What’s in a name?

 

 

Jul: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; so Romeo would,

Were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title.

Romeo, doff thy name; and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all myself.

Rom: I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d…”

Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene II

 

This has to be one of my favourite scenes from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. In a world of titles it just so beautifully illustrated what titles mean to human beings. Titles will lead people to war, titles will cause a person to take responsibility, titles will give security and unfortunately titles are used to hurt and bind. So it goes without saying that it is important what you are called in this world but more importantly it is important what you call yourself. When a child is conceived people want to know whether it’s a boy or a girl because that is one thing that will determine the name and the clothes they will wear at the least. Eventually his or her parents will choose a name that people in the world will call her legally. There are other titles that are given that denote the social status of a person and they are just as important. Are you single, married or divorced and once again these titles will determine what access you have. Some titles are cruel and are solely designed to hurt a person. They are either created by people around that person or in some cases by the person themselves.

 

One thing I realized when I fell pregnant was how important the name I would give my daughter was going to be because it would tell about my attitude towards her and the circumstances of her birth. In retrospect the names I chose for her ended up defining my experience of her. In my naming her she was my blessing, she was a light in my life, she was the very thing that changed the course of my life for the better. I told her before I met her how proud I was of who she was and who she was going to be. I told her that the circumstances of her birth will be nothing to the world changer she was going to be. At 10 months she is like the rising sun itself in personality and in appearance and I am already proud of the woman she is becoming. Every milestone I wish I can record and just keep as a reminder but then I am reminded that she will do more and I don’t want to keep these moments as a standard for her.

 

The way she has impacted my life has been phenomenal. In giving her these names; she made me conscious of the names I had allowed people to give me and the names I was giving myself. I did not like any of it. I wanted to be a light to my daughter, a shining example of a woman living her life unapologetically. I wanted her to be proud of me and for her to take pride in her circumstances. Something had to give and give it I have. This past year has been full of challenges but I can honestly say I would not have had it any other way because beauty and love has come out of it. As Romeo put it ‘call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d”.

 

My old names still want to lay claim and somehow they still find expression in the most fascinating ways that you realise that the things we speak to ourselves truly becomes a living thing that has the ability to determine the things we believe in, what we believe is possible in our world, how kind we are towards ourselves and others. I have decided for myself that the words that reside in my mind are subject to my authority, I qualify them and they must be worthy to be in me. The question on what am I to call myself came up because of the transition that I am going through and I realise how insufficient the names I have been calling myself are. They do not describe the wonderful, intelligent woman that I am. They describe a woman who was just never enough in a situation however untrue that was.

 

The names you give yourself determine what you permit people to do in your life, the words literally become flesh. If you are asking yourself ‘what did you do to deserve this?’, ‘what do you take me for?’ the words you speak to yourself could tell you why that is happening. I must however be honest and say sometimes a situation will happen not because it is invited but to test the validity of your words because sometimes in good faith we speak words to ourselves but have not anchored them in our reality. In other words we are living them superficially. I had a lot of those and things in the past year have happened that have forced me to either walk the talk or discard the description.

 

Your name or what you call yourself should be so well chosen that anyone who encounters you would know who you are without explaining yourself but do not be scared that if people don’t get it right you must show them who you are, unapologetically. Your authentic self is just too valuable to be subject to apologies. So just be and the rest will be with you.

 

Love and Light

Thembile Cele

A Woman Re-Imagined

The ‘little terrorists’

Everybody has a name for the little voices that creep into our consciousness every time you are all revved up to start something. As of last week I call mine “the little terrorists”. Terrorists? How so you may ask? Well these little guys have become so skilled at bombing any attempt I make at changing the things that bother me about my life and sad to say but I am their best helper because I actually listen. One of my dreams and goals is to become a coach specifically coaching women. Up until past few weeks I was giving myself every kind of excuse on why I was not ready to start living that dream. I mean who would listen to anything I had to say? Have I lived enough? What if I know is not enough? What I failed to ask myself was what enough is when it comes to life experiences? Is there an age limit to it? As a result I thought maybe a gradual entry into the life of coaching was necessary until I could get my life right? Once again what constitutes a life “gotten” right? So needless to say I have been a ball of procrastination (terrible mental picture I know).

Line ‘em up and let me at ‘em
Sometimes a spiritual and mental purge is necessary to really latch on something and nothing says purge more than a fast. I have always loved the thought of having doing a fast but I have just never had the discipline to complete one (‘little terrorists’). One thing I noticed from my break-through was how the moment I was alone how the little ones just rose up: “You don’t have finances to do this thing”, “Wait a year or two and you should be to handle it” and when I told them “No more waiting” then a surfeit of other things I was not able to achieve at the moment for example ‘your webcam doesn’t work maybe buy another laptop before you start’. With that blur in my mind I decided let me shock myself and these little suckers and see what happens.
So I started a fast and it didn’t take them very long on the day it was meant to begin for my little friends to throw in comments from the peanut gallery. My plan had been to start the fast from sunrise to sunset; abstaining from food and drink. At around 3 am any attempt at sleep stopped and the little ones started their assault: “Thembi you know you won’t be able to handle this, so why even start” “what are you going to do about your medication, you know you need to eat and drink lots of water” and when I ignored them they started negotiating “ok, fast but at least drink water, you know how dehydrated you become” and when that didn’t work “why start at 5h30 when you can start when it becomes light, isn’t sunrise when the sun actually rises and you can see it?”. I must admit this one nearly had me to the point I was debating the wisdom of continuing with my fast. I ended up starting at 06h00 because I was sitting there listening to these little monsters and it hit me – this is what I do every time I start a project, every time I get excited about something new that I want. I talk myself out of it so much that I stop whatever I am doing and continue with my old ways. What I learnt the past week is that I must qualify the voices. Listen to the facts. Sometimes we focus so much on the reasons that give us no we forget the ones that give us a ‘yes’.

How many of us quit something because we imagine so many obstacles to what we want to achieve that we just GIVE UP. So I have declared a war against my little terrors and the most important weapon I have against them is this: I am aware of what they are. In other words I have their number, their grandmothers’ number and their great-grandmothers. Nothing beats being aware of the things that haunt you. I became aware of these little terrors in the past week where faced with going after my dream I was giving myself excuses on why I should down-scale my plans. Sitting there with a coach I was like “hell” I really need to get rid of these suckers. For me self-awareness is a start, having that internal dialogue to clarify who and what you are and where you are going because believe me if you have a fire in you about something it is already yours , its done you just need to believe it.

I believe.

Love and blessings..

Tell me of that love

Tell me of that love

The kind of love that story books tell

The kind of love that had Samson tear down a house when it was betrayed

The kind that has a man set himself on fire rather live a single moment without it

Tell me of the kind that has a mother turning herself to a human shield rather than her child be harmed

The kind of love that has a stranger rather lose his life to protect a stranger

Tell me of the love that has a man sacrifice his family to save the world

Tell me of the fearless love that sees beyond the Self

Sees past war, hate, anger, bitterness, disappointment

Tell me of the love that just is……

Defining a new path

So why did I start this blog and why call it ‘Raising a Woman of Destiny”?

I believe that women are the answer and problem to everything. Say what you like but when a woman has standards and can hold on to them believe me a revolution is about to happen in there.  I have always been fascinated with how girls are raised and taught because I know for a fact the women that raised me had a definite impact on who I am today.

As a woman,  I find myself concerned about the state of womanhood but also very excited about being a woman in this day and age because things are changing some for the worst and more the better. I want to focus on the better.

 

My Story

I am a 32 year old zulu woman, born and raised in Durban. I am a single woman and a single mother to a newly minted 4 month old girl. Now you may ask why I seperate the two titles, aren’t they one and the same? For me they are not because up until March 26, 2013 I was a single woman and thereafter I became a pregnant single woman. The ‘single mother’ title is newly acquired and a definite work in progress.

I became a single mother as early as 10 weeks into my pregnancy. The last time I saw my daughters father was on my 31st  birthday when I moved out of the home we had been sharing.  The situation was an unhealthy one and one in which if I continued to stay I genuinely believe i would have become a victim of emotional or physical abuse. When a person tells you what they feel and do not want; listen! Do not interpret or analyse because at that exact moment in time that is who they are and if you know you are not about that – walk away. In the midst of telling me the only reason he pursued a relationship with me was because he was lonely, I was told that he did not want the child because the child he wanted he had with the woman he had been married  and since he had no plans to marry again …..and if I chose to keep it I must understand that I would have to raise her on my own. I walked away and so far I am raising her on my own.

 

Motherhood

The one thing that hit me when my daughter was born was how quickly I became conscious of who she is as an independent person, being, woman. I saw her as someone with her own dreams and her very own destiny and this scared the hell out of me. i had a fervent wish to keep her as close to me as I could. There were times I wished pregnancy was longer than 9 months (crazy  I know).  I remember many times during my pregnancy trying to keep at bay the hurt and bitterness I felt at what he had done and vowing to not let him see her because well if he could hurt me like this and I am struggling to understand ‘why he would do this to me?’ what would he do to this fragile life I was nurturing inside my body. What hit me when I held that very pink, chubby, foreign yet very familiar body close to me I knew I had no business building walls around her. I could not afford to make my life experience her life experience. My past her future. Something had to change.

 

Raising a Woman of Destiny

I firmly believe that every person has a unique destiny in store for them and you just have to be willing to experience life with no boundaries for it to happen. I will also admit that up until lately I have been an absolute control freak and I know nothing about going with the flow and being open and trusting but than I look at my daughter and I see this woman whose very smile is like pure sunshine and I wonder why I am not living life like she is.

Like all mothers I want the best for my daughter and so far that has involved me doing things that I have been very uncomfortable with but I knew were right. One of my favourite sayings is that if you are not strectching than you are not growing. So now I am embracing a new path.

 A few days after my daughter was born I made the uncomfortable decision to inform her father that well….. she was in the world. I agonised and agonised over it because I kept on picturing him being his usual self and asking me ‘what I wanted him to do about if she was born, didn’t he make himself clear when he said he did not want any part in her life?’ . That thought left me physically sick so I decided to preserve my piece of mind and not let that nightmare come true and instead of placing a call to him I sent him a text message after months of silence between us.  I got a very unique response “congratulations, umuntu muni and have you given her a name yet?” (I felt like matcheting his head in) and my equally unique response was “its a girl, Lathitha Gabangaye”. Him “What does Gabangaye mean”. Me “,My pride and joy”… the end. So it was not completely the gloom and doom I foresaw but it was nothing compared to the excitement i felt just looking at her. I knew that going forward I had to be clear about what I was expecting from this situation because the disappointment and frustration I felt I had to understand and be able to work through it for my own as well as my daughters sake. I had to let go what I expected the father of my child to act like and rather accept what he was. I had to understand who I was, what affects me and what that meant for my daughter. What I realised was that I could not take my fears and make them hers. As young as she was I had to trust her to be strong enough, wise enough to deal with her own father as I had to deal with mine, I had to take her and put her in that wide open space where anything and everything can come at her and trust that the love and acceptance I give her will be enough for her to come out of whatever experience as a wholesome, happy being. So I said to my Universe We Are Here and We Welcome You.