Exams, Work, Visitors and Omega Heatwaves.

Six am. The coolest part of the day right now as we have eclipsed midsummer. I sit propped up in my bed, the sheets strangled and pushed to the bottom of the bed. Thandi lies at my feet, closer to the whirring fan that has worked overtime for the last 10 days. I’m awake early because I slept with my window open and my shutters not snapped shut to profit from the night time coolness. The coolness (it’s hardly that cool, but in relative terms, it’s a welcome relief) is the compromise for the early start to my Sunday. By 9 o clock I plan to shutter my windows and block out all manner of Omega Dome hotness which broils like a furnace out there. I really don’t enjoy shutting out the light, but when it brings unbearable heat, I’ve come to accept that I can alter my personal stance on some things in my life.

The days of June have ticked over with a relentless monotony. Actually, that’s a very bold lie. It’s hardly been monotonous. In our home the days have been spent navigating Alex’s final exams, dealing with my own torrid emotions and trying to navigate my professional career and finally a happy visit from my brother. As a result I’ve not had any time or emotional space to sit and write, neither for creative purposes, nor to even file a life update here.

So I sit here in a circle of tossed sheets and whirring fans, the sun rising slowly across the drying canola fields outside my window, and I try to put words down in my haste to share one essay a month. Will I fail to deliver the goods this June?

What have I learnt this month? This isn’t something I typically reflect on, the monotony of my day to day means I tend to forget to take a moment to teach myself. This sounds a little too Wellness-y for my typical musings, but perhaps it’s something I should bring to my life.

I can say that finally after 12 years, and I’m sorry to admit it’s taken me this long because it’s too late, I’ve finally figured out that Alex despises doing exams. She hates them so much that she morphs into a child that has anxiety attacks at the drop of a hat: look at her sideways and she’ll seek shelter in a darkened shuttered room and conjure emotions from thin air that eventually cannot be ignored. As for the exam prep stress, she feels deeply in her heart that she will fail, and that she will never match up to anyone around her. Between you and me, she’s never been studious, so I have to be honest: these same thoughts have sat with me, but trying to bring her back to earth as she’s spiralled has been a full time job. Early in the month, as I did my own spiralling (I’ll elaborate later) I figured it would be best to simply leave her at home with her books and I would go about chores without hassling her.

It was the wrong decision. It turns out I need to be a physical presence even if it means leaving her to the books and poking my head into her room every hour or so. Even if it was to talk her off a wall.

I now have huge regrets that it’s taken me her entire school life to see this side of her. Perhaps I gave her too much room to opt out of life during the first 2 years of high school because of Anton’s glioblastoma but let’s be honest- I couldn’t have done it any other way. Needless to say, as she arrives at her final exams less prepared than what she could have been, there are still consequences to that shitty brain cancer. (God, it really is a trauma that keeps on giving, isn’t it? My eyes have just welled up with tears as I reflect on Antons absence in my daughters life as she finishes school.)

So yes, I have learnt that Alex doesn’t cope with school and exam stress, and that I have indeed made the correct decision in whichever way my career has been going since the tumour arrived in our lives. As much as my girls have found their own personal journey into life going forward, with their girls friends, and the Boyfriend, they do still need me to be present and as a chef, it means I need to be selective about my career. Life happens, and sometimes it’s unpredictable- perhaps more than sometimes- but being together and present to take stock of changes, of emotions: well, they’re more important than we sometimes realise.

Which leads me on to my own situation. A year ago I was grateful to receive a job offer from a friend who had recently bought a restaurant. The offer was perfect: carte blanche on the kitchen menu, a generous creative space for me which I’ve always deemed important, but also, the working hours were perfect from the perspective of a single mom: 35 hours a week, weekdays, lunchtimes. 3 boxes neatly ticked to serve me. I was, and remain, truly grateful to O for giving me this opportunity.

Except the job didn’t pan out to be Everything: a reminder that it was too good to be true, and that there’s no such thing as easy money. I won’t break down the long list of things that have troubled me over the course of the year, but for the most part I pushed through a tedious, difficult workspace because the working hours suited me right down to the ground. Also over the course of the year, business has dropped so the cash register is empty. Salaries haven’t been paid in a timely manner, the menu offer has changed to accommodate inventory management, and my deepest regret: I’ve become a bitchy resentment filled ‘friend’ to someone who had my interests at heart.

Okay, that’s not my biggest regret. My biggest regret is that I’ve had a taste of a ‘normal’ work day, and I’m not fully prepared to give it up. But the options to maintain it: well, let’s just say that I’ve hit my own wall. I’ve slammed so hard into it that I’m struggling to climb over it, and I’m merely trying to choose a path around it: left or right?

So redundancy looms. It’s imminent. With the redundancy I at least can profit from unemployment benefits again, and given I still have a bucket allocation circa 2025, I have a little stop gap to allow me to look for a new job. Exactly what that new job will look like is my challenge.

Already I’m dispirited with the food industry food safety hygiene standards and I’m craving a new career outlet. Which at this stage in my life I can’t afford. I need a proper paying job with the benefits that come with that, which means my options are to remain in my chosen career. And in order to maintain the work life balance of which I have grown accustomed, my choices in jobs remain cafeteria style positions.

There is a part of me that isn’t enamoured with this line of careers. Mindless, cheap food for which so few people remain grateful for. I’m a snob under all these social layers, so I don’t rate it very highly- professionally anyway. But I was also raised to do what’s expected of me: work to be the best I can be, provide for now and the future. Where do I fall on Maslow pyramid of needs? Or better question: what have I achieved so far in my life to determine my Maslow standings? 🙃

The fly in the ointment is that I’m due to apply for a new residency permit in a years time. In the 13 years I’ve been here, we’ve always applied on Antons work permit, and it would always be a shoo-in. Easy-peasy-lemon-sqeezy kinda shoo-in. My application next May will not be that. I WILL NEED a proper job contract, and with at least 6 months of payslips behind it. Plus, in an ideal world, that job will best be offered by a company of reputation. In other words, I can’t take the next 6 months to undertake a bakers course, or attend university to – I don’t know- maybe launch an entire new career?

Except we all know full and well, I don’t have that personality, so it’s just the little voice in my head that whispers to me in my moments of insecurity and anxiety.

Anyway, truth be told, I did spend the early days of this month trawling job sites, landing on cafeteria positions time and time again. It makes the most sense, because while I don’t relish the mundaneness of a cafeteria, I do relish a 9-5 weekday job, so I will set aside a part of my values for, well, a different set of values, and I applied for various offers. Sadly I have received a resounding no thanks to 100% of those applications. And that’s a whole other set of emotions that’s rattling around in my brain.

Of course, all that came to a grinding halt at the arrival of my brother for his first ever visit to us in Strasbourg!

I’ve always been quite pragmatic about our South African friends and family coming to visit us in Europe. It’s quite ridiculously expensive travelling to Europe on the South African Rand, even if we can provide a bed in our home. The cost of the flights is one thing, the visas another thing completely if you have to travel on the Green Mamba, and when you get here, the cost of even a bottle of water is ten times more expensive (never mind a pint of the local brew) and of course the language barrier also plays a role. So I’ve never expected the South Africans to visit. Over the years various family members have come, for which we are grateful for, but never my brother. I won’t lie, I’m not certain he would have made a point of coming this year of it hadn’t been for my girls telling him very pointedly last October that he’s never been to visit and he owes us one 😆. So maybe a small about of guilt played into it, but there he was mid June trekking the 24 hour door to door journey across the mass of Africa and the Mediterranean ocean, hooking a right turn into Germany and a bus across the Rhine to where Beth met him at the train station and took him home. He brought the (South) African sun with him and it was a real treat. I took the week off work and while we might not have done all the fun filled things we could manage, we touristed and spent some great time together- something that doesn’t come as easily when we happen to travel to South Africa for our own extended holidays. I enjoyed showing him how our life goes on here, what’s normal for Alex and Beth, and we spent a week actually sitting at our dining room table eating meals together (something that has fallen by the wayside over years of complacency). My girls got to see a different side to their Uncle Gra, and likewise for him, he got to see my girls in their own skins.

I will forever be grateful to anyone who does undertake the journey from South Africa. Thank you Gra, for everything. 🤗

It was a little bit emotional being here at this waterfall, one we’ve visited frequently with Anton, to not have him present.

Finally, as the moment the earth hit her summer pinnacle and began her spin away from the sun, Europe was caught in the clutches of an intense heatwave. It was fun for the first 3 days. Less so after 10, watching the earth turn brown in the absence of water, possibly even burnt to a veritable crisp, my two pairs of shorts being recycled through the wash quicker than normal, and watching poor Thandi literally fade in the oppressive heat. There is no point in trying to walk her, and as we went to bed last night I could hear her panting. She was extremely grumpy with me when I picked her up, dumped her in a bath and sprayed cold water over her, soaking her literally to the bone. She finally settled down after that, and I’m certain we’ll do the same thing later. Today is finally the turning point.

How I’ve existed at home since Thursday.

In general this weather pattern has been the talk of France all week. Possibly (if I read correctly) a high pressure meteorological pattern, that typically moves, got trapped between low pressure systems and turned the land into a pressure cooker, impossible to allow cool air to move in. Heat from the north of Africa as well as unusually high ocean temperatures has all added to it: global warming is the word, and it hasn’t helped that I’ve resorted to driving everywhere this week- the car’s aircon too much of an attraction.

But summer has begun, and my girls are now officially on holidays. It’s going to be another period of change for me as they each have their own sets of summer plans, leaving me on my own at home for occasional weeks. Alex has finished exams and her heart is lighter than I’ve seen it in a very long time. Beth is happy to bury her nose in various romantacy novels and there is a general lightness around them.

Honestly, she’s not called The Drama for nothing.

From my personal side, I have realised that my entire social life seems to prefer drinking wine with friends – in pursuit of lightness. While this is a perfectly reasonable aspect to my time off, I think it’s time to branch out into marginally more holistic (??) avenues, and perhaps even to find a group of other-minded friends (so that I don’t wear down my current group to fatigue). The acceptance of this moment is one thing: the action therein a completely different experience. I’m not saying New Year, New Me – but another step in the journey of personal growth is becoming a much-needed part of me.

Gosh, I can’t describe how grateful I am to so many lovely women.
❤

And on that note, I shall bid you adieu. I’ve finished this just in time to whip up a gas-braai lunch (I couldn’t be bothered turning a stove plate or oven on). It’s sad knowing the height of summer day is now over, and in preparation for the upcoming Strawberry Moon, here’s a flurry of sunset photos to appreciate.