Belly Up....??

So I've been musing.........
And perhaps I'm starting to believe that a friend of mine might just have been right a few years ago when he told me that I might just have too much testosterone in me..........Lol.

Baby...baby.......and oh baby!
I think the natural inclination for most people.......at least where I come from....is that once you get married, there should be the advent of little ones somewhere along the way.......
And then people talk about all this 'maternal instinct' stuff........hmmmmmmmm.....something that I just don't relate to....

I watch other women coo-coo over babies, or the idea of babies...........and I just have no connection to all of that.
I hear other women talk about how much they want to have kids......and I don't really have connection to that intensity of feelings either........
I mean, am I missing something??
Did I miss some training or class while growing up? Lol.

Not that I don't want to ever have 'Mini-Me's' at some point in the future.........but I don't really sit thinking about it....or planning for it.......or yearning for it either.
I like kids.....I really don't mind them...and I actually think I would make a fantastic mother.....
But I also really like the way my life is so far. Lol.
So people would call that being selfish huh?

Sometimes I think it's because we are sooooo attuned to the fact that marriage and kids have to go together......Or that when you reach a 'certain age', you have to be at that point in your life......
But who's to say one size fits all??

I would really like to find out from other women, did they always WANT to have kids???
But, I'm certain that I might not get the honest answers I seek.....because it would be viewed negatively if someone actually came out and said, NO, I really didn't want to have kids, or have these many kids.......It's seen as something bad, so I don't think I'll get the honest responses I seek.

When I was a teenager...I thought boys were stupid (I secretly to some measure still think this).....and I wasn't interested in boys.......and everyone around me was running after some boy or the other, having crushes, relationships, etc etc.........And I didn't want any of that..........I pretended, just so that I could fit in....and so that people wouldn't view me as being weird.......I bet in this day and age, if I was a teenager now and communicated that to people, the natural answer would be perhaps I'm gay..............
But I'm not gay...and I wasn't having any of those thoughts then either.......But I still wasn't like everyone else swooning over some guy.........just like I don't swoon over the idea of babies now.

And so here I am at a later point in life............with a different set of issues......
Are there people who have kids because it's the expected thing to do??
Would anyone ever admit to that???

I see myself as a mother in the future......God Willing.........but just not now........
And I find babies cute......I don't gush over them....but I find them cute (most of them), and some actually delightful....Lol.......
But that doesn't kick in this 'maternal instinct' that I envision.......the thing that people are always talking about. Lol.
Another funny thing is...........everyone always thinks that I don't like kids......I guess because I don't Oooh-Aaah at them like everyone else.......and yet, I actually do enjoy the company of kids.......Just smart, well-behaved ones. Hahahahaha........And ironically, I think kids like me too........and that surprises people.

As women, we are expected to want babies...and dream about prams and booties...or something along those lines......It's set up as the unspoken sphere of womanhood.
So does it make you less of a woman supposedly, if you don't fit that category?
Do people think there's something wrong with you?

When I was single, there was this immense pressure to get married.......but I held out.....until I found Mr. Right.
And then it turned out that people were putting me under a microscope thereafter, because I did not fit the 'Wife' type. lololol.......I guess I don't fit the 'Mom' type either then......
So these magical emotions and bonds that other women have about children, I don't have it.
And I suspect there are other women out there like me...................
But perhaps public censure keeps them wary to speak out their true thoughts.

Women Are People Too...!!!

I recently read an article that I felt very close to my heart, because I remember a few years ago where I was at a point in my life trying to find myself.....
Who am I?
As we plod through life, we define many roles as women.....as daughters, sisters, friends, girlfriends, wives, mothers, aunts, grandmothers.............all rounded and carefully molded to fit our cultures and the communities that we grown up in....
But at some point in every woman's life........and perhaps several times in a woman's life.........she reaches a point where she tried to define herself as an individual..........And usually society is not kind to these kind of thoughts.

For me personally....that question.......Who am I?...led me down the spiritual path of Islam, in which I found peace, balance and a place for myself within society......That was my identity....And I could be ultra 'feministic', and yes still be a good person......I am still me, and I am a Muslim woman, and in the midst of all that, I still play all the roles I have to play in connection with my fellow human beings....without losing myself in the mix.
Sometimes this struggle however, leaves many ladies confused and tormented...And they may not be able to identify what is the root of all the conflict.........

The words of  BETTY FRIEDAN fifty years ago had immense power, and I think up to now, will still resonate with many women.
So despite this being a tad bit long.........this blog is dedicated to her..............and to all those girls who have always been told, that there is a glass ceiling.

"It is not easy to put into words a feeling and a problem that women find harder to talk about than almost anything - including sex. it is in fact such a complex and elusive problem that - as prevalent as it is - there is not yet a psychological term to describe it. Essentially, this feeling or problem is a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning, a search that is going on in the minds of women. This is not easy to put into words because those women who struggle with it struggle alone, afraid to admit that they are asking themselves the silent question, "Is this all?", as they make the beds, shop for groceries and new curtains, eat peanut-butter sandwiches with the children, chauffeur Cub Scouts and Brownies to and from meetings, or lie beside their husbands at night.

There are no words for this search in the millions of words written for women about women these past 20 years in columns, articles, and books by experts that tell us that our roles as women is to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. The voices of tradition and the voices of Freudian sophistication tell us that we can desire no greater destiny than to glory in our role as women, in our own femininity. They tell us how to catch a man and keep him; how to breast-feed children and handle toilet training; sibling rivalry, adolescent rebellion, how to buy a dishwasher, cook Grandmother's bread and gourmet snails, build a swimming pool with our own hands; how to dress, look and act more feminine, and make marriage more exciting; how to keep our husbands from dying young and our sons from growing into delinquents.

They tell us - the psychologists and psychoanalysts and sociologists who keep tracing the neuroses of child and man back to mother - that all our frustrations were caused by education and emancipation, the striving for independence and equality with men, which made women unfeminine. They tell us that the truly feminine woman turns her back on the careers, the higher education, the political rights the opportunity to shape the major decisions of society for which the old-fashioned feminist fought.

Now a thousand expert voices pay tribute to our devotion from earliest girlhood to finding the husband and bearing the children who will give us happiness. They tell us to pity the "neurotic",  "unfeminine", "unhappy" women who once wanted to be poets and physicists of presidents, or whatever they had it in them to be. For a women to have such aspirations, interests, goals of her own, the experts keep telling us, impairs not only her ability to love her husband and children but her ability to achieve her own sexual fulfillment.

How can a woman shut her ears to all the voices of the experts and listen instead to the inner voice within her that tells her something else? Sometimes a woman says, "I feel empty, somehow", or "useless", or "incomplete", or she says it is, "as if I don't exist".
Sometimes she goes to a doctor with symptoms she cannot describe: "I have a tired feeling"..."I get so angry with the children it scares me"..."I feel like crying without any reason". She may spend years on the analyst's couch, working out her adjustment to the "feminine role". And an inner voice may say "that's not it".

A woman may live half her lifetime before she has the courage to listen to that voice and know that it is not enough to be a wife and mother, because she is also a human being herself. She cant live through her husband and children. She has to find her own fulfillment, whatever it may be.
It is such a simple truth.

Betty Friedan
Co founder of the Organization for Women (NOW).
She died in 2006.

No woman knows where her search for self fulfillment will take her.
No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands.
Maybe growth does not come without conflict.
When every woman learns to listen without fear to the voice inside her, instead of smothering it, it may lead - perhaps even more surely than rockets into space - to the next step in human evolution.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves???
Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?
Who knows what sons and daughters will become when their mother's fulfillment makes girls so sure they want to be feminine that they no longer have to look like Marilyn Monroe to prove it, and makes boys so unafraid of women they don't have to worry about their masculinity??
Who knows the possibilities of love, when men and women share not only children, home and garden, not only fulfillment of their biological role, but the separate human  knowledge of separate human beings??"

Fat... .Fatter....Fattest!

So I'll probably get slaughtered by some people for this....And others will just think I'm plain evil.
Oh well.............Same script I guess. Lol:-)
They can't hate me more than they already do!:-)

So I have decided that I'm no longer going to refer to people as being 'Big', or 'Voluptuous', or 'Plus Size'..........
Why??? you may ask....
Because all those terms are a cop out!
They are all just FAT. Yes i said it......and guess what, that includes myself......I'm not happy about it, but I'm not ashamed to admit it, and yes I would like to do something to remedy that situation.

The trainer at the gym today cringed when I said I was fat. He tried to correct me and and say that I shouldn't use that word. Lol. I told him I needed to use that word precisely for the reason that, if I wanted a change in my appearance and health levels, then I would need to hear the truth.

So you see, I think, it's actually counterproductive to use all those cop-out phrases I mentioned. It gives people a false sense of well being, a false sense of security....

You are what you eat. and I had the good fortune of having a very health conscious mother. So I grew up watching her exercise constantly, get us to be active, and get us to eat our vegetables and salads with every meal. She is the REAL Suburban Barbie, and I really hope, wish and pray that I age as gracefully as she is........but she didn't stuff her face every 2 hours with a muffin did she??....No....So I have to come to terms with the truth.
I am, what I eat....
And I eat a whole bunch of things that make me fat.
And I'm fat not by chance, or not because of crazy food additives in the food nowadays, or not by genetics, or for whatever other reason people always find as an excuse to justify their situation.......
I'm fat because I eat more than I need.

The first 2 weeks that I spent in the land of Obama was actually very depressing and stressful...because everywhere I went, all I could see was fat men and women waddling along.......everywhere!..Adults and children too........
If I should point this out, they would all get upset (as people here do ever so often!), and tell me (the foreigner) to probably pack my bags and go back where I came from (as they like to say).
But it really terrified me......and continues to terrify me.....
People are FAT. And I have a pretty good chance of turning into one of them if there is no intervention.

I watched my maternal grandmother, who had raised me, fall ill and die within a couple of months from complications due to diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, chronic kidney failure..........the works!
After she passed away, our diet at home was even more conscious...and i was super active then.......
I have since fallen off the wagon.

People think that my quest to be a certain size is all probably to do with looking good in a sexy bikini or something frivolous of that nature..........My quest to be a certain size is a very real life or death situation for me....
That's how i see it.
If only other people would see it that way.
Some people may argue that we are all going to die anyway.....but then my training as a health provider has also showed me that people can suffer for years from chronic illnesses solely based upon the activity that happens between your mouth and hands............

So I have pretty good chances of remedying this situation.
I don't drink alcohol, or smoke...therefore my ills are inactivity and increased weight, and yes, my BMI falls in fat zone for now (overweight).
There is constant talk here of the crazy obesity levels......the first lady is in this massive campaign to get kids to eat right because of the levels of childhood obesity...........but yet, no one says it just as it should be said, because people here are so obsessed with the thoughts of not hurting other people's feelings (though they would not hesitate to tell me to pack my bags and go back where I came from).........
Bottom line is, YES you are FAT, and you are FAT because you eat too much! So eat less, and get moving.

The first way to change your situation, is acceptance.
And without acceptance, there will be no real realization, no motivation to have a different scenario....
And you cannot accept something if you don't see that there is a problem in the first place. So sugar coating things will not help in changing the situation.

Some friends thought I was probably being funny by refusing to be 'politically correct' about fat people....And there will be some people who will think I'm picking on fat people.......You see, with the proportion of people here, even me, who is currently overweight, still appears to be much smaller than everyone else, and hence giving me a false sense of security too...So you see, they will never see ME as being fat, and they will think I'm picking on THEM and being insensitive.
As I said before, some things need to be said as it is.
I believe as woman, we should celebrate our different body types and shapes, but that doesn't translate into celebrating a health risk....You CAN be full of curves, and NOT be fat....The 2 are not synonymous.


So lifestyle change, here I am!

Do all things come in boxes???

"Would you consider yourselves an Inter-racial couple??"
Up until that question was posed to me, I hadn't actually thought about it......seems funny...but I hadn't really thought about it.....but what does it matter??
My husband is African American, and I am half-Indian and half-Somali ethnicity-wise, AND from Kenya.....
So are we an interracial couple?? Considering that phenotypically, I'm just a normal black woman? :-)

Talking to a gentleman at the department of Immigration gave me a bit of leeway with my kinda thinking luckily.
I asked him, what I should tick, with all those never ending forms that I've had to fill regarding ethnicity??
He said even he doesn't know what to tick because he's from Puerto Rico and doesn't fit into any category available! lolol. And as he rightfully said, it doesn't matter anyway.

I personally think, we human beings are obsessed with categorizing ourselves into every shape and form that we can think of, and somehow for whatever reason that gives us a comfort level.
I've never been at a level where I want to give someone a comfort level.
I want to be as different as can be.

This defiance didn't just come about right away however....It had to be slowly built after years of being in the front line of a constant stream of questioning....
Growing up was not easy....not easy in the least....with nowhere to really fit it, it took me more than 20 years to define who I was, and who I wanted to be.

Since there's a section of Somalis that do not consider themselves African, there is much confusion as to what people actually consider my father's people......African or not? Arab/not? or just Somali!
And since I didn't have a mother with 'ethnic African' roots anyway, my claim on being African, on being Kenyan, was always questioned.....always.
See in Africa, there's always the question of where your rural home is. And seeing that I was raised in the city and knew no other home, it was deemed that i was not really belonging to the land.
Where is your father from? Nairobi.
Where is your mother from? Nairobi.
No! you cannot be from Nairobi................where are you REALLY from???

From a very young age, this question puzzled me.
Every school holiday, most of my friends would go upcountry to their respective villages to visit their extended family.....they would go HOME.
But I never had such a 'home' per se.... My father was orphaned when young. His siblings were in the city along with us. My mothers family was also all in the city, and at that time, there was no concept of Afro-Asians. Despite being a 3rd generation Kenyan, my mother would always still be considered not African. So where was I meant to say I am from??
I never knew how to answer that question.

Then there was the phenotype issue.
The Somalis welcomed me, because I looked like them. but rejected my sisters (well, not verbally, but you could always see it) because they reminded my father's family that our mother was indeed an Indian, and not from coveted Somali bloodline.
The Indians on the other hand rejected me, and welcomed my sisters. My siblings would fit in better with them. I was just too much a shade darker for them to be comfortable with me. And in a society where being lighter skinned is what is defined as the standard of beauty, you can imagine how difficult it was to be consistently judged as the the ugly duckling.

So there you go.....
The Somalis wanted me, but would still always refer to me as the one with the Indian mother..and that rubbed me the wrong way.
The Indians didn't want me.
The rest of my fellow Kenyans didn't see me as a Kenyan...or as being a 'real' African.

So i grew up in a zone here and there, looking for others like myself....others who are displaced from society.

Going to Europe was a relief and a respite. There were no questions there, unless I ran into either one of my biological ethnic groups, then the quizzing began. Who is your father? Who is your mother? Which village are you from? etc etc etc.....
The formula never changes.....
But other than those few instances, it was a real relief. Nobody really CARED what I was and where I was from! Oh the joy......perhaps it is why I was so comfortable there. I never had to deal with that......gave my brain a break.

Moving to the Middle East brought back the all to familiar questions........Aargh!
Where are you from? No, where is you asli (origin)? Where is your mother from? Where is your father from?
Your mother married a black man? There were no Indian men there for her to marry???
The Middle East was a whole new level.
Other than the usual where are you from tirades, they mixed it with the racist colour issues as well.
Exasperating.
Worst of all is, the answers to all those questions are what determines whether you get a job, or good service anywhere, or just about anything done....
Actually worst was when my husband used to be constantly asked by Arabs as to why he married an African woman, when he has the chance to marry a white one, so that he can improve the colour of his children.........!!!
Their issues in that part of the world are just a little too deep for me....

So here I am now....with a whole new set of boxes to tick...this time not mentally, but also in every form that ever comes my way.....what it my ethnicity?
I still don't know the answer to that question.

They assume......
A lot of people do that round the world too, but here it's accentuated....and even when Americans leave their country, they carry that mind set with them. I don't think they are even aware that they do it.

For the most part however, there has been nothing unpleasant so far...or perhaps I'm comparing it with the Saudi Arabia where i just came from, and it would take a lot for anywhere else to reach that level of nastiness.
But really it hasn't been negative.
Just that people have been curious. and because they are so used to putting everyone in a box somehow, they just can't seem to figure me out.

As I said, it took me 20+ years to define who I was, and who I wanted to be.
And I consciously REFUSE to see colour. I refuse to.
I see people.
And just as I don't want people to put me in some box and assume things about me based on what they perceive I should be, I consciously make the effort not to do the same to others.

Why are we so afraid of people different from us?
Why do we feel threatened...uncomfortable....uneasy??
Why are we always striving to put everyone in some sort of category? whether it's tribes, skin colour, religious beliefs, ethnicities, body sizes.....you name it.
Countless times I get the most ridiculous questions and statements ever....like:
"Are you really Somali? but you speak such good English!"
"Wow, you are a very different Muslim. you are so easy going and tolerant to other people."
"Interesting, you seem to fit right into western society. I thought coming from Africa, this would be overwhelming for you."
"You should have married a Somali, and not DILUTED your blood any further"...!!!
And it goes on...........

I would like everyone to do an experiment...and see how many times a day, that you do categorize a person without a second thought? Without even getting to know them first.....how many times do you put a person in a box??? and WHY??