Be careful what you ask for!

A few days ago, whilst I wallowed in my non blogging life, reliving everything that I thought was so unfair about life, and mine in particular, a friend, out of the blue, sent me this.

Wise words

As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn't supposed to ever let you down probably will. You will have your heart broken probably more than once and it's harder every time. You'll break hearts too, so remember how it felt when yours was broken. You'll fight with your best friend. You'll blame a new love for things an old one did. You'll cry because time is passing too fast, and you'll eventually lose someone you love. So take too many pictures, laugh too much, and love like you've never been hurt because every sixty seconds you spend upset is a minute of happiness you'll never get back.


Now it is not everyday that a chain email gets to you but this one did, and so to you Lina, I am grateful for getting me out of the rut that I was very carefully digging for myself as I transformed into a very miserable cow!

A few weeks ago, I sat down and decided what I thought I wanted out of life at this point. A completely radical Wambui! My list comprised of re-building the bridges with my family, a man, to be bare foot and pregnant on a farm, surrounded by cows and mango trees, no lawyers for miles, huge crushed velvet sofas, lots of fake fur cushions and a state of the art coffee machine. Nothing much! I made that routine call to the man upstairs and this time negotiated as to how I would like this to take place, and for purposes of clarity, included an excel spread sheet time frame!

Unfortunately, I was not too specific or not specific enough. So first I contracted a bronchial infection (kindly diagnosed as a urinary tract infection by our friendly ICTR doctors, leaving me throwing up for a couple of days from some seriously strong drugs that could kill a cow and which my doctor in Nairobi relegated to the trash upon first sight! I was not well) and the family thing did not go as was planned in my head. I made the next call upstairs and elaborated that a humanoid might be along the lines i was thinking of, possibly with similar offspring, without the bacterial connotations. The family thing may have to wait, however, when I said I wanted a good catch, severe coughing and introducing my stomach to my lungs was not really what I had in mind. Ungrateful woman that I am, because I did have a very sexy voice for a few weeks. I digress.

So He provided the man - or so I thought. Or rather a couple of them in a row! Nice! Thing about Africa is that men are not shy in telling you what they want. In some respect western men may want to take note. It is not always creepy and slimy, and there is a way of flirting here that is just perfect. However this time it came with additional baggage that I was simply not prepared for. Truth be told, until now, that has never really been an issue. So I am sure there was some element of confusion when He listened to that voicemail, saying, right, maybe i am ready for this. Don't know if I mentioned before that I had recently been put on voicemail due to an overwhelming number of unnegotiable requests. Hee hee!

Boy 1 - cute, good conversation, (must admit at first thought was very gay!) fantastic dancer, but soon found out also very married with kids. Had to pass. Despite the obvious attraction, I was never good at three legged races. So I thought, well, He is having a bit of a laugh and figured if I could provide entertainment, well why not? We were testing the waters. Checking out the available talent - bring it on!

Boy 2 - again cute (me thinks to myself this is not a bad track to continue on!), good waistline, not out of proportion (not that i am superficial but a man with a stomach and breasts larger than my pregnant vision makes things slightly difficult), great conversation, known him for decades (can be either a pro or a con but I chose to be positive!), my family seemed to like him (again not quite sure if that was a good thing but chose to look at the positive) and he seemed quite partial to the idea of my pregnant vision (nothing like the offer of making beautiful children to make a woman lose all concept of rational thought!)

Several other events seemed to coincide with this period that I will not go into as my current version of violins (crickets) will lose surely their strings due to an overload.

Now here was the dilemma. I have spent most of my adult life, infact all of it, clamoring for that independent life. That life that meant I made the decisions of where I would end up or be in the next month and who would or not be a part of it. Not reliant on anyone for anything and simply doing what made me happy, usually in my professional existence and hardly ever in my romantic life. But like I have lived my life, I had made a decision, something had to give and I was willing (I think!) to do that, with family, friends and men.

Hard though it was to admit, Boy 2 broke my heart. Into little itsy pieces that I let surround me for too long, without even attempting to put them together. That just seemed so much easier than pretending to be whole. The last time everything seemed to happen all at once, I vowed self preservation was the way to go. Why is it that the older you get, the easier it is to get hurt, the tinnier the pieces and the longer it takes to regroup? By the time I realized that the whole is sooooooooo much better than the shattered, I had internalized and analyzed everything and the product was not pretty. Urghhh! Why do we do this to ourselves? And it was for this reason that Lina's email, however innocent and slightly corny (sorry Lina!), jolted me out of a very destructive self pitying path. Ohhh, this is beginning to read like a self help book! Sorry ;-)

Anyway, the moral of this story (and no I am not vying for Jerry Springer's line of work!) is that the last few months, despite practically all of the above happening in such a short space of time, the moping and wallowing made me realize that sometimes, just because you don't get what you think you want, it is not necessarily the end of life as I know it. Yes it has taken me 2 months to finally come to this profound conclusion. Hee hee! And that being single does not necessarily equal lonely. That while I cannot control what or who hurts me, I make the decision as to how I deal with it. That I have an enormous capacity to love and feel if I let myself. That my body can only cry for about half an hour before it gets fed up and yet laugh for hours. My life is great. I have amazing friends, a great family, a job most people would kill for, the opportunity to travel the world doing what I love and I get to meet fantastic people almost everyday. Why would I ever want to change that if I don't have to and it is being handed to me on a platter. So to those I have moaned and bitched to, paticularly in the last month, I am truly sorry and love you dearly for being so patient with me, even when all you probably wanted to do was hit me over the head and shake some sense into me.

And anyway, it takes years to grow a mango tree and like being continuously upset is very similar to climbing Kili - way too much hard work.