To my Sofie on her tenth birthday

TEN?  You can’t possibly be 10?  That is 2 whole hands!  That was a lot of sleeps to finally get to this one precious day of your happy birthday.  I am so very sorry it wasn't as fun today as you wanted and that tomorrow we have to cancel the ten pin bowling but I PROMISE I will make it up to you and we will go later in the holidays.

 

Sofieliscious you were one of the biggest and best surprises of my life.  Spending 9 whole months so convinced you were a boy.  Doing your room up in blue dinosaurs and spending that entire time making the blue bear quilt as we all waited for you to arrive.  And then you did and the first thing I did was raise you up and we were so shocked.  GIRL?!   It’s a little girl?  Rebeka has a sister?  Where is Zack?  Who is this little quiet content brand new person with her large wise eyes? 

When we sent everyone the text to say Sofia Josephine had arrived at 3.9kg everyone was most confused.  I was delighted.  I SO wanted another girl and I really wanted Becks to have a sister.  Daddy and I were crazy about you from minute one and we stay crazy about you still.  If I had to think of a recipe that showed who you were I would say a fillet steak with chocolate chilli sauce.  You really do get something like that and it’s this fascinating blend of different ingredients that somehow all work and are unique and delicious.  Unique means only one exists.  There is only one Sofia Josephine Novitzkas.   You are so brave and I know your tummy gets sore because you find things scary or they worry you or make you feel yucky.  You do them anyway, you take a deep breath and you dive off that block and swim, swim, swim.  Or you get up on the stage all alone and sing in a voice that makes everyone in the room absolutely silent.   God has given you many talents and you are a lucky girl.  We stay grateful to Him every day for your healthy strong body and your beautiful singing voice.  For your super flexible body unlike the rest of us stick figures.  

I know school hasn’t been easy for you and you get stressed.  I also know some of the girls can be so ugly.  Don’t be ugly back.  I know it is very, very hard and it is natural to be mean back but you will see that some people are just ugly inside.  Even Mom and Mimi and Aunty Tertia and Aunty Nina have to deal with mean people.   I always think something in their heart must be broken to make them so unkind.  People get jealous or insecure.  Insecure means they feel like they are not good enough and they don’t like the fact you might be better than them at some stuff so they try and make you feel horrible about yourself.  And remember not to be nasty to others or think you are better because you have a gift they don’t.   God made us all different; it is what makes life interesting.    Even dogs have different personalities! 

Well done on your school report!  I told you it would be fine and you did better than fine.  I am so proud of you because I know it was hard and you were tired from Annie shows.  When I watched you on stage I just wanted to cry.  My little girl, my Sofie, Blicksie, Fifi girl singing and dancing like that.  Well done my amazing actress.  None of us can do what you do in this family and we are all beyond proud of you.  Sofia I cannot tell you how much I love you because words are not big enough for the feeling in my chest.  I know you get this because your chest is also bursting with love for us too.  You leave me breathless.   I am your biggest fan and your cheerleader and I will support you in whatever you want to do in your life.  We don’t know what that is yet but I know you are someone.  Even now when we walk through the mall and you are all dressed up you turn heads.  You have swag my Sofieliscious and I am excited to see where life takes you.  Happy Birthday my gorgeous!

Why I can't do macrame just yet.

My Dad was asking me why I push myself so hard and my mom called me today saying I do too much and she is concerned about me.   I must admit at the moment my anxiety is a little like a veld fire on a hot and windy day, out of control and sucking all the air from the atmosphere to fuel it, hot and wild.

Ideally I should be the person who stays home most days enjoying my alone time, reading a little.  Taking time to cook dinner, grocery shop, walk my dog Lucy and just be.  I should do gentle exercise like yoga and hang with other mothers on coffee dates.  It would help my anxiety and subsequently help my mouth which obviously reacts to stress and fatigue.  

Somehow I just can’t.  I have had a shit past 5 plus years which was beyond my control and I have also had far too many friends and siblings of friends die way before their time.   They are gone.  Gone.  They have no more choice with what to do with their life, they have no life.  How can this be?  I still can’t wrap my head around it and the latest one was a tough one as my friend Bee was convinced she was not going to die.  We pretended along with her.  We had this joke where she decided her name would not be Bee Peggy (peg as in die) so I called her Bee Zoe.  Zoe means life.  I even have her name saved on my phone as Bee Zoe.  Part of why I live my life hard is because we just don’t know how much time we have on earth.  I don’t want regrets.  We also don’t know how we will age and when I am an old lady, I can THEN walk my dog and do yoga and cook dinners and meet girlfriends.  I will have the time and I won’t have the strength and energy I have now. 

I love having goals that scare the crap out of me.  Part of me is drawn to that veld fire adding fuel like this 21km I am running on Sat.  I am really nervous for it.  It would be incredibly easy not to pitch up but I want that…I have frikkin’ done it feeling.  I have just done something for the very first time at age 43 that was hard and needed bravery and hard work and determination.  I know it’s not Comrades or 2 Oceans but for me, it’s huge.   It has taken me 16 months to get from I hate running I can’t run 5 meters and never will, to, I am about to do my first half marathon.  Do you get me? Entering for  70.3 Ironman makes me want to puke it’s so scary.  What the hell am I thinking?  Training for the Olympic distance Tri was hard enough.  This time more than double the distance for each discipline.  We start in August and I have enjoyed not training since April 26^th.  Not being so exhausted.   Odd thing is I still run 3 timed a week, swim twice and do one spin class but that is considered not training compared to what is up ahead for me.  Yoh yoh yoh!!!

The studying is really not good for my Dystonia and I have added some new tricks to tongue spasms and palate spasms.  Lots of blowing into my sleeve or arm, face scrunching, jaw clenching.  I think the latest meds kicked me up a notch on the Dystonia scale.  I have to be so careful not to let it consume my life, my spirit and my joy.   For anyone who has a chronic debilitating conditioning they will understand how you fight.  You refuse to succumb.  Training so hard, studying so hard, I am in control.  Me.  I can stop at any time.   When it’s pissing with rain and the wind is howling and we are on a training run its hard but I can just stop whenever I want to.  My Dystonia, I have no control.  I am a puppet jerked 24/7 with no respite.

So that is why I train so hard, push and push some more.  To honour my friends who died too soon.  To have the rush of achieving goals I never thought I could.  To keep my head above water when my Dystonia wants to claim my life by dragging me under where it’s dark and murky.   I understand it’s not sustainable and I have to balance it out and keep perspective and I do, I will and I am.  My new schedule (Typed up today till Nov colour coded = Agatha calmed down) has a day off written in for 2 of the months until my next exams.  I am also only working 2 of the 5 days during school holidays and no weekend so I have 3 weeks of chill time.  I will read, go for long bike rides, bake, hang with my kids and chill.  I really will and then August  its training time with lots of exciting heart racey triathlons and half marathons before the biggie next Jan.  After 70.3 Triathlon next year I am pretty sure I will not do another.  If I want to finish my degree by the end of 2016 I have to do 8 modules next year and the full 10 in 2016.  You don’t believe me do you?  Really, just this one big bucket list triathlon and then I will be a sensible 43 year old normal person with my midlife crises over.  Promise. 

To my Rebeka on her 12th birthday

First let me start by saying HAPPY birthday to you.  I have said happy birthday many times but this time I mean it, I wish you the happiest day ever.  You won’t remember but I used to write you happy birthday and just general letters on my old blog.  Mom will read it to you sometime.  This time is cooler though because you get to read and really understand. 

Twelve!  You were right Becks, 12 is indeed a big birthday, technically the last year of being a tweenie before you hit the teens.  I know this is all about YOU but can I just say I know I must be pretty awesome because God needed someone very special to raise someone like you.   I love that I know just how to love you.  What makes you tick and what makes you happy.  You are different Rebeka and you always will be.  Sometimes this will be a huge blessing and sometimes it will be a source of pain.  You see and feel things on a much deeper level than most people.  I have this too and when we live in a world that seems so incredibly unfair it can cause much heartache.  The good thing is that you will never be that person who turns a blind eye or decides not to care.  You do care and have the gift of fairness, compassion and kindness and God will use you in your life to love and care and heal.  I am not sure in which profession but I do know it will be in a space and place where you get to show your love and care for people or animals.

I am so immensely proud of you.  Not for your grades or swimming or anything you have done or not done.  I am just proud of WHO you are and to be your mother, the person who gets to guide you and help shape you as you grow up.   I don’t know everything, no one does.  People will try and force their own ideas and opinions on you but you need to find your own truth and belief system which has already started to grow.  People call it their inner voice or the little voice in their head or their conscience, that what niggles and tells us stuff.  We call it the holy spirit, the voice of God that tells us what to do, when to love, who to love.  You have this already, have had it for a long time.  Sometimes we don’t want to listen; we so want to do what WE want to do.  That’s OK too because it is how we learn, we bump our heads and next time we learn to duck or take another route.  We also learn to listen next time.  (Mom has only learned to listen to this voice so much later than you!) 

I am glad you had a great evening at youth last night and Auntie Michelle and your friends made you feel special.  Super glad you love your prezzies and your breakfast with Dad this morning.  I know it felt like forever waiting for your phone but this amazing and excited feeling you have right now, it’s what comes from waiting for something you really look forward to.  Delicious anticipation and then the moment of having it in your hands!  Hey, sounds like my pregnancy with you.  Waiting, waiting and then my arms and heart full of you.

So let me end by saying happy birthday Rebeka Scarlett Novitzkas.  I wish you another 80 special birthdays on this earth, even more.  I love you more than I could possibly describe but I know you know.  Stoked for the wonderful plans and future I know God has laid out for you.

Love from Mom x

Day 80, Time heals

For those who only read my blog but are not my FB friends, I have been doing a series called one hundred days of gratitude on my FB posts. I started on April 1^st and decided I would write about something that I was grateful for each and every day.  I have Lingual Dystonia which I got from taking the anti-dep Cymgen, a Cymbalata generic.  In August this year it will be 2 years.  It is painful and debilitating affecting my tongue, palate and jaw with 24/7 spasms and movement.  Speech is difficult and by the end of the day pain forces me into silence or short sentences.  I have tried various medications with no real success.   The last meds made me extremely depressed and very suicidal.  I won’t even speak about the latter too much as we don’t talk about the S word but let’s just say I thank God that at the end of the day as much as I desperately wanted to swallow every tablet on my shelf and sleep forever, I couldn’t do that to my mother.  Her own mother took her life and who wants to be THAT person who loses their mother AND daughter to suicide.  It’s even hard to type the word.  I will just say be careful of meds and if you are incredibly depressed and on meds, chat to your doc about the side effects.  If you are family to a suicidal person, drag them off to the doctor.  On weak days the strength to stay, to fight, to live is very hard and you need that person to recognize that day.  But that’s over now, I went off the meds and now I never think about it.

F*ck!  What an intro for something that is meant to be a positive post.  Sorry!!  So back to time heals. Two years ago some of you will remember we were immigrating to Singapore.  Moving a family of 5 and their one dog to another country takes an enormous amount of preparation.  Getting the kids emotionally ready and positive takes masses of input/brain washing etc.   So after visiting Sing and organising schools and accommodation and re homing our rottie and doing all the shots and paperwork for my dog Lucy, we were ready to go.  The mover was booked, my house rented out, notice had been given at school here, banks, phone company and basically our entire lives here were wrapped up.  I had one farewell party and the big one was organised for a few days before we left.  What made everything that much sweeter was Gary’s BF lived in Sing and my darling sister and her family. 3 weeks before we were due to leave Gary’s company drops him and says sorry, you are too expensive so the deal is off.  We apologise for the inconvenience.     Inconvenience?  Seriously?  Your dentist being late is inconvenient.  Forgetting to buy milk is inconvenient.  This?  This is a total and utter mindf*ck.  It flattened us, crushed us and almost destroyed me.  I was finished.  Beyond devastated.  We still had our tickets to fly obviously so off we went for a 2 week holiday in a state of disbelief and shock.  Daniel was depressed for months, the girls took massive strain and I was traumatised to the point where I eventually went for therapy.  I was then prescribed the evil cymgen by my nightmare psychiatrist and after 14 days, dystonia arrives and never leaves.

OK, this post is still so negative!!   So the good bits, 2 years on and everyone has gotten over it apart from one causality.  The girls eventually healed, Daniel finally got Carmin and fell madly in love and Gary has a great job.  Me, I got lifelong dystonia which means I am never quite free as it was a direct result of not going.  I have wondered why God would take me on that journey and why He would give me a permanent reminder but what is the point.  We didn’t go and everyone recovered and the irony is that when I eventually get to ask Him why, I will be so blown away by being in heaven and loved up none of the stuff on earth will matter.  So time does heal and life goes on and the new path becomes THE path.  I see it all around me all the time and I am grateful because I know when things are horrendous, it will never be forever.  Time will erase the painful bits and lighten the load to something we can carry and maybe even make it so light, it will just blow away in the wind.