Happy week

The loveliness of getting married seems to creep up on me slowly, but surely. It's like waves, actually. Every now and then it whacks you dizzy. And this week is dizzily-happy week!

Why?
1. I saw one of my lovely bridesmaids over the weekend and we had a lovely, big, girly chat on a beautiful winefarm.
2. I saw another one last night (cousin Zaria! She is still as mad as a hatter.)
3. Another one is coming to visit for New Years (New Years in Cape Town, whooohoo!!)
4. In a week and a half's time, another, different one is getting married.
5. I have a gazillion bridesmaids!!!! 
6. Tomorrow is Friday.
7. Work is better (I've been a bit negative lately)
8. I went for a run this morning (AND I've been healthy all day. Not a piece of cake or muffin in sight!)
9. We just booked our tickets to go see mom over Christmas (my mom).
10. I have a beautiful new photograph of husband-to-be on my desk at work. He looks dangerously handsome in it. Dangerously, I say. And I'm marrying him!

Also, lovely filmmaker of Butterfly Films screened a new film this week, and has a new website up. Stunning! Film is about a rehabilitation program running in our prisons now and I think it is a very, very worthy cause. Check out filmmaker's new website and film here.



So the happy list above should give you an idea of my progress, but do not be fooled: the run this weekend went horrific. Besides that I started slow and negative, I also went for a katabox class the Monday before with energetic Michael, the instructor, making us do all kinds of kicks and fancy tricks that had my hamstrings screaming bad words at me. I finished the race, but my time was that of a negative hamstring-carrying girl: 2 hours 43 mins (even slower than the previous one, which I called a 'training run'. Yea right). If it wasn't for a new friend that I made on the way, who knows what that time would have been...
But am going to stop the wordiness now and leave you with some pics.

so you can tell how positive I was if I was counting kilometres.....

like I said. Incredibly positive. See that puddle? that was me, not the water

more positive....

It was only when I started focusing on the view that it got a bit better. Shortly after, Vanessa entered the picture...



well done Vanessa! She got her pink number - this was her 10th Winelands marathon!



Eat Pray Love

I saw the movie this week and I think it's a good theme for the past week. For a good life, actually - not just one year of finding yourself. Elizabeth Gilbert and Oprah has this belief in common, something I believe too. Oprah says: "If you want to accomplish the goals of your life, you have to begin with the spirit."

I am so with them on that.

As I said last week, I was struggling with the premarriage course, but decided to reserve judgement until the end. I was right - it turned out better than I thought. Here is the lowdown....

This is what I wrote after the first installment of the course: (putting it in red so you can feel the fury)

Eeeeeeeek. It was damn difficult to spend an entire weekend focusing on our relationship! It left me feeling like our relationship has been put under a huge magnifying glass and taken apart by strict-looking, purist scientists. Some of the discussions went like this: in some homes, people have different cloths for the floor and the dishes, whereas in other homes, people just clean up a mess on the floor with the closest dishcloth. Which one do you usually use and what do you expect your partner to do? Then filling in exercises about the rules (like aforementioned one) that your parents had in their home.
Pause, please.
Rules? RULES??? People have rules in their marriages? AAAAHHHHH!!!!!!

As you can see, I wasn't very positive. I also don't respond very well to structure (as I now know), so the rigid hours - starting at 9am sharp, having only 10 minute coffee breaks and about 3 seconds of lunch - did not go down well. But then a few things occurred to me. A few surprising, important things.

1.) We made two lovely friends on the course. It's another couple who loves blogging, computer games and wedding planning.  (please tick off 'making friends' for this week).
2.) Besides the dishcloth issue, we revealed some serious stuff about ourselves to each other. Necessary stuff, but in a safe environment. (When the dishcloth thing came up, we just gave each other a confused sideways glance: 'nearest cloth okay?' - 'totally')
3.)  The fact that the couples who were presenting doesn't have divorced parents, doesn't make them perfect or naive, it just means they have less trouble believing.
4.) Some of them actually have divorced parents.
5.) Every single couple in that room will be there to pray for us when we someday need it, and I'm sure we will, because most couples do.
6.) God and praying suddenly starts making a lot of sense when you realize that in fact no matter what we promise or do, we can't guarantee anything. We can only trust God.

I gathered some useful info from some of my married colleagues as well:
Maret: "We didn't do a course, we went to the dominee. He said that we must remember there are different things that make a woman and a man feel loved: Men want to know that you trust him with your life, that you respect his opinion. Women want to feel safe and loved. Remember that and you should be fine."

Saafia: "When I went to the molenaar before I got married for my 'coaching', I was very negative. I thought he was going to give me the whole obedient wife spin that muslim women have to know. But it was lovely. He said 'Saafia, don't worry. Just remember if you want to paint the house blue, you can't just paint it blue. You must discuss it with your husband first. And that's true for most of the rest, too.'"

So last night we cooked pasta for our new friends from the course (also made quick emergency trip to get pizza after fiance had an unfortunate run-in with the pasta), ate chocolate, drank wine, and thanked God that we have this wonderful life where we can eat, pray and love all in our very own home.

Amen!

PS: A picture of Oprah for you. Not that I think you don't know what she looks like. But guess what? This picture was taken at the cakemaker's. Oprah's had a cake made at our cakemaker!! AAAHHH! I share a cakemaker with OPRAH!!!! It is very, very cool. Very!!!!!! I must remember to ask Jackie (that's the wife of Charly from Charly's Bakery) the story behind it. Apologies to everyone who thinks this is very superficial. I am sorry, and I promise I did not know this when I chose the cakemaker (and would not choose a cakemaker on this basis), but I am v, v big fan and I .... AAAHHHHH!!!!! .... can't believe it.

  

Fearless - a sneak preview to the next post...

(Isn't she stunning? I love her story)

premarriage courses freak me out and I shouldn't design wedding dresses

Happy Movember! Fiance is growing his moustache and this is in support of him. Whoohoo!

Despite my happy introductory pic, I must admit this week has been quite a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Fiance and I started a premarriage course last weekend, and it has awakened all kinds of fears in me that I am struggling to deal with. However, I have decided to reserve judgement about the course and how I feel about the whole thing until it is finished, which is this weekend, so for now I am just doing a progress report with some pictures of my week...

Making friends: We have a new housemate! I shall call her Housemate 2 for now, until I have a better description. She came at a very opportune time - I was in the process of an emotional cookie-baking week. 



Decorating batch 1



Batch 2 before it went to the oven



The (very rickety, but well-loved) oven



Our lovely kitchen

 Running a marathon: Marathon? What marathon? What with all the cookies and emotions flying around, I haven't been doing much in the line of running. But yesterday I ran 7km, so at least I can't say I've done nothing. I also entered for my next 21km - to be run on 20 November in Stellenbosch. Yay for running! 


Planning a wedding: I have found the dress!!! Friends, I realize you might be confused, because Fifi was supposed to make my dress, right? Well, she did. And she did everything I asked her to do - everything! But the problem is, I am not a designer. Nor am I a dressmaker or awesome wedding planner that have lots of knowledge about fabric and things. My idea of a wedding dress (which she was probably questioning all along) was actually a bit... impractical. Very. So I paid Fifi her fee, took the dress home and then swiftly packed it in my basket of clothes that I won't use soon. Then I walked into a wedding dress shop and bought the only dress of all the hundreds of dresses that I've tried on the past few months that actually made me look twice. It fits well, it doesn't look like a cake instead of a dress, and it made me feel like I could walk down the aisle on my Daddy's arm tomorrow.     



There it is! Safely packed away in its bag, just waiting to be worn.

Learning something: One shouldn't think things through too much. Sometimes going on a gut feeling is enough. Fiance - like this dress - is my gut feeling. And that's what I'm going to hold onto while we do the second installment of the premarriage course this weekend.

a church, a wedding, God, a friend and two dogs.

I am sorry this is late!!! I am guilty as charged, I skipped my Sunday blogging. To my defense, work was crazy (and still is) BUT my loyal best girl fans gave me a kick in the behind and so here, finally, is the promised post. It is a little emotional, a little spiritual, and a lot of happy. Enjoy!

So I was going to write about a lot of stuff that happened the past week, like the fact that I hung out with the lovely artsgang (see pic).......

artsgang members 1 and 2 - the yoga instructor and the german one. These are the people who you MUST know if you ever visit our little town Mtunzini, in Zululand. they are lovely. These and two below are the people who I can read poems and stories with, and they are always producing new stuff. member 2 thought up the name 'artsgang' for us bunch of looneys.  



artsgang members 3 and 4. number 3 is philosophy professor (can you see it?) and his wife is v. cool. She writes and listens and studies psycology and makes best seafood paella I've ever tasted. They also have a grandhild who is the next Barbie. It's adorable!


...and the fact that fiance and I had a visit with the dads (yes, I have two and their dating. Have been for 16 years). I won't say much about them, besides that they live in Zululand and look at the room we slept in...




yes, that is the new SA flag. yes, those pillows are of the old SA flag. Ask no questions, hear no lies. All I'll say is that my dads have an interesting sense of humour.


I was even going to write that I had a hectic week at work and am thinking of stres management classes and all kinds of things. But then I got to my friend Lesley's wedding and I forgot everything.

So this post is dedicated to my fellow journalist friend and her lovely husband, Pieter. You may have noticed that I don't usually use names, but I've decided to use their names for this post because they are so open and honest about their story, and I think it can serve as food for thought for anyone. This is the part where I get a bit emotional and a bit spiritual...

I remember meeting Lesley that first day she walked into the newspaper office in Zululand and thinking: 'mmm... I don't know if we'll get along so well. She's way too churchy...'.
But then Lesley became a friend, and very soon her churchy-ness became a big comfort in a scary newspaper world. We shared chocolate muffins (I'm lying, we each ate our own!), wished Laurie (the other, fun journalist who didn't yet share our office) would come visit to input stories on the system (I don't think she ever got anything done when we were there, we just talked to her all the time), and we complained about deadlines and difficult sources to each other. Lesley  never made me feel like I should be going to church, or was bad for not going, or anything like that - and this is big, because it is not very hard to make me feel guilty. Whenever something bad happened, she would just say that she's praying over it. I didn't think much of it, but times weren't always easy for me and some days I found myself hoping that Lesley was praying. She seemed to be like my grandmother - one of those people with a direct line to God.

During that time a lot of hectic things happened at the paper. I saw a very nasty accident one day, one I couldn't really cope with. I had anxiety attacks, I felt nervous constantly, I couldn't cross a street without thinking that I might be run over or something. One morning the editor walked in to tell me Lesley was going to be late, because she'd been in an accident over the weekend. She had been on duty that weekend, and parking at yet another accident scene, a drunk driver passing the scene smashed into her little brown VW Beetle. Luckily, she was okay. (But Beetle was no more, and after that she had to drive some other fancy white thing).

A few times she invited me to church, once I even went. For some reason (and Lesley doesn't know this), I was fighting back tears in church that morning. Afterwards I just gushed about the chocolate cake they give after service to take attention away from the teary thing. But the thing is, standing there in church with her felt like I was eight years old again and in my grandmother's church. It felt good. Safe, happy and right - even though church and God still didn't make complete sense to me.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Lesley met Piet. She'd always been a bit of a head-in-the-clouds person, but now she became like a full on airy-fairy, a goner. Half the time you had to snap your fingers to get her back to reality. And she started learning Afrikaans. Her first word? 'Asemrowend'. It means 'you take my breath away.' Three guesses who said that to her! (well done, Piet!) 

About the same time, I took a break to do a course in Cape Town and ran into - which I didn't know at the time - the man who would be my fiance in the near future. Lesley and I started dreaming together. I told her I was crazy about him, she told me she and Piet went on a date. Then I moved and not long after - ping! Engaged! Both of us! Within a month or two from each other, we both promised our lives to these men.

As fiance and I drove through sugarcane farms to get to the venue this weekend, I basked in being home - Zululand. Smelling the sweet sugarcane and feeling the breeze, spending time with the dads, seeing Laurie the fun journalist.

Lesley did not take her eyes off Piet even once as she walked down the path to him. When she got there, she held his hands like she was holding on to life. The wedding car? A VW Beetle. And when it came time to say the vows (they wrote their own), the very English Lesley said hers to Piet in Afrikaans, while the very Afrikaans Piet said his to Lesley in English.

Me? I bawled my eyes out. Couldn't stop crying. At first I didn't really know why. Laurie the fun journalist said it's 'coz I was there from the very beginning, and someone else says it's because I'm getting married soon. But I've been to weddings before - lots of them. So this is where my own history came in a bit. I realized that Lesley and Piet, who have been so very dedicated to each other and who has not for one second pretended that they have the power to keep their own marriage together but that it is God who will keep it safe, has allowed me to believe in marriage again.

I got engaged in complete happiness, but it was mixed with a large element of surprise. My parents (as you might have noticed) are divorced. My friends's parents are divorced... I barely know a happily married couple and before my amazing fiance, who refused to stop believing in me or in love, came along, I was a bit doubtful whether I would ever get married. But Lesley and Piet, together with fiance's dedication, have shown me that it's okay to suspend your cynical side and believe in marriage. To let it be special, to let it be something meaningful instead of just something people do becuase everyone else is doing it. And to put everything into it.

So this weekend, fiance and I are starting a premarriage course at church, and after the wedding, we prayed for our marriage. I am still grappling with these things - I don't always agree on things they say in church and I once even mailed Lesley in a rage about a sermon - but I have found there is one thing that stays constant: the safety. God is a place, like Lesley and Piet, where it's okay to believe in love, in the fact that somewhere, someone is looking over you and your relationship, and to be okay with the fact that you don't know how to keep a marriage or relationship together, because God does know.

Filmmaker has been the drum I bounce everything off on morning walks and communal breakfast in our beautiful home. She is wonderful free soul, it seems, who despite having her own heartaches, still does not hold back in sharing my joy about getting married.

So, dear friends, I leave you with a pic of the happy couple, as well as a few lovely pics from the filmmaker who has been listening to all my laments each morning as we walk the neigbour's adorable dogs through beautiful Bo-Kaap and into the mountain.

congratulations!



ahh... bliss.

Dog and mountain pics by filmmaker at Butterfly Films.