Eyes

Eyes

Saturday 23 December 2017

I wish Christmas would never come

They’re sitting around in a mock-meeting. Mr. stuffy faced egg-headed rooster, all prudish with his seriously disapproving pursed lips. Hard to take him seriously with the big red tuft on his head. There is the giddy headed frog, silly fellow’s constantly falling over himself in giggles. I want what he’s on! Five eagerly waving reindeer popped out the other day. They bore a general conviviality that had me on the lookout for exciting company. Every day of Advent brings with it another little surprise, another delightful creation with thoughtful little details.

As wonderful as the tradition of Advent calendars is, it is a tonne of work thinking up and collecting meaningful things to fill 24 little pouches for the 24 days before Christmas. I’ve been shirking my way through this task, cutting corners turning to ready-made ones. Hiding behind the stress of the chores of preparations that lead up to the perfect Christmas celebration.
The tradition has caught on in this house despite us lazy adults, with the children filling in where the adults left off. We, spoilt parents, have got a special spread of Advent Calendars this year – a high-tech variety of Python programmed, love-filled messages that pop up every day, building up into a cleverly crafted Christmas poem. 
On the first day of Christmas, the computer lit up with Once upon a time there lived a dad
Day 2, he was never mad
Day 3 it said, he had a lot of patience
On day 4 ..and never missed any of our occasions.
My calendar, was more the good old fashioned, low-tech hand crafted kind. Collecting used cases from Kinder surprise eggs to craft prudish roosters from. Pouches were interspersed with earrings in my fav colour, necklaces beaded and fitted to size. The occasional poem or hand-made card for variety, a stout wooden star that promised to love me to the moon and back.

My children’s weekly schedule is just as challenging as mine. Yet my daughter makes quiet observations and executes on them, noting attentively that I could do with a new hair clip, or a custom made armband with manually twisted patterns. And as she’s squirrelling away each ready item, toiling at the wrapping and numbering, my son’s honing his programming skills to have the automated calendar running and bug free in time for the beginning of Advent. And me…I’m just making my excuses to myself. In the days when I did take the effort, I recall the joy there was in lighting up faces every day with another door opening, another pouch revealing precious treats. As much pleasure as there is in giving, so also are there gentle pangs of disappointment sometimes. A secret in the trade of giving is to be rewarded by appreciation. Some days all calendars get overlooked in the grind of routine, pouches get forgotten, doors go unopened. I know from experience how that feels. When days like those come, as they always do, the children hide their hurt much better than I ever could, with a benevolent resolve to give happiness.

I love my giddy headed frog from day 10 most of all. In a cross legged precarious perch, he’s sculpted from clay with ears pinched into place and big beady eyes. He followed our escalation with the same comical amusement that he observes everything. We were having a row over her behaviour in a certain situation - I said I disapproved, finally un-muting my internal dialogue over an issue that had been nagging for some days. She made clear her indifference. Sparks flew. We raged at each other about the usual things of respect and value that adolescents and adults seem to define and interpret ever differently. The words came out strong, giving my anger a degree of validity it could never merit. And then I said it. I said ‘I don’t want your damn presents. I want you to care about what really matters to me’.

The night passed, wrought with actions than couldn’t get undone, words that couldn’t get unspoken. There were 3 more days to Christmas and the spirit of the season had right well been butchered. After  every miserable night and every glorious night - after every single night dawns a whole new day. The computer screen had already lit up - it read He helps us stay strong, and tells us when we are wrong. Tip toeing into her room the next morning, I tried not to wake her, lest she order me out again. There was nothing more to offer this morning than the feeble apology from the night before. She stirred and awoke nevertheless, realising I was there. Half asleep she reached out for my hand and smiled. Comfortingly unhesitant.

Later that day while Mr. Frog grinned on, she handed me the pouch for day 21 all ripped up and mended, the little treasure safe inside. It was the same for each subsequent day, pouches ripped and mended. Treasure safe inside. The spirit of Christmas had been ripped and mended. Love, forgiveness, generosity, they were all safe inside.


Let the pouches go on forever. Let it not stop when Christmas comes.

Friday 6 October 2017

I'm a bitch

“I wish you were never born into this family". Her words hung in the air, dense and stinging.

Little girls, daughters are positively delightful little things. They run about gaily, brightening up everything with their pretty little dresses and bunches in their hair. Riding on your knees and making up cute little sentences you can repeat to your friends. All of that is just as jolly as it should be. But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter is quite another thing.

When they were as little as 4, in Kindergarten, he’d sit himself down on the bench with the usual helpless lethargy while she would undo his shoes and help him un-suit from the coat and scarf paraphernalia. Nobody had taught her to do these things, or asked her to. These reserves of intuitive caring came entirely naturally and with complete commitment. Any amount of equal-gender upbringing was no match for natures hard wiring. Whoever said male and female ability differences boiled down to socialisation, not genetics, never observed it from the vantage point of bringing up girl and boy twins. The KG staff remained most amused at how one 4 year old little girl fussed around her twin brother.  

That same little girl, the adorable daughter, is now a 12 year old directing her scorn at that same brother she continues mothering. Growing into her life, one oestrogen loaded, high self-expectation at a time. Which also means it’s an on-going imbalance of boy and woman through their growing up. Well, despite his persistently lethargic disposition, he had had the audacity of brilliantly outdoing her at a Math test. Whilst surprised by his own achievement and scathing from her words, he is nevertheless a man in the making - enjoying his 5 minutes of fame like it were a lifetime of successes back to back.
Whereas for her, she’s on a roll. Perfect is her baseline, success is the norm. Anything right below that is looser-level failure. She’s accustomed to excelling in everything she embarks upon, by sheer grit and perseverance. Of course she was not angry at him, but at herself. It is how women are sometimes. Unfair and irrational. Angry at their own standards. At disappointing themselves, eternally envious of the infuriatingly chilled-out composure of their male company.
Some time will pass but she will come around, as she always does, inundated with shame for her behaviour and an even firmer resolve to work harder, apologising effusively for letting her frustrations get the better of her. He’ll graciously accept the apology, not quite recollecting what she's going on about, forgiving quickly and generously. She will 
be curiously surprised again, and relieved that he got over it so easily.

It’s endlessly entertaining and frustratingly inefficient that people straddled with the same genetic coding continue to repeat the same mistakes, re-learning the same lessons, generation upon generation (no wonder evolution runs at snail-pace). It’s similarly frustrating and also somewhat funny that whatever the year civilisation is in, boys and girls, men and women simply have different roles to play in life according to the different contributions they make to a shared reproductive system. This little girl, like many of her kind, will be the nurturer and the listener. She will, like her mother and grandmother before her, also be the one to tell the man to intuitively go to the doctor and nurturingly sort out the laundry. She will multi-task, so as to do both to perfection at the same time, not losing sight of her own personal ambitions, as well as booking her kids dental appointments and making a lasagne. All of this will, ever so often, churn up a storm in her.
Until recently, US meteorologists gave traditionally female names to storms, and hurricanes for the shared characteristics of being unpredictable and destructive. When the ‘Women’s Movement’ finally had their say and male names started being introduced, another bias took shape - people became less likely to prepare for hurricanes with women’s names, not taking them seriously because they don’t sound threatening in comparison to their male counterparts. This ironically made those storms more deadly.  

There is a subdued appreciation of the singular advantage of experience this 12 year old boy is being provided with, by living beside and loving strong women. Yes, he would be better equipped to understand them into adulthood, probably ahead of his peers. But excitement for such great fortune is limited while the scrapes still burned. He knows already of the perfect super human powers of emotional intelligence she is capable, of the heightened sense of self-awareness and punitive self-criticism. For reasons seemingly unfathomable, she will also rage with fury causing unpredictable destruction like the hurricanes she defamed. Discount her, and it could be similarly deadly. There will also always, always be those reserves of intuitive compassion. 


Borrowing from some of Shania Twain’s wisdom, she is a bitch and a child, and a mother. She is a sinner, a saint. Take her as she is, it might mean you will have to be stronger. Don’t be afraid, you know you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Thursday 29 June 2017

Dreams and dogs

Dreams don’t come floating on fluffy white clouds. 

Nor do they have star popping centers with tinsel trimmed edges. No, there is none of that mystical magic in making dreams come true. For those times when dreams are to sail out of the stupefied subconscious into reality, it is only grit, ambition and hard work that will lead the way. And never giving up. It’s so easy to get sold on the romance of living out a dream, misled by the marketing and packaging of ‘making dreams come true’. Fatally underestimating how thin you have to be willing to be stretched, how little sleep you will have to sustain on, how much you have to continually believe in it. Blood, sweat and tears. Thats what dreams comprise of. 

Would you take on someone else’s dream though? Strange things happen, stranger than they seem. All of a sudden you could be straddled with an abandoned dream you never dreamt, to realise or let perish. Like that puppy the kids wanted so bad, their biggest dream. They beg and plead, it’s their only Christmas wish. There’s nothing else in the world they’d rather have. Until you get the dog and it doesn’t walk itself, chews up all the new furniture, reduces exotic family holiday destinations to places only reachable in dog-ride km’s. Dreams have that very inconvenient thing about them, they demand sacrifice and commitment and even a complete change in life-style. A permanent departure from the plush comfort-zone. They make you forfeit luxury treats of laziness and relaxation. Or else those cherished aspirations become an irresponsible recklessness, ending up like the Christmas pup, in the orphanage of abandoned dreams. 

Two days ago, 5 otherwise completely disconnected people become a team of focused foster-parents to one such abandoned dream from that orphanage of dreams. Once loved and cherished too, by someone. Overnight they had not 1, but 2 full-time jobs. Dreams want to know nothing of all the misfortunes life has slung at you. They were dreamt into existence, so you rise to the challenges of rough times. What good is it hiding behind self-pity if it comes at the cost of giving up on dreams? Giving up, even on adopted dreams.

Is that even a thing, an adopted dream? Whom are we kidding, dreams are not dogs. 
Dreams come floating on fluffy white clouds.

Thursday 2 March 2017

PWC, the Oscar stars!

Martha L Ruiz and Brian Culinan became the most known, non-celebrity faces at the Oscars this year. As auditors, this is probably the 5 minutes of fame they wish they'd never had. The Pricewatercoopers accountants are probably experiencing that 'may the earth rip open and swallow me' moment.

Everyone had something to talk about on a dull winter Monday morning. For once, we here in Europe woke up to news that wasn't hogged by Donald Trump's depressingly ridiculous imbecility. Entertained instead by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway's comical expressions of the night before. How Warren fumblingly passed on a burning ball of uncertainty at the 'best movie' announcement, to Faye, rather than scorch his own fingers. How the over-eager Faye impatiently grabbed the envelope to blurt out the movie name she recognised on it (happily blanking out the rest), only to realise later how badly her fingers were scorched. Warren himself got off 'scot-free', sheepishly taking the mike back grinningly at a shock-faced, applauding audience. True to the spirit of Hollywood, the applauding remained stable through the entire fiasco! Only later did we learn, that the whole goof-up was attributed to two selfie-taking distracted PWC auditors who's responsibility was handing over the right envelopes to the right people at the right time. 

The infallible PWC who had previously boasted that their 83 year old contract had never come up for tender because they do such a 'good job', was also capable of human error. Precisely because, surprise surprise, even companies as big as PWC are comprised of mere mortals. So even fat pay-cheque drawing Partners at PWC aren't exempt of human error.
And let's put things into perspective, what were the real consequences of the blunder? Did Jordan Horowitz go home with the wrong award? No, the goof-up was corrected immediately, amidst a lot of awkwardness. Did it surface a systemic rot at the core of PWC competencies like with the Volkswagen crisis? No, it was a localised human moment of inattentiveness. Was anyone hurt, did a bad drug have to be recalled? Did anyone die, like in the recent Yemen attack that went 'dreadfully wrong' killing 25 people amongst which 9 were children under the age of 13, one a 3 moth old baby and a US soldier. 
This was a show-biz, black-tie event of some brilliant entertainers thrown into an off-the-script scene of embarrassing awkwardness which gave everyone something hilarious to talk about at work, and more fodder for the ever hungry Trump-inspired political satire. 

There is talk of how many heads will roll, how PWC will salvage face. Will PWC be able to claw it's way out of this crisis? The Oscars have barred Martha and Brian from future ceremonies. Crucial work of repairing the cracks that led to this mammoth mistake are being mended. 
I think it's also a huge opportunity for PWC to rise above all the melodrama and parade its humanity. To laugh at itself and it's Oscar winning blunder. To hold back on rushing to internal decapitations. To acknowledge the damage sloppy carelessness can cause. And forgive. Forgive and appreciate being able to quickly and confidently eliminate a deep-rooted, festering flaw in the company. For a blunder is what it is. Nothing more and nothing less.

Wouldn't that come as a pleasant, unexpected surprise? It's a rare ability, in business, for a company to use the opportunity of a crisis, into a showcase and proof of it's empathetic human side.

Be the star of the extended Oscar's, PWC!