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Imperfect or I'm Perfect?

Men and women will only be equal when a woman can walk down the street scratch her crotch, burp, fart and still think she is the sexiest thing on two legs. 

So says my husband, who should know.

The truth is that if a woman exists who thinks she is perfect I haven’t met her. I doubt anyone has. I’m sure Kate Moss has issues. Body dysmorphia isn't an anomaly, we all have it to some extent. Maybe it goes with oestrogen.

Fat women want to be thin.

Thin women want to be thinner with more curves.

Old women want to be young.

Young women want to look more mature.

If you have brown hair you want blonde.

If you’re blonde you want to be a red head.

I want my daughter’s curls.

She wants straight hair like me.

All of which is why gyms, Estee Lauder, plastic surgeons, hair salons and Jimmy Choo make so much money.

This is also why I am about to be a part of the Imperfect Project.

It is all about realizing the perfection in imperfection. In seeing your body as representing who you are, where you’ve come from and the strength it took to get this far.

The Imperfect Project takes woman of all shapes and sizes, with scars and stretch marks and orange peel thighs. Real women like us. Women who have given birth, lost their boobs to cancer or gravity. Women who live, love and need to celebrate the woman within.

Remember that movie, Shirley Valentine? 

Every woman, she is beautiful in her own way. 

Quite often we forget to see the beauty in the curve of our hips and instead see that we can’t wiggle into a pair of skinny jeans. Or we focus on unsightly stretch marks and cringe, instead of seeing them as marks of motherhood and fertility. 

What the Imperfect Project aims to do is strip off all the artifice and help a woman find her courage, acknowledge it and worship it.

One woman has just come out of an abusive marriage. One after years of marriage had never been naked in front of her husband. One as lost her breasts to cancer. 

All of them used the project as a way to reclaim themselves, to see themselves as heroes, to see the beauty in who they are.

Does the thought of stripping off for the camera with no protection, no armour to hide behind scare me? Absolutely. It scares me silly. But it also fills me with excitement. And an urgent need to go the spa get preened, plucked and manicured.

By the time I arrived at the Rosebank Life Day Spa for an emergency massage my head was spinning with the implications. 

For many women going to the spa is traumatic. Taking off their clothes and allowing another person, a stranger, to touch them can do the exact opposite of relaxing them and instead drive them head on into a panic attack.

I love going to this spa. I love that they have thought about this and made sure that there is a curtained change room so you don’t have to strip off in front everyone else. I love they don’t see the imperfections and I never feel judged and found wanting. I feel like a goddess.

From the time I walked in the door on Friday afternoon I began to shed all the stress and tension I was carrying around like Atlas. So I shrugged it all off and wandered into the change rooms. 

I eased my aching feet out of the killer (but very sexy) heels and cuddled into an enormous toweling dressing gown. On me it was voluminous, but as I ambled up the stairs I passed a very tall man on whom it was a micro-mini. One size almost fits all.

I looked down at the heated pool with ill disguised desire and popped my head into the steam room and sauna and promised myself next time. Lerato was busy with a client and so Ivy ushered me into the room of tranquility. I had warm oil massaged into my hair, strong hands sweep away my worries and wondered how anyone could deny themselves this because of fear.

We need to be touched. Have our hair brushed by someone else. Feel human contact. That is part of the healing of massage. 

The simple touch of someone else who cares enough to try and help you through the stress of everyday life.

 

I promise you, by the time you’re done with a treatment, you won’t feel imperfect at all. 

You feel as perfect as the Venus de Milo rising on a shell surrounded by men worshipping your beauty.

You don’t need to burn your La Senza lingerie to feel empowered. 

Just go get a massage.

I work. Sue me.

I am a working mother of three. Please don’t judge me. Don’t look down your nose at me when I wear exhaustion like a cloak, when my children are asleep on the floor of my office, when I didn’t manage to complete all their homework on time.

There is a reason the Hindu goddess Durga is always shown as having multiple arms. It is because she was a working mother too. It also why she had such a short temper.

Despite what you think, I don’t work because I am selfish (or as my 6 year old says “Shellfish”). I work because like most mothers I have to. Of course I’d like to stay home, watch every cricket match (okay maybe not the cricket, but soccer for sure), go to karate and spend 2 hours every day revising homework. I’d love to go to the gym, meet some friends for lunch and maybe do some filing. But, in case you hadn’t noticed we are in a recession.

If I could, I would help in the tuckshop, cover books in the library and chaperone the school disco. The truth is I don’t put my career in front of my family. If I did, I’d still be working in South Africa’s top ad agency, coming home after 12 and have a string of awards to my name. I work because I put them first. Because without it, they couldn’t go to your school.

My school, back in the day, had an hour of supervised prep every day, so that our parents could get on with parenting. 

My experience so far has been that teachers expect me to get home at 6pm, feed them, bath them, read to them, do an hour of homework and have tem in bed at 7:30. 

I am not Hermione Granger and I don't have a fancy little eggtimer.

That was how my Friday started, with me apologizing that I hadn’t managed to do all my seven year old’s spelling and promising we’d do it over the weekend. Coming on the heels of a work week from hell, it pushed me over the edge of the abyss. I went to work almost in tears. And then I bought a Lotto ticket.

I was weighed down by all the things I couldn’t do, like a visit a friend who really needed me by her side, or be the kind of mother teachers used as an example of perfect parenting. 

Hah! There is no perfect parent. 

We all muddle along the best we can and hope our kids don’t hate us for it later.

Inside a toddler's brain

A friend posted this on Facebook this morning and... well... it resonated. 

Say Cheese Shoot

Blindfolded and giggling...

That was how the day started as we collected Lexi's Best Friend Forever for a professional photoshoot with Vanessa Lewis at Nina Say Cheese.

As birthday surprises went it took the cake. 

Suddenly, these gorgeous scruffy tomboys morphed into little ladies. 
Although the shoes didn't last long and nothing could hide that glint in their eyes. 

 I felt like an oracle getting a small glimpse of what Lexi will look like at eighteen.

After a bit of a stiff start the girls relaxed into having fun and being the center of attention. The balloon was irresistible. As balloons are.

This entitles the bearer...

Passports are funny things. Just little books of paper and stamps. Yet for some odd reason they represent part of our very being, embody our nationality, our character and in some way define us. They give us somewhere to belong, a sense of pride, even a homecoming.

When I painstakingly completed the forms to renew my passport and that of my son, I did it with the complete certainty that we belonged and it would merely be a bureaucratic inanity to give us new ones. I was wrong.

First of all, the forms themselves are about as long as War and Peace, only even less accessible. I tracked down a person allowed to ratify my photographs, one I actually knew and that was a stroke of dumb luck. Then I set off to the nearest Postnet and couriered the whole lot to the Embassy in Pretoria.

Boy, was I in for a shock.

“I’m sorry, but there is a discrepancy.”

“A what?”

“Well... it appears you shouldn’t have been granted a passport in the first place.”

“Hang on. I’ve had it for 20 odd years. I’ve renewed numerous times. Why now?”

“Ah well, we pick up these things all the time. Forty, fifty years on.”

About now me and my cool, calm, collected demeanour parted ways. I felt a bit like I was being accused of obtaining a passport through nefarious means, although how I would have accomplished that at the age of 9 was quite beyond me. 

I felt absurdly hurt and abandoned. Combined with my local Home Affairs losing my son’s foreign birth application, one phone call made him a stateless entity.

By the time I calmed down a bit and managed to sift through the detritus of the internet to find a direct line back to the embassy I was stricken, confused and faced with the implication that we didn't belong.

I found a care call line that would have cost me the better part of the month’s salary for each minute I spoke, but through trial and error managed to find someone, who managed to find someone I could talk to. 

He was very British, very polite and terribly apologetic. 

Apparently my file said that I did not react well to the news. No, I didn’t. I felt like Wile E Coyote must have whenever he got hit with a falling anvil.

I was told to find a registration certificate that I would have been issued back in the mid-eighties. There was a sad tone to his voice, a sort of pitying ring that said he didn’t think I had one of these treasured pieces of paper. Of course, there was also the repeated use of the word “if" that eroded my confidence into a little heap of dust.

Thank the Lord my mother is a pack horse and my father more organised than I. Tucked away in an old steel box was this tenuous link to my citizenship. To say I fell on it glee would not understate my reaction.

The embassy was astonished, but ludicrously happy for me. They even let me scan it in and email it. 

Accompanying it was an affidavit explaining that my passport had suffered some water damage. Basically I was not about to sign an affidavit saying I stupid enough to stick it in the washing machine.

I was warned that the passports would take four weeks, but everyone was extremely nice to me. I felt that I had misjudged them, and so I had. 

For precisely 8 days later a young man in a DHL truck pulled up at the gate and handed over our shiny new passports. I am terrified to let them out of my sight.

I never knew this one thing could unsettle me so much or leave feeling quite so bereft. To belong to a country again feels good, really really good.

And next month we will be jetting off for two weeks in the English countryside.

So, British Consulate Pretoria thank you for your patience and courtesy in dealing with an irate and tearful woman, but most of all thank you for coming through with shining colours in my hour of need.

I can’t give you knighthoods, but you totally deserve them.

PS: I have put certified copies of that registration certificate in every safe south of the Equator.

Life and the Day Spa

Joie de vivre. Sometimes the stress and strain of everyday living can erode that joy to live until you feel like the walking dead. I can’t really speak for you, but that’s how I felt this afternoon.

Around me all day chaos and drama erupted like Mount Etna with indigestion. The CEO went on the rampage, dishing our warning letters like poisoned Smarties. One poor chap got two in the space of about 3 hours. A designer left in tears after a supplier yelled at her for non-payment, not that she could have anything about it. 

The creative director, a Buddhist, tried to inject some rationale Zen into the proceeding, but that didn’t last. His Buddhist principles got chucked out the fourth floor window as I heard him yelling, “Are you out of your ever loving mind!” at the CEO.  

Basically, it was the day from the deep depths of a fiery hell.

By the time I escaped, I had a raging migraine and a bone deep exhaustion at facing the traffic on the way home.

And then... dum... dum... DUM!

At the intersection ahead of me appeared a sign. It was like a light on a dark night illuminating the path. It read “Life Day Spa. Just opened.”

I would be very inconsiderate to have ignored such a blatantly god given sign. You can’t ask for more overt messaging in a time of need. Never one to disobey my instincts and with the desperation only working in advertising can bring, I drove right in and pleaded for a massage.

I was soon enrobed in a soft warm dressing gown and slippers, sipping a cold glass of ice tea and being treated gently, like you might treat someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was very soothing.

Lerato ushered me into the Room of Tranquillity and set about removing me from all earthly matters with an Indian Head Massage. 30 minutes later I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. My headache was a faint memory and I think she managed to get rid of knots in my neck I’ve carried for the last decade.

Indian Head Massages started out in India, imagine that? Seriously, women used to do it on each other to encourage their hair to grow. Narendra Metha brought to the West and extolled its virtues based on Ayurvedic techniques working on the upper back, shoulders, neck, scalp and face. It can help alleviate the symptoms of stress, help you lose weight (not sure about this one), migraines, sinus pain and hair loss! Physically it helps with lymphatic drainage, blood circulation and muscle tension. Psychologically it helps balance the upper three chakras using acupressure points or marmas.

All of which is all very well, but I’ve had some awful Indian Head Massages in the past. Whatever Lerato did in between rubbing heated oil over my back and releasing eon’s worth of tension it was nothing but pure magic. I was able to slip into that beautiful somnambulant state of sheer bliss.

I didn’t have to make small talk and most importantly I didn’t have to listen to bloody Enya. I hate Enya. I have walked out of spas that played Enya. She is not remotely relaxing for me, she is irredeemably annoying, like Dido.

I’ve been to the Life Day Spa in Fourways and I have to say Rosebank is nicer. It is warmer for one thing and more intimate. They also have an amazing floatation pool, which I plan to try out post haste. Apparently, 30 minutes in that and you feel like you’ve slept for 4 hours. Perhaps I should install one in my home. If you can’t beat insomnia you can at least work around it.  

By the time I got into my car I felt renewed, revived and ready to face tomorrow’s journey into our nation’s capital. I can’t quite communicate the dread I was carrying for this task, which involves a complicated train journey and hike through city streets wide enough to accommodate two ox wagons. Simply put, I distrust meetings at any place that start with “The Department of...”

But right now, I feel like a limp noodle, I smell like a garden of roses and I plan to sleep like the dead. I deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.

Say Cheese

On 20 February 2006 the world changed forever. 

Maybe you didn’t notice, but the world as I knew it shifted slightly to the right.

Alexandra Isabella was born at 06:50 and promptly altered the state of the universe to suit herself.

Today is her sixth birthday and like most mothers, I suffer from party panic. 

You may scoff, but I have been to parties where the mother has broken down into hot tears of hysteria because the kids didn’t want to pin the tail on the donkey.

I have spent sleepless nights baking elaborate birthday cakes in the shape of the Sword of Omens and a robot. I have iced 100 small pink cupcakes and stuffed party packs full of toys and candy from China Mall.

Each year there is a not-so-subtle parental competition – one which usually ends with you substantially poorer. You can easily end up spending as much on a birthday party than you did on your own wedding – only Daddy doesn’t pick up this bill.

I have been to a party where one of South Africa’s premier soccer teams played ball with a bunch of 7 year olds. Former State President Nelson Mandela made an appearance at one.

I don’t bother even trying. I sent the boys to bootcamp to wallow in the mud and be yelled at by ex-Navy Seals. They go hone happy, exhausted and covered in mud. Most the time they are happy with a water pistol and a jumping castle.

Girls are harder.

This year as I was lamenting the impending day with gloom, the power of social networking led me to a review by Shelli Nurcombe-Thorne who knows more about Johannesburg than anyone I have ever met.

Largely because she writes a Joburg blog about it. She had just reviewed a kids’ photo studio and promptly sent me the details of Nina Say Cheese.    

Lexi and her best friend were duly collected on Saturday afternoon and chauffeur driven (by me) to the studio of Nina Say Cheese in Fourways.

Vanessa Lewis is a professional food photographer, but was inspired to start a children’s studio after the birth of her daughter, Nina. 

She offers four magical sets, an aeroplane hanger, a circus, a forest and a tea party. 

She also provides delicious cookies and macaroons from a real pastry-chef.

The girls put on identical pink ruffled skirts, pretty tops and sparkly shoes. Suddenly these two scruffy little tomboys blossomed into the most beautiful and ladylike little girls. They posed, they played and they laughed and laughed and laughed.

I haven’t got the pictures yet, but I know they will be beautiful.

So all-in-all it was a good way to celebrate without having to entertain 25 small girls and their 50 associated parents.

Social networking again helped me out on the birthday present front. Having expressed interest in a Barbie Bride at a friend’s house, her mom called to tell me about the best place to buy Barbie clothing.

Hint: It is not Toys R Us.

The Rosebank Market on a Sunday is home to a remarkable stall. A elderly man painstakingly designs and makes exquisite furniture for baby dolls and Barbie Dolls. His wife equally painstakingly designs and sews tiny clothes, sleeping bags, duvets and other necessities for small girls and their dolls.

For R300 I bought a wardrobe and 6 perfectly made little outfits, including a wedding dress. Unlike the cheap and nasty Toys R Us clothes, they don’t fall apart as soon as Barbie is dressed up and they cost a damn sight less.

I highly recommend him to every mother of a small child who balks at the idea of buying yet another Barbie. Lexi unwrapped her gifts this morning in total rapture.

 

I also got out of baking a million cupcakes by strolling into Mother Hubbard’s in the mall and purchasing for R70 a Happy Birthday cake for her school birthday ring. 

Far less stressful.

This afternoon I will pick up little karate kid and take her out for ice-cream with sprinkles on.

Heaven.

And when we get home Lexi can model the pretty clothes purchased on her shopping experience with my  mom – from Zara no less!

Suffer the Little Children

And God said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” 

Somehow, I am not convinced He was referring to mine. 

My family’s forays into religious instruction have met with disaster. It is not surprising when one set of grandparents are Mormon, the other Anglican, your Dad is an atheist and your mother a sort of a Pagan.

Let me place this perspective. It was Christmas Eve, the tree was shining, the gifts were wrapped and my sons gathered around their father’s knee.

“Boys,” he said, “Your little sister still believes in Santa, so don’t ruin it for her. Okay?”

Ah, how sweet, or it would have been, if I hadn’t had a conversation a few nights later with the little sister concerned.

“Mummy, Daddy has told me the facts. There is no God.” stated my tiny daughter.

“How. Could. You?” I roared at my spouse.

“Hmm? How could I what?” he asked in mild bemusement.

“Santa Claus!” I spluttered, “The Truth!”

At his point he wisely decided to shut up and wait for the tsunami to pass.

“How is it okay for her to believe in Santa, but not in God?”

Small boy aged 7 came home perturbed by our eating habits.

“Mom. All animals are God’s creatures, so we can’t eat meat anymore.”

“Sure thing,” I said, “But then you have to eat vegetables.”

“Vegetables!”

“Yup.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to Father Ian. I am sure God will make an exception.”

It is not as though I haven’t tried to engage my children in religious thought. I took them all off to the family service at my mother’s church. It did not go well.

I should have known from the start, when after two weeks of readings from the Gospel of St Luke, my son James hooked up with another James and the two of them staged a revolt.

The priest stood and droned, “And the reading today is from the gospel of St Luke.”

The ritual silence was broken, “No!” said the two James’s standing up on the pews. “You read from Luke last week and the week before. This week, you read from James.”

In the face of their combined fury he was floored. He read from James. 

Then we had to face communion. We knelt in supplication. The priest made his solemn rounds of “The body of Christ. The blood of Christ.” And then he got to me. My son watched intently and then burst out in horror, “No, Mum! You’re not going to drink the blood of dead guy are you? That’s disgusting!”

My mother is still furious that I performed what she refers to as a cop-out and I like to think of a quick two-step to the right. I delegated responsibility for explaining the sacraments to the priest. After all I wasn’t sure if he subscribed to transubstantiation. Then I bowed my head and wept in laughter.

Since my son pointed out the rather vampiric quality of the communion ceremony to me I’ve not felt the same about it. Anyway my mother then suggested we take a break from church.

It must be genetic, because she was almost ousted from a prayer group for daring to challenge the origins of Easter – the pagan Goddess Eostre and the bunny and egg as symbols of fertility did not go down well with the church group. Funny that.