Today my hubby and I are celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary alhamdolillah! Shukr Allah it has been 20 years of love, laughter and tears! We’ve got here through our own bespoke tailor-made efforts and lots of prayers. Someone asked me the other day what the secret was to a 20 year marriage and my answer was that of Dory: ‘Just keep swimming’ and have no memory! I am so grateful to have reached this landmark day, and that I have my wonderful boys and daughter, too. Yet I always hesitate to want to share this joy with others because I don’t like to come across as picture-perfect. What follows is a now amended piece which I wrote about a year ago but never published:
Sometimes I hear people call me a health nut, super organised, and a hands-on mum, and I am surprised if not slightly disturbed. I don’t like this image that others have of me, because really, that’s not me.
It disturbs me for two reasons: firstly because I don’t want to be a hypocrite. No one knows how healthy or unhealthy I am really… I have high aspirations, that’s all! I’m not super organised – I’m almost always late, very messy and chaotic. As Flylady says, I’m not “born organised”. And I won’t even comment on being a hands-on mum. Parenthood did not come with a manual and there’s no customer service to call when things go wrong. I don’t think I’m doing the whole ‘parenting’ thing right. I used to have hundreds of theories and staunchly believed in them but now I have four kids and no theories. Someone famous said something like that once. I’m just rolling with the punches and eventually I will be able to walk out of the ring. Battered and bruised. But out of the ring. (And possibly be like the woman who went to bed for a year!)
Celebrating 20 years of arguing in style, and getting bruitful results!
Celebrating 20 years (almost) of parenting without a manual
Celebrating 20 years of mess!
Celebrating a happy relationship with food
When I try to uphold a perfect standard and I spend days eating deliciously unhealthy food I start disliking myself and my body. I start resenting my imperfect proportions and beat myself up over my lack of willpower. But when I accept my imperfection I can let go and allow myself to enjoy food and then later enjoy getting back on track again.
Celebrating an imperfect me
Here’s to celebrating 20 years of a brutiful rollercoaster journey of love!
A new-look website!
Most of my loyal readers will know that I disappear of the blogosphere regularly – I’m known for it. Come one family hiccup, event or emergency, and it ‘over and out’ from me and blogging and coaching gets put on the back burner. But recently I’ve been very active on my site as yet again, my website got hit by serial spammers, who were leaving up to 3 comments per minute on my site whilst I was carrying on with life with blogging-on-the-back-burner, happily unaware. The last time something like this this happened, my dd was just born and I just wanted a quick fix to the site. Eventually it happened again, and I was advised to leave Joomla and move over to WordPress but it was a mountain I didn’t want to climb, an area of my life that I was burying under the sand, a pot that was on the back burner with the gas switched off. So again I opted for a quick fix until a few weeks ago when it became apparent to me that I could hide from my website demon no longer and also was helped by my new brother in-law who is a…. web developer! And here it is! Ta-da! A new look website which is more organised and accessible than before, and much easier for me to manage, alhamdolillah!
Success – do it your way
On the coaching front, I am back in action, helping ladies and couples to improve their marriages. I was recently asked what my success rate was. For me, it all depends on what one’s definition of success is. For some women, separation or divorce is success, while for others, better communication and boundaries is; while some couples need to be more conscious of being respectful and appreciative of their other halves.
Speak up against unsafe behaviour
When mentoring and coaching, one of the things I encourage ladies to do is to recognise when they are presented with unsafe behaviour and to see it for what it is: unsafe. Once ladies start to see the behaviour as unhealthy and inappropriate, they can then speak out against it. It’s surprising how much we have been conditioned to thinking that unhealthy behaviour such as manipulation, blame, emotional withdrawal, etc is normal and acceptable, but it is not and remember, when it comes to any form of unhealthy behaviour, silence is never golden.
