SUCH TIMES

Life is like a song, with a beginning and an end and a melody that pulls on all the heart strings.  It is only a little past 11am as I write this and I am exhausted!  I may have mentioned a number of times over the years, living with our grandmother. It has been 3 months since her recent mild stroke and she has been needing extra assistance daily. She's recovered 97% of mobility but still needs 24/7 supervision. My mum is currently down with a cold so I have to be the temporary primary care giver.   It's hard to accept that this is the new reality with her and all the good memories we once shared are just that now, memories. She's still here with us but for the most part she isn't. That brain disorder that creeps up on the elderly and affects everything we do around them can be such a physical and an emotionally draining exercise. It is not for the faint of heart. Half the time we're fighting them to remember basic things but they're just not there anymore and ...

I read a book a year ago that I still refer to constantly today - Soul Care by Rob Reimer  It answered alot of my questions for all of the trauma I was experiencing in my 20s. And now this trauma.  The book highlights alot on unhealed trauma if not dealt with in one generation can show up in a different generation.  Soul Care uncovers that Jesus may have been introduced in to our lives but it was without confronting the wounds that are still there. To be fair Some of these wounds can be from a different generation altogether and we would have no idea about. But the symptoms or signs that there is unhealed trauma keep showing up. Some of these signs are repeated patterns of sin - sexual abuse in the family, domestic violence, witchcraft or homosexuality are just some common examples of unhealed trauma in the bloodline.  The world today praises fully functioning people as if keeping ourselves busy or occupied to the point of burning out is the way to go in life. Over t...

It's a real battle to stay alive when everything around you screams the opposite of what you're feeling,  When everyone around you is moving on with life,  When you are expected to be strong and carry on  When no one can fathom the depth of broken hearts and shattered dreams  When everyone wants to have a say without considering our hearts of clay  Words wound our hearts and souls in ways we cannot explain  Hearts torn apart by decisions made outside of us  Our nervous systems have a way of shutting out unfathomable pain until we are ready to sit with ourselves face to face  Embracing the pain that keeps us enslaved  This is my way of releasing myself from the bound of this pain...  Keep me in your prayers please I pray  Pray that I remember who to live for  Pray that I encounter what to live for  Enough to keep me alive  Because some days all I remember is the pain  Keep me in your prayers please I pray Pray tha...

We made it home the next day. It finally sunk in that, what happened, happened. I grabbed my things that I could grab out of the car and headed straight for the bathroom. I sobbed until I couldn't anymore and after messaged a friend for a breather. From experience, friendship always makes it better so whenever I had the capacity to do so, I go out for a bit. It's hard to navigate because you don't want to be in the way of people's happy lives with your sad story while trying to heal from it and you also just really want to be healed of it - all the different emotions that overwhelm us when conversation or memories trigger the wound. Feelings of anger and rage that I allowed myself to be put in that position, feelings of hurt and shame that I actually loved this person, feelings of betrayal that he didn't keep his word, feelings of lack that who I am as a person and what we talked and experienced in the 2 years of our relationship wasn't enough for him to keep hi...

Please allow me to express myself. I will get to the constructive bit afterwards I promise.  I wish I didn't have anything against boys and their mums but man if your boy is 16 and wanted to get married and mum got in the way, I fully understand. And understood. But if he is 33 and mum is caught by suprise that he wants to get married is craaaazyyy. Meanwhile mum is fully aware of the relationship the whole time but there's no intentional progressive conversation on what next. Only, "let's wait for the uncles". Crazy to think that we even function like that as Fijians- to put our lives on hold until the "uncles" made their decisions or agreed to the decision.  At which point We are going to assume that they didn't care (or approve.) So we planned it without parents as our 30year old selves. (Lol what is a 30 year old in this Fijian family?)  Nearing the day, out of courtesy we decided to inform parents. Note, I say, Inform not ask for approval. My pa...

Imagine a girl growing up in a safe little good Christian home. Key words: safe, good and CHRISTIAN.  I start here because when the environment in your development stages in life is safe, good and Christian, your views and ideas about life is very limited. Limited to only good things. It's not bad and I'm not ungrateful but I say limited because I had no idea how to cope when bad things happened to me because it was a foreign concept and that it was even possible to happen to me in the first place. God was my protector I was taught and I should be immune to bad things?  I look back and see trauma happened one after the other for me in my 20s and now 30s that I guess is where my safety net comes in. My safety net being how I was raised as default - prayer, Bible and family with phrases like, "just pray about it!"   Great stuff but does not negate the fact that I was raised to believe that God is good all the time and for a kid that was raised in that environment, unco...

For some reason, I thought I needed to be out of the woods of this process to be able to tell the story. At least a proper one where my emotions are not in the way. The danger of doing it anyway is you feeling the rawness of the rage, the hurt, the heartbreak, the bitterness.  But I want to stay alive and telling the story helps me do that. Not for likes and follows and shares, but to simply stay alive.  Cue tears.  There's this misconception among Christians sometimes that nothing bad happens to us if we believe in Jesus. You know because God is good all the time and  Great things He has done. I'm not writing to imply those aren't true. I just want to tell my story.  This blog has been about my journey. Testimonies of God's faithfulness in grief, suffering and celebrating life and milestones. And so the journey continues.  Here's what I've been dealt with: a relationship that I love(d) where he wanted to marry me ..... and then he didn't, the morning of....