Catharsis

I really forgot how good it is to write, how much its helps to clarify and clear.

So this is what i plan to do from now on.

Bunky Bee & Worthiness

He she is my little princess my bunky bee, bunky appeared just as we were about to get on a flight to the UK when asked her name she replied cheekily "bunky ". So i added bee and "bunky bee" it is. 

This is her in my Zara dress restyled buy her. 

There is really nothing more amazing, more beautiful and at times more stressful than watching your child grow up. She is well settled in school and excited to go everyday she is extremely cautious of dangers now, the total opposite of when she was a baby/toddler. Her teacher tells me, it is always her that points out a child swinging from a chair or putting a plastic bag over their head. (this episode prompted a note to parents about plastic bags being brought to school )lol. 

There has been the ongoing eating issue of the past few weeks, she has grown a couple of cm and, up until a few days  ago was eating as though she is a small bird and not a four and a half year old. 

Once her weight had dropped by 1kg i was really starting to worry but after extensive searching i discovered that its common especially after illness... ( i even found a mum whose four year old son ate chicken nuggets and pees only for 6 months) and the less of a deal we make the better. So after a week or threatening

 (K) bribing (me) we just allowed to her to leave the table... go to school etc, having only had a bite or in some cases nothing at all. We just let it go, rule being as always, that if the meal is not eaten then there is no dessert. 

Her school did the same and kept a close eye on her, i bought a seven seas multi vitamin syrup and hung on. It was going well, she was indeed only nibbling but it was a start... until we went to visit the Turkish family last Sunday. The exclamations of how thin she looked and ill were really over the top and very annoying. 

For breakfast she only ate one tomato and my husbands aunt asked me quite aggressively (while he was outside smoking) "What i was going to do about it"  that was after she had given her a bar of soft cream wafer chocolate.

I had to really stop myself from saying more than "nothing" nothing at all" "when she wants to eat she will but giving her chocolate will only suppress her appetite" 

What i wanted to say and i think i said it to myself in an Ally Mcbeal Style mind monologue (remember those ?) 

"Oh i plan on holding her down and force feeding her, i plan on filling her with junk instead of real food so that she is nice and plump and unhealthy" 

and then i let it go just as quickly.....we left very early that day after only staying a couple of hours, K had missed the drama (thank goodness) but said on the way home his aunt had changed back to her old self since receiving a pace maker.

He was actually right, a few years ago she was, in my eyes a quite mean gossipy woman with a broken soul after loosing her son when he was in his late teens. She routinely treated her only daughter terribly and berated her husband constantly.She was loud and demanding and very bossy, then she had a heart attack and a successful heart bypass that left her with heart problems. She became more open, she had much greater depth, spoke more softly, she told me her dreams and her fears. She was humble and kinder she even stopped talking about her illnesses. Then last year she was given a pacemaker, so she is back happy and healthy but the closeness i had developed with her is gone, she is the same person of course but i miss her....

It made me think allot about dimensions or levels of ours lives, i mean if we are continually working towards something (i don't believe it is an up or down ) then it is only natural that we have to go sideways sometimes to heal old Karma or learn something. I myself even did this this past week. I hope she starts working towards something again , it will certainly make Sunday breakfasts a lot more pleasurable. 

And Ceyda, on Thursday afternoon at 3pm at school, after not eating all day she told her teacher she was hungry, alarmed they ordered her her favorite Lentil soup and bread and the spell was broken. Friday she asked for a boiled egg and toast no crust as though there had been no 4 week window of none at all. K and i sat looking at each other as she demolished the lot. Oh the joy.That day she returned and asked for Hot Dog as it was Friday treat day .. 2 hot dogs later, a bowl of strawberries and a banana.. i was floored and that the way its been the last 2 days, in fact the volume of food she has eaten is probably enough for a whole week. YEEE HAAAA !!! 

And me, my sideways blip... well there has been the Equinox, and i am feeling a new sense of  loneliness, the kind you get when your life is in massive transition and it feels like everyone you know is ready to move forward or already has... with or without you.

Friends pre Ceyda were never integral to my life, in fact i have gone long periods of time with no friends. When i am truest to myself i am an introvert, i struggle with large groups, I take a long time to connect with people... i can be socially awkward.. yet .i am always the girl, that on the outside appears as though she has many friends. I know because its me that created that persona.

I met some really really fantastic friends though, over the past few years, some like S and S, funny i just realized they both have names that start with the same letter : ). I still truly miss. Expats move. 

When Ceyda was born other great friendships were developed, playgroups were joined i threw myself into social groups, threw parties and became friends with allot of women. We went for dinners, had play dates, gave each other advice supported each other but them the emails slowly stop and the meetings ended. Life starts to get in the way and planned coffee dates are put off and off...and work begins...relationships remain in tack via facebook likes, and cute comments. 

Ceyda got older, and life is changing for me and on Friday for the first time i accepted it. 

(perhaps by going sideways) 

By allowing myself to feel alone, to feel vulnerable and to admit how tough i am really finding it. 

How hard it is to wade through the quagmire of my life, don't get me wrong i get it, i have to do this one alone but sometimes i wonder what i will do when my father is no longer here. Or when mother snaps. 

Who will i call. I am not even a phone person. Where will i be. Our relationship is shattered my father and mine, its sadly not possible to fix on the outside , its something that cannot be fixed... my fathers last memories of me were of him feeling full of disappointment in me. The injury to his brain doesn't allow for the creation of "new", so when i visit i am more often than not reminded of this.

Even if i convince myself that it will not....even if i choose for it not to... will i wake up one day and feel crushed by this and will that be ok ? 

Is that being true to myself or allowing my Ego to take over.

The quagmire is in my head and its called worthiness, and so i will hang on a little tighter, hang out with my elderly dog having coffees on the balcony when i am supposed to be working, because for some reason i feel like i cant breath.

I will ask those that i can for help in the only way i can and understand when it does not come. I will. 

Sunday Rainbows

So Pretty. 

This rainbow is a really good reflection of me right now. I am the rainbow trying very hard to stand out in the dark clouds overhead. Trying to shine. Trying to be true to myself. 

Super Soul Sunday

Oprah has this fantastic weekly super-soul-sunday i havent been able to watch any yet as we don't have Oprah here in Turkey at the moment ( we used to boo hoo) but i read her website and receive her super soul  sunday newsletter. This weeks Super Soul sunday will be with one of my fav writers brenebrown and i a soo want to see it.
This past Sunday i had my own Super Soul Sunday : ) i have been feeling very pushed and pulled, at times i feel as though i am fighting to find balance in everything, at times i literally feel starved of human contact.
(i guess this is what happens when you work from home alone) I find it actually impossible to connect with friends for one reason or another, last week i saw my dear friend N for the first time in 5 weeks i swear i felt like a puppy out to play. I was really super excited and so grateful to catch her before she headed off on travels.
So Sunday was as hectic as ever, Sunday is house cleaning day... washing all the ironing top to toe the house,  by 1pm i suddenly just felt ,well tired and a tad fed up. Hubbie was in the garden with a friend visiting from out of town... Ceyda playing quietly in her bedroom. So i stopped made myself a yummy latte grabbed a pile of books.. my new Brene Browne book Daring Greatly, the power of now.. Ask the angels.. a Deepak book (that i love just opening chapters with and seeing what comes to me ) and went upstairs and lay on my bed ( my bedroom is so beautiful when its sunny the light just floods the room i felt surprised i had never done this, tearful almost that i find it so difficult to to this for myself ) After reading choice chapters of my books i settled down to meditate. I could hear Ceyda in the background and the soft sound of a backgammon set downstairs and then peace. I allowed my body to re balance and rest.
Later i finished cleaning the house & hubbie pitched in when his friend left.

That night i dreamed the most amazing dream, infact i know it wasn't really a dream. I was in this huge white building with no roof, surrounded by just about everyone i had ever met in my life, we shook hands acknowledged each other with smiles it was like being at a huge ceremony and then it began to rain stars literally... it was quite beautiful.

From now on i am going to forge that little bit of time for me.

a bus full of laughs

Oh goodness what an intense time it has been...
today i had an adventure, i literally traveled out of the city and found myself in the strangest way.
I have a new Business English student who wanted private lessons at her home in Bostanli.

So here i am on the bus feeling confident that i will find my way, I change buses and ask the driver to tell me when to get off. So of we go and go and go and go and go... until roughly 45 mins later it occurs to me that we are in the middle of nowhere. I check use my google map and lo and behold , i am indeed miles and miles away from my destination.At this moment the bus driver turns and i see it dawn on him. He forgot, and so began a rather complicated yet seamless plan to return me to where i wanted to go. This ment stopping another bus and speaking to the driver...i sat on this bus for another 20mins, by now it was 11am i had left home at 8am and for all purposes had been on public transport for too many hours and was over an hr late for my lesson. So what did i do, i laughed, i laughed out loud.
There was no sweeping panic or frantic texts... the message was so loud and clear to me.. those who are lost will be found...

oh wow i wish i had has the time to finish this before i posted. Sounds a bit on the odd side the way it is above what i ment to say way that i have this resounding feeling perhaps through guidance that eveything will simply be as it is supposed to. The panic and stress make no difference at all to the end result.

Tired but Insipred

I am sitting in my bed listening to the rain outside, i love the rain in Izmir, we have had the most beautiful few days but the air felt heavy and polluted by wood/ plastic will burn anything to stay warm fires. Last night after sitting outside in the warmth of the full moon and falling into a deep and tired sleep, i actually woke dreaming of rain. Freshness... just thinking about it makes me want to inhale deeply. Last week i took my first ever solo work trip, i was by all accounts actually quite terrified, the trip went well, by day 3 Ceyda wasnt even too worried about speaking to me  telling me "mummy i will see you in 3 days". I missed her terribly.I realise she is as much my security blanket as i am hers. 4 hour flights are boring..and life doesnt seem quite right when there is noone to read a bed time story to. 

For me the trip made me realise how much of life is a work in progress, the greatest extent of my socialization over the past few years has been a few overcrowded (but fun) playgroups and relaxing coffees with wonderful friends. In an office environment my heart literally pounds, i think that in my case i have actually forgotten how to behave, i even forgot how to argue effectively, words come tumbling out instead of sentences. Work in progress. 

I am tired but inpired to be a good role model for my daughter, to support my quite awesome sister and find a new sense of balance. Life is still complicated, two weeks ago we/i sold the remaining shares of our company here. Leaving behind failure is not an easy thing to do, i have worked very hard on this, on not allowing it to affect me too deeply..talking my Ego out of my mind, cautious to protect those that feel a deep sense of wrong doing by it. The sense of relief was so huge that i spent most of that day finally allowing myself to feel all the feelings that i had been so careful to keep wrapped up. My Ego slept soundly as i tried to clear my soul of the burden, can we do this ? I dont know ? I want to think so.t i do know that i chose not to carry this failure with me for the rest of my life. I have accepted it, learned harshly from it but there will be no scars. 

Wow almost Feb already

So here i am finally finally getting back to blogging. I think i pretty much need it for my sanity these days.

We had a pretty unbeatable end to 2012 and start of 2013 with a family hotel holiday trip. It was magic in all senses of the word We stayed near London at the Luton Hoo over Christmas and then drove to Wiltshire where my mother was born for New Year so we could see family as well. We stayed at Woolley Grange in Bradford Upon avon and loved it there highly recommened to families. Quaint village shopping, beautiful scenery, fantastic Zoo trip.. great Spas... insane amounts of food and far to many French Martinis. This is how is will remember the end of 2012 and the start of 2013.
Ceyda adored spending so much time with her cousins Max, Nate and Jack now we are really looking forward to visiting then in Canada this summer.

Ceyda and Max

Will try to add some more pictures later.

So what are we doing now. We are for now staying in Izmir, I am working on a few project within the family business and trying to stay sane whiclst working from home. So Bodrum is on hold... for now. 2013 is already an interesting year. Roll on Feb !!