it possible to have it ALL? Or do I have to choose? I don’t want to have to choose! I’m greedy.

I don’t want to be seen as a sexual object. I want to be appreciated, respected and loved by a man for who I am as a person. But if I should choose to take my clothes off for a man I wish I had thighs like Beyonce’s and a butt that could drive him crazy!

I want independence, I want to be able to come and go as I please. I want to be able to go for a two week holiday anywhere in the world that I should choose to go. I want to be able to shop for myself all the time. But I also want to have a man to come home to. I think I do want to one day get married and have children. But I don’t want to have to give up the great life that I have in order to have a husband and children.
Can I be a career woman with nice shoes and clothes and have a home cooked meal with my family most nights and an occassional night out with the girls?

Why is it just expected that I should have to give up one thing to have the other? Why can’t I do it all, have it all? Well maybe in the end the choice will not be mine, life or fate or some higher power will choose for me. Because at the end of it all, I don’t have any control over whether I meet the man of my dreams or not.  Maybe my punishment for being greedy will be that I will end up with nothing at all.

When I was 19 years old, I first started living on my own. It wasn’t exactly by choice, but I wasn’t too upset about it. It was one of those things you wish for when you’re angry that actually do come true and you’re not so sure you want it anymore, but then you learn to deal with it.

When I started university my relationship with my mother was absolutely terrible. We could hardly have a conversation without it turning into an argument! I said one day in anger, to my best friend, that I wished my mother would just move to Jo’burg like she kept speaking about doing and  then I’d have to live on my own in Durban, because transferring universities if you’re in medical school is not easy. Well that same year, at the end of my first year of university, my mother packed up and went to Jo’burg. She never even told me she was going. I went to visit a friend one day and when I came home she was gone and she never came back. I’m not sure when exactly she called and told me where she was. The thing  was that she had left my younger brother and sister behind as well, so it wasn’t exactly the freedom I had dreamed about, but I decided that I would have to manage. My gran came over to stay with us and that helped a lot.

My second year of university started, my mother was in Jo’burg like I had wished for, I was left in Durban, but I had no idea how I was going to pay my university fees and I had my brother and sister to look after! It was quite an adjustment! By around March of that year, my brother and sister had joined my mother and I had the independence and freedom I had craved. I was still at university and I was trying to find a place for myself to stay. But most importantly, I could have wild parties on the weekend without too much hassle!

So eventually I did find a little place to stay in a little room/kitchen/shower in the back garden of the most amazing family whom I came to love dearly: it was my ex boyfriend’s family. That’s how we met each other! I was living in his back garden, talk about easy access! I did like having my own space, but truth be told I was really lonely, and I spent a lot of my time reading and crying on my bed!

There came a point in the relationship with my ex boyfriend when I decided that living with his family was not exactly the best situation. I found a house with a boy of my age whose mother had died. He didn’t want to live on his own, so he decided to rent out the spare rooms. But the house wasn’t the biggest of houses, I had hardly any space of my own. You couldn’t have sex without your housemates hearing you moan, except if there was a huge party and everyone else was loud and drunk or passed out!

I spent most of my university career living in this house and managed to pass my exams despite sometimes waking up at 7h00 when I had to register for my exam at 7h30! And university was at LEAST an hour away using public transport! I didn’t own a car or even have my license.

After university I was off to Worcester. I shared with two girls. We all had boyfriends, but the rooms were a bit bigger and the walls a bit thicker. I never knew when they were having sex, but maybe they were just really good at quiet sex. The kitchen was tiny, our dishes spent more time piled up in the kitchen sink than in our cupboards. If all three of our boyfriends spent the night, there definitely was not enough hot water to go round in the morning.
But we did do some bonding. White girls are definitely more prone to civility than hostility. They always woke up all chirpy in the morning and would sit in the kitchen eating cereal and being happy, while I lay in bed covering my head with the pillow trying to imagine it was 2 am and I still had 5 more hours of sleep left!

At the end of two years of internship, we cried when we had to go our separate ways. I didn’t cry so much because I left Worcester and drove to the airport to pick up my boyfriend and we were doing a road trip back to KZN, driving through the night on Christmas Eve with a picnic basket packed for Christmas lunch. And I was going to be working in KZN only 4 hours away from my boyfriend, as opposed to more than 16 hours away while I was in the Western Cape.

I arrived in Ingwavuma on 1 January 2008 and was given the keys to the filthiest house I’ve ever seen! My then boyfriend and I spent the whole evening cleaning it and it was still dirty! We had to scrub the bath before it was possible to use it and come out clean. But that wasn’t the worst part, the worst was that I had to share with the speech therapist! She worked 3 days a week and on the other two days of the week she volunteered for the church. She had no idea what it meant to be on call! In the 7 months that I lived with her she never ever offered to share a morsel of her food with me! We would each cook seperately and we even had seperate fridges. She would lock her fridge! Although, in all fairness, she did start leaving the key in the fridge door after a few months. She also had this cat, with a bell around its neck! AAGGHH!

Finally, after much begging and convincing, I was allowed to move into my very own park home in the Mosvold Trailer Park. And I say: BRING ON THE TRAILER PARK!!! If it means that I will have my own space, I’ll take it. I think that at the age of 25, I’m much more ready for it than I was at 19.
Having your own space means that you can have visitors over, male or otherwise, without consulting your housemates.
You can make out on the couch without worrying about someone walking in on you.
You can use the toilet without having to close the door.
You can put eggs on the stove to boil, go out and forget about them, come back a few hours later and find a smoke filled house, burst egg all over the kitchen and a burnt pot and you don’t have to apologise to your housemate/s!
You can listen to whatever music you feel like as loud as you feel like.
You can run from the bathroom to the bedroom naked without getting caught.
Best of all, you can lay in the bath with the bathroom door open, with a glass of wine, listening to Coldplay and crying about a boy without any interruptions! You can even get out of the bath and walk to the kitchen to refill your glass of wine, dripping wet all over the floor without having to wrap a towel around yourself!

There’s nothing better than having your own space!

So the last post was written mid experiment with not-so-great love: a fling. This experiment seems to prove to me that I’m not a fling kind of girl. Or maybe I was just flinging with the wrong kind of guy. He was this beautifully sculpted player! And players are just so used to telling lies, that they lie even when they don’t need to! I was going into it with my eyes open. I didn’t think he was even anything near “The One”  he was just so good to look at. I wasn’t asking for anything from him, I thought we were two adults having a good time. But he just seemed to feel the need to try to convince me of how deep his feelings were for me. And I knew he wasn’t being sincere, we hardly even knew each other, it’s not possible to develop deep feelings within a week and a half! And he also made me wait a few times, which I HATE!!! Don’t tell me you’ll see me at 8 and then turn up at 9.30, it’s just rude.

Anyway, despite having my eyes wide open and all of that, I think every girl just wants to be loved deep down inside her. And so even though I knew that he wasn’t being sincere, it still disappointed me when I saw his interest begin to wane. He says it’s because I told him I couldn’t have a serious relationship with him, but I think that if he really did have such deep feelings for me nothing I could say would be able to deter him. Am I proving that women don’t know what they want? Well, maybe so, but nonetheless after less than 4 weeks my experimental fling is over.

What have I come to realise:

• I value honesty. I would rather have someone be brutally honest with me than lie to protect me.

• My ex boyfriend treated me SO well! He was a really good guy! And I suppose this is a really valuable realisation, because I now feel less anger toward him and I’m able to have a mature conversation with him without getting all emotional! It’s definitely a step in the right direction!