and if April showers bring May flowers, what do June showers bring?

[kuangning]

kenhighcountry asks:

1) With all that you have been going through lately, what one thing has most helped you to keep your balance and your focus?

2) Do you ever feel pressure to live up to an image of yourself that other people might have?

3) What aspects of growing up in Trinidad have remained important to you?

4) When you envision yourself with a life partner, what are his most important qualities? And what flaws would be absolute deal breakers?

5) What does happiness look like to you?


With all that you have been going through lately, what one thing has most helped you to keep your balance and your focus?

He has. No, really. That's my twin, and, as much as anyone in my life, he hears all of my troubles, interjects his own good sense, and tells me when I really should just get something to eat and go to bed, because I'm overwrought. Next to him, however, this forum has. It's very easy for me to become so caught up in my own head that I can't get past it. Getting outside input really is essential for me.

Do you ever feel pressure to live up to an image of yourself that other people might have?

Doesn't everyone? In this forum, despite firm repetitions that it is my journal for me, I have twinges of guilt if too much time passes without an entry I consider "real writing". I do feel that the majority of the people on my friend-of list are reading because they expect creativity and introspection and pure flights of fancy, and that the people I list as friends expect (reasonably, I might add,) my time and attention and that I care about them and sometimes comment to their entries. Most of the time, that's not a hard thing to live up to, and in fact, it does me a lot of good.

Outside of this forum... my parents see me as the dutiful daughter, contributing emotionally and financially without showing that it affects me adversely. They believe their eldest child should be obedient, responsible, and a capable second parent to the younger children. My co-workers expect some level of social interaction during work hours. My managers and the guests see someone who is "on", cheerful, helpful, polite. None of these things are bad things, except at the point where people expect them and I feel I must comply, regardless of how I actually feel. I'm still trying to strike a balance between other people's needs and wants from me and my own for myself.

What aspects of growing up in Trinidad have remained important to you?

Many of them have. I completed my childhood in Florida, but I am still and probably always will be a small-island girl at heart.

I love the fact that I spent my first years as close to the land as it was possible for a child to be. We raised chickens, ducks, and pigs. I know where coffee comes from, from planting to picking to roasting. I've plucked chickens, helped butcher pigs, and learned to know and avoid snakes and scorpions and tarantulas. I've woken up every morning to the sight of mountains through my window, had birds nest under my eaves, heard monkeys on the land my parents owned, and have spread gum on branches to catch wild budgies. I read Jewitt's The White Heron when I was eight or so, and didn't understand why someone would write a story about something so commonplace, or why the stranger would ask Sylvia to help him do such a thing.

The music means more to me now than it did then, perhaps. I was classically-minded as a child, and some of the calypsoes horrified me. Now, I enjoy them more, although there are a few that have always been favourites.

I keep coming back to the stars and the moon and the sea. Trinidad is not even a hundred miles across diagonally. In the space of a few hours, one can be on any beach on the whole island. I spent a great deal of time near the ocean, and I still think of that as "home." Especially by moonlight. After all, the moon inspired my very first words. ;)

Beyond that, however, there's a certain sense of pride that's never left me. I'm the product of generations of traditions and beliefs that came together in that particular way in only one tiny place in the whole world. My generation of children was perhaps the luckiest and the brightest and the best, and I placed well among them. Our parents had had the benefit of the oil boom, and our children are reaping the sorrows of the economic depression. We were happily positioned. I can't recall a single instance of racial prejudice, for instance, among my peers. It was directed at us by teachers and parents, certainly, but we children were mostly oblivious to it, and our lines were drawn on other issues. We never doubted that we would succeed, or that we would even shine, and that's a certainty the generation that's growing up there now doesn't have. The world's closed in on them, in a lot of ways that it didn't for us.

When you envision yourself with a life partner, what are his most important qualities? And what flaws would be absolute deal breakers?

Would you believe me if I said I didn't know, exactly? I've spent a lot of time deliberately not setting out this kind of thing in my mind, because the one thing I do know is that the reality shatters the preconceptions every time. He has to be kind, that I do know. I have to be able to respect him, trust him, and talk to him. That presupposes intelligence, and more than that, he should have something to teach me. He'll need it, to be able to convince me I can achieve more and be happier with him than on my own. ;) He has to be strong to deal with me -- that's that respect thing again -- and strong and gentle is a difficult combination to find, I've discovered.

Absolute nos... unwonted cruelty, to myself or anyone. More than occasional, momentary arrogance, though that doesn't translate the same as "pride". Relinquishing control entirely or attempting to control me unduly, by whatever means. Infidelity. I admire polyamory in theory, and respect people who make it work, but I'm not emotionally capable of it now, and maybe never will be. The point when I discover the man in my life wants to be with someone else is the point when I completely let go and he's free to be with that person, but he'll find it almost impossible to ever convince me again that he wants to be with me and that I'm not simply second choice.

He has to love and be loved by my children, as well. The couple of times I've become involved with men who didn't love children, that's told me there was no future in the relationship.

What does happiness look like to you?

Ask the easy one, why don't you? ;)

A home of my own, and my family in it. A means of supporting us that doesn't take me away from home for most of their waking hours. I'd be perfectly content to be a single mother to a dozen children provided I didn't have to work outside the home to keep the roof over our heads. Note that that doesn't mean I don't want to work; I'd quite simply go mad if I felt I wasn't accomplishing something in my own right. But young children of a single mother who works outside the home are, essentially, orphans. That's not the life I ever wanted for my own kids. Besides that, for my own sake, I want a career that isn't make-work, that makes a difference to more people than just the next set who see the paperwork. I want control of my time and my financial security.

Not that I dream big, or anything. ;)



And, again, if you'd like to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so. :)