I want to write honestly about WHO I AM in 2015. This feels important to start this blog and a good time for me to look inwards too. It is so easy to project who I would like to be, who I was 5 years ago or who I feel like on a bad day when everything looks a little gloomy.
I am a HUMAN, I am a WOMAN. I live in Bristol, UK. I am a MOTHER, I am a DAUGHTER and a SISTER. I have a French partner. This makes me a quarter French through cultural adoption. I am also a quarter Red Dzao through cultural adoption, but mostly British through place of birth and upbringing as well as officially on paper.
I love living in a city. I love drinking coffee, I love textiles, I love art, I love talking to people. I love sharing time with all the people I love. I love yoga, I love growing vegetables, I love having a clean house, I love cycling around, I love walking our dog, I love cooking, I love the beach, I love swimming, I love drawing, I love taking time to listen, I love dreaming about future projects, I love being independent.
I hate (DISLIKE) … it feels negative to write this all out, as nothing especially is springing to mind. I might do it later if it feels appropriate.
My daughter is currently 2 years and 4 months old. She is funny and cheeky, she is inspiring and makes me see the world differently. She sees things new and as they are, and is just beginning to make some kind of sense of all the complexities around her. I also see how much growing she has to do to overcome her frustrations, I see how much love and guidance she needs to become the person she can be.
When I look at the list of all the things I love, above, there feels like a lot of things to be grateful for.
I am so grateful for the fact that I spent 20 years in education, enabling me to be able to write, to be able to analyse, to be able to critique and to have an opinion. To be confident to share my opinion and to be know that people will take me relatively seriously, because I come from there and went to that school and that university and I studied that.
I am grateful to my parents for having given me that education without having expectations of what I was going to do with it.
I am grateful for having to opportunity to travel and to have experienced different ways to living in this world.
I am grateful to be able to speak another language and to be able to experience everyday life through a completely new set of words.
I am grateful for my independence and freedom.
I am grateful to have a wonderful daughter and to be a mother.
I am grateful to have been able to take the time to tune into my body and to listen to my mind chatter, knowing that this does not define who I am.
This all sounds amazing when I write it down, however there are struggles,
I struggle with how to most efficiently use my time.
I struggle with always being late.
I struggle with having to deal with domestic life, despite having help from my partner, the hoover and the turn of a switch electric appliances, it is still endless.
I struggle with juggling my daughters needs with my own.
I struggle with having so many great ideas but not being able to see them through.
I struggle with childcare and money.
I struggle with having lots of possibilities of ways of doing things but not being sure which way is the best.
I struggle because I feel like I don’t have elders I can go to for support because the world that I inhabit doesn’t look much like the one my elders inhabited when they were younger.
I struggle with the fact that the environment and the economy around us are in a very vulnerable situation.
All this feels important and was spurred on when watching a BBC TV show about the average families eating habits from 1950-2000, how this has changed the domestic role of the average woman in the UK. As I was watching it I felt passionately that I am not an average woman. But as I dwell on the show more, I am coming to think that perhaps I am a very average British woman in 2015? Perhaps the thing is that this is not the average women that the media portray.
It fascinates me to think WHO ARE WE AS WOMEN IN 2015? Beyond what the media portray.
And how does community come into all of this?
I am going to ask Tamay what she is grateful for and what she struggles with, she is certainly not the average woman portrayed by the media …. (this is for another post)