In conversation with ourselves
It’s a 16 days for everyday for many things. And there really ought to be no more victims. But they are, and its never ending. And so it is a 16 days for every day. For every single day.
Wearied by the marks of time. I have questions.
It’s the worn tale of many. But it doesn’t make it any better or any more acceptable. A friend of mine who has been in a steady relationship for just on two years, the kind of relationship where the couple in question are as much lovers, as they are friends. The time was theirs, doing most things together. Growing together. A healthy relationship by all accounts. Then they got pregnant and he gives her either or’s. She will have an abortion or he might walk away from the relationship. From her. And as such he now tries to walks away then. He doesn’t try for the staying bit, he tries for the walking away. The decision as simple as that. As that black or white. He alone now determines the bottom lines.
And I have questions.
Why is it that this still remains so easy and so prevalent amongst peers. Im not talking a situation of people in their early twenties here. With issues of youth, and money, and lives to map out. Im talking young professionals, educated and somewhat privileged – in the sense that the tools of building a life a little more in their possession, than a vast majority whose path is more arduous. Where the practicalities are not the biggest issue in question, just the strength.
Why is it that men a**ume they have more to lose than the person who must carry and deliver this new life. Why is their fear of more value when a woman’s seems so eternally bound to selflessness regardless. Yes, he is scared, but so is she. Yes, relationships don’t always make it through, and it is also an age when you don’t have to get married. But men are still not trying, just that. So we can stop having women who weren’t blessed with immaculate conceptions having to go through the ever so painful experience of 9 months of carrying alone. Sad people giving birth to sad people. Where is the responsibility in having sex with someone and being party to them being on contraceptives and then when luck runs out so do you. Where are we going, what are we building when we have forgotten not only responsibility but compa**ion, honour and a relative shame. What is this business of men demanding abortions of women who they claim to love, when the decisions taken with regards to a sexual life together, are taken together. So he says get an abortion or we doesn’t stand a chance and she says but if I do this, at a stage in my life where I cannot justify why I have to let this baby go, I will hate you. And with one swoop he kills them anyway. There goes the trust then, even if winds blow a certain change of heart, who you remain as, is someone who didn’t want his child. And who she is now, is a woman who must go home and not only tell of an arrival, but that the father may not come for the journey. And even though hope knows no boundaries, she is not the first and she certainly won’t be the last.
Its messed up at that place where he even thinks he possesses the luxury to simply walk away. Are there not enough of us who come from single homes, are we not too many already. Are we not familiar with this pain. How quickly 'we' gets forgotten. How lucky for him. We chained to our wombs. And our wombs chained to our hearts. You work this, you don’t run away, you work it. It WILL change you and you WILL grow. Life is about growth, you cannot avoid it, to run is to stunt your development and you will always traipse through yours only half you and haunted. Life experiences are about building the internal muscle to deal. It is what makes the difference.
And this begs a serious mention for fathers who are being men, who show us something else. Its not easy, and its no norm but you are out there. You are the future and you change today. You stand tall amongst men.
It also brings up the selfishness and anti progressive behaviour of limited women who abuse some of the mechanisms in place to satisfy their own ends. In the same way men differ, so too do women, and the tragedy here is that some of the casualties are the women who are actually worthy, those are our soldiers who are falling down, cut down by the ways of abandonment. For then there are women who lie about some of these things when they could be better people themselves. And they muddy the experiences of others. And then you’ll catch people being silent, their tongues caught because now these challenges always stand so up for debate because we let ourselves down. It’s a reality of intricacies like women who also use abortion as a means of contraception, in a time when sex without protection is a little more than about babies, like you will die. Disrespecting themselves so bad that they disrespect life itself. In as much as it is a call for the men of our time to see and grow, it is too a call for women to take the risk of respecting themselves and other women too. There are experiences that provide a common thread, but it is a most a frail thread. For when the facts state that there are more women than men in life, we need to be asking ourselves some questions on the relationship we have with ourselves. Our understanding of where we stand in relation to our bodies, our loves, our lives, the men we are raising and to other women. We as young women need to start asking ourselves some questions. Do we, to begin with, believe in some of things we have other people getting up and addressing. It’s not showing. We do not know how to support other people and anothers misfortune is always just anothers gain. The change is not going to come from only upward movements, greater titles, more acquisitions, the garnering of an endless stream of props. The perimeters that govern the rules of engagement are not defined by that, its in behaviour where you will meet yourself.
We are so comfortable in making separations between how we conduct ourselves in our own small spaces and what’s going on outside there. The greater picture is reflected in each and everyone of us and our decisions and choices, in who we are every day. We are a people who cannot be accountable in our own lives, and then we grow and we are shapers of destinies and nation builders, when we stand a people who cannot take accountability in our own lives right now. And then we wonder why things are the way they are. We cannot see where it begins. That woman pressing fraudulent charges is a thought to be upstanding member of society; the guy speaking on our behalf, he sleeps around and puts his wife at risk of contracting a virus. No different from us, just people who are more in years, but who once stood where we are, faced with the same choices we face. Choices they just couldn’t be bothered to have made differently. Why? Because its uncool, because taking responsibility is boring. Too much trouble is it. We rarely pay attention to the things that actually do matter in life, it’s everything else but those things. And then we want to be indignant, surprised, when we leave much to be desired as well. We are those people right now. And right now already we can barely take responsibility. Right now.
Sieze the day. Don’t take things too seriously. Live for the moment. But then as life will have it, im not quite sure why we seem to not know this by now, as life will have it – the moment will turn on you. And then what.
We are unprepared to be the people we need to be to confront and rise above these things that tear us apart, that colour the texture of our society. We ourselves remain ill equipped to be the people we are looking out into reality searching for. And so we question everybody else but our own selves. Some of the challenges of our time don’t just ask us to engage, they ask us to change the way we engage. We are being asked to change how we live. Never mind the guy who wont. What about you, why can’t YOU be that person. There is no perfect moment, there is no signal for readiness. There is you and every day making the same choices just a little differently. Its not about grand gestures and big moments, it’s about how you relate to and treat the people already in your life, the people you meet - those you do and dont know. It begins with your immediate world. Who you are is not a moment in the future, its held right there in how you treat your girlfriend, your mother, your sister, your boyfriend, your flatmate, the person who helps out in your home, the person across the counter, your friends. Evene the people you think you have nothing to gain from. You have the power of choice over decisions and actions there. It doesn’t take anybody in particular, no one is more special, more capable – there are only those who bother to try. Empowerment comes from within and change is about learning how, and having the courage, to swim upstream.
We share words when the state of the world asks us to question ourselves, to bring it home. It’s not enough to simply attack how we think. Its just not enough anymore, the truth of all we have been equipped with only comes into being with what we do. In precisely those actions we think have nothing to do with anything. They do.
Be a better you.
I may have been preaching but I’m just saying. This is what’s happening. This is us. And It makes it a 16 days for every day.
For every day.
