Everyday when I wake up from my blissful night sleep, thankfully I am able to sleep blissfully these days. I think about things I could do in a day and I want to do them perfectly and I want to keep calm. Nightmares have always tormented me and messed with my sleep at times waking me up in the middle of the night with a painful and racing heart. I beleive the pain was due to nightmare and not my heart. Why would I have a problematic heart? I eat fairly good food and I am not obese. Besides I have survived worst things in life and there is no reason my body would give up on me now.

I did not accept my own trauma. It was the saddest thing I could do to myself the most unfair thing rather. I should have accepted long ago that I was dealt a bad hand when it came to my parents. The acceptance would have made me stronger and believable. I sadly believed what my parents told me. I believed I was a bad woman with a peanut of a brain. Yes that is what my father insisted and repeated that my brain like the brains of all women was smaller and inferior to a man’s. I could never be equal to my brothers in anything. Not that I wanted to be but since they said it , it must have been true and the truth as I believed it then tormented me. I believed my parents were good even when I was in the depths of misery and I believed it was all my fault.

Where am I really going with writing about this again!! It is like I want to write about it even when I don’t want to write about it. I would really like my soul to heal in this lifetime and find beautiful things that it can experience in whatever time is left of this life. And it is such a long, complex and nuanced story to tell that my writing skills won’t be enough. I am not writing about it now.

Today is Sunday and I realised how difficult it is to live here in this city in this apartment. I want to go outside in the sun and walk in the grass but it would take enormous effort to get ready to lock the doors take the lift to take me from the eighth floor to the ground floor and walk through the street lined with high rises on one side and car parking on other to go to the open green space in the middle of the township that I presently live in.

The apartment I am living in, at times feels suffocating, and now I am sure is one of the reasons for my gloomy mood. May be for my gut problems and anxiety too. Today while walking in the park I felt such a strong urge to work in the flower beds. I wanted to touch the soil and feel it but the park is not mine, it is only a place where I can come and take a walk, admire flowers and move on. It is not a place for me to find satisfaction and contentment for my life that can come only if I worked on it myself. The workers of the landscape company work on it year round cutting, pruning, cleaning and planting. And I don’t envy them. They might feel I am in a better place.

There is a divine connection I feel when I work in soil. I can work with my hands inside the apartment. I can make soap or something with a box cutter and a glue gun but it is not the same thing as working on soil and growing a simple humble coriander and to see it bloom or to plant my favourite flowers and be able to call them mine and see them bloom and perish, collect their dried up flower heads and harvest for seeds to plant them again next season.

Or I can do nothing and simply let the weeds grow wild and vines climb up the trees. And I can still marvel at the beauty of it all. I don’t like the human company very much would rather prefer a dog or a cow but I have one friend apart from my immediate family and that is all I have. I am fine with it. I do talk to people though but that is all small talk and it is what it is now.

Today is Sunday and a relatively free day so I am writing all the things that have nothing to do with homeschooling and kids. And yes one thing that has surprised me today and many times before is that ….kids don’t ever look at my wrinkles and white hair and aged hands, they look at me in the eye and say, ‘come play with me,’. Why is that? I had this happen to me more times than I can count and it has always surprised and embarrassed me.