Life at forty

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I guess I have not had the life of many naughty forties because I am not married with children, so I do not relate to the many millions of women out there that share their stories about love, engagement, wedding, childbearing, childrearing and in some cases, divorce. I am at peace with that, when I think back on my life and realise that I made the best choices I could at the time. So I have filled my mind, my heart and my soul with different things, or perhaps the same as other women, but simply left out the many thoughts and feelings that they have experienced due to their matrimonial commitments.


I still feel like 25 sometimes, as though I just finished studying, just finished going through the wildest parties of my life, and I am just about to embark on my journey of life, to climb the corporate ladder, although this has never been my ambition, and find the love of my life. What happened at 26 was that I decided to follow Jesus Christ, and even though I was far from a saint afterwards, I think it shaped my lifepath very differently to how it would have progressed without the Lord in my life. It has definitely not always been easy, sometimes I think it has even made my life more challenging than before, but I still love the Lord to this present day and think it was the best decision I ever made, as one of my landlords once said.


Nonetheless, I might be having my mid-life crisis as we speak. I am in that middle, in that centre, in that place where I stand on the brink of it all, between the past and the future. I am present. I stand in that place on the see-saw where I desire to have a straight line on either side of me, the balance, the perfect medium. And I know I must move forward, but the schemata of my life has been distorted, shifted, almost removed, because I do not have a usual life of husband and children. I assumed I would have all these things one day, and that was my mistake. The assumption. Don't assume, said Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, or you make an ass of you and me. I never dreamed of a white wedding, of children. Instead I saw myself in an African village teaching children English. And I saw myself writing up accounts of a business I would run, much like Scarlett O Hara from Gone With the Wind. I also wanted to be a performing singer, then a writer, a songwriter, and a photographer. I saw myself being many things, an explorer or ethnographer, a linguist out in the bush learning new languages and getting to know different tribes. And yet I am in the ratrace, working a 9 to 5 job, actually 8.30 to 6, but let me not get technical now.


If I had to die today, I would die with these dreams that I have come to believe are children's dreams. But perhaps they were actually God's dreams for my life. Perhaps I need to be like a child again. After all, I still love to sing, dance, write, take photos, travel, teach English, and accounting to some degree. I guess I am a simple woman, not simplistic, but simple.

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