New Challenge for the New Year

I'm taking on a new challenge for the new year.  "A year of writing to uncover the authentic self" course.

I’ll allow myself not only to write but to be vulnerable and share with you, my writing journey.

Wish me luck 😊

The happy dance

 

“I looked at Antonia and I saw that she is beautiful” - said my son.

He was five years old, and his sister, Antonia, was born a few weeks ago.

In the weeks and months that followed, he became utterly protective of her. Worried that flies would hurt her while she was sleeping outside. Angry of the neighbor kids when they were playing in the yard, they were too loud and would wake her up. Sad when she was crying, getting more and more irritated by my apparent lack of capability to comfort her properly. “Is she hungry mom? I think she is hungry! Maybe she wants something else than milk? Can we please give her something better to eat?”

Not surprising. She was still inside of me when he started to become concerned. Watching cartoons one night, he suddenly declared. “Mom, you should eat the TV! The baby is all alone inside your belly, and she is probably so bored, has nothing to do! If you eat the TV, she could at least watch cartoons!”

But then, Antonia learned to stand. Holding on to the furniture she liked to “dance”, moving her butt up and down and making happy sounds.

That summer day, Mihai was in his “happy” place, playing Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation. Completely immersed in the game, life outside Crash was irrelevant.

Antonia managed to crawl next to the TV, got herself up and started her happy dance to Crash Bandicoot’s music, her little body covering the whole TV screen.

The brotherly over-concerned and protective phase ended in that exact moment.

It took another ten, maybe fifteen years for him to look at her again as the little sister that needs care and protection, and not the annoying little loud thing, looking for attention, interfering with his life.

Mom and the happiness lesson

I’m reading “The Antidote. Happiness for people that can’t stand positive thinking”. 

Thought of my mom while reading it. 

My mom has a very particular philosophy of life. In a nutshell, it comes to three main points. 

    Duty comes before anything else. 

    It’s better to expect less so you are not disappointed. 

    People are not to be trusted until they prove themselves to be trustworthy.

Today, she gave me a lesson in happiness, and it surprised me. 

-       I think I found the right book for you, mom! The one that describes your life philosophy, you might like to read it.  

-     Hmm, are you implying that I don’t support positive thinking? I don’t support self-delusions! I consider it idiotic; it means to look at a donkey and say, “what a beautiful horse”!

-    Well, I still think you will like the book. For example, the author is saying that the rush after happiness is what makes us unhappy.

-    Nobody can be continually happy, and nobody can be continually unhappy.  All the religions are talking about a balance, one that you find through love, sacrifice and acceptance. Psychology, psychiatry, they are slippery. There is no such thing as soul dissection. The same outside conditions can build very different characters – serial criminals and saints can both be born out of similar trauma. The oldest drug in the world, alcohol, cannot solve this problem either – some drunks are sad, others are funny, or boring, or annoying, or aggressive. They are all trying the same thing, to escape their feelings, but there is no universal recipe on how to manage your feelings. Books and art are also a form of escaping from an imperfect world. Beauty is born out of suffering, but ugliness also is born out of suffering. The survivors are not the ones analyzing their feelings, but the doers. Like you."

---

It took a lifetime, but maybe I am finally starting to understand my mother, as she is finally starting to understand me.

A list with all the things ....

It is March in Finland.  I’m at work, in a meeting. My ten-year-old son is calling. It is after school, and he should be at home, alone and probably bored. Or hungry. I considered if I should answer, but I decided to step out of the meeting and deal with it.

-          Mom, I’m a little bit wet.

-          Why, what’s happened? What do you mean you are wet?

-          Well, I went to the lake on the bicycles with the boys. And I got a little bit wet.

The lake is frozen. Almost. It has been sunny the last few days, and the ice is starting to fade away at the shores, but it the temperature is still mainly under 0 Celsius degrees.  I am not yet worried

-            How wet is a little bit wet? What did you do?

-          Well, I went into the lake a little bit. I am a little bit wet and cold, and I don’t know what to do.

Antti, one of his best friends, is with him. His house is a few mins' walk from the lake.

- Go to Antti’s home, I will call his mom, and I’ll be there shortly!

In a half-hour, when Antti’s mom opens the door, and I see her eyes, I know something is awfully wrong.  Then she says, “He is okay. He is okay. Don’t be scared.”

I see him by the fireplace, with no clothes, just a blanket around him. His hair is wet.

He was not “a little bit wet” – but thoroughly wet.

Walking in the middle of the lake, the ice broke, and he fell, getting entirely underwater. The other boys have been brave enough (or not fully aware of the danger) to walk to the hole in the ice and pull him out from under.

The avalanche of emotions, it is hard to describe. Gratefulness, horror, anger, horror, gratefulness, joy, horror, and gratefulness again. I can’t talk.

He is scared. Not of what happened, but of me, on how I will react. 

I hug him, and I kiss him. I say, “It’s okay. I am happy you are safe. It’s okay now. Let’s go home.”

Later in the evening, when we both managed to recover, I got to ask him, “Do you know how dangerous this was? Haven’t we talked about the iced lakes?”

He looks me in the eyes. “I’m sorry, mom. But can you please make me a list of all the things in the world that are dangerous?”

I want to. I want to make a list and then ensure that he will never get close to any danger. Never ever again. 

I realize horrified that protecting the ones we love and keeping them safe and secure it's just something we imagine we do in order not to deal with the truth. We have no control. 

Lists are not the answer. 

Angels are. 

 Sanda / www.sandaberar.com

The distance of dreams

The distance between how I thought my life would be and how it came to be, I don't know to calculate it. 

I was born and lived my teenage years in communism. Money didn’t matter, friends did, and I believed it will always be the same. 

I am living across the ocean now in a country that made vows against communism. Money matter. Friends, I’ve lost plenty. 

I've dreamed of becoming a writer, of having just a little bit of talent for that. It turned out my mind was more tuned towards logic and math, rather than creativity. 

I became a software engineer and a teacher of algorithms. I am not teaching anymore. I can barely read a rudimentary code. But I paint. Creativity came later in life and in a very unexpected form. 

In my teens years I used to have a dream of myself living alone in a cozy little apartment downtown. Full of books, some paintings. I remember imagining how I would come back from work, dressed in a very elegant, usually black suit, high heels. Something similar to how a lawyer woman, partner at some big NY firm is dressed in Hollywood movies. 

I don’t think I have ever got to wear the elegant black suit with high heels at work. Jeans, t-shirt and sneakers have been my garderobe for work most of the days while working in software industry. I have enjoyed the comfort of it. 

There was no man and no kids in my teenage dreams. Only my cozy apartment in which I would relax in the evenings with a book and maybe a glass of martini. 

I have been married, twice, I've raised two kids and for many years I barely had any time to relax in the evenings, with or without the book. 

It has been a road with many unexpected turns, but I have finally got to my house, with all the books and the paintings. I am getting the itch of writing again. And it turns out, even in a world where money matter, friends matter even more. 

I am happy I didn’t choose the road I was planning to in my fantasy teenage world. I got the chance to learn how it feels to hold my babies, I got the chance to learn what complete love is. I got the chance to learn so much more than I have ever dreamed of. Sometimes following our dreams means limiting ourselves. 

Sanda / www.sandaberar.com

Sunrise in the forest

I always thought I am going to be a writer, if not now, at some point in my life. I never thought I am going to start painting. Life is full of surprises, they say. Some of the better ones come from inside us. 

When I'll get to be a writer, I thought, I am going to write about the light inside us and how we become alive. 

I started to paint, and my brushes want to tell the story of light in the forest and how the trees become alive.

Sanda / www.sandaberar.com 

 

The story of my life in clip stories

 

The 5s without breathing.

He is asleep in my arms. I know I should put him in his crib, but I so need to feel him close. It’s my son’s first night at home. I lean and lay him down in the crib and go to my bed. My eyes are closing when my son’s breath stops: one second, two seconds. I’m on my feet. Three seconds, four seconds. This panic is something I have never experienced before. Five seconds. He is breathing again. And in that very second I realize that I will forever worry for him. There is no going back.  

The airport

I am waiting for my luggage to arrive. The belt is moving slowly, empty. I like the airport’s buzz, hearing the people’s voices surrounding me, it’s lively. Then I notice something feels odd. There is no buzzing. I look around, all the people are still there. I do not understand what is happening, are they talking, and I can’t hear, am I having a stroke or something? And then I know. This is Finland, the country I am just moving in. Life with the sounds and all I knew before is gone. I’ll need to learn to listen to silence.

I want to be happy now

My five years old daughter, she is a stubborn little one.  “Why you are not buying us a dog now” She is at the kitchen table and looks particularly decisive tonight. “We have had this conversation; we are going to have a dog when you will be old enough to be responsible for him”. “I don’t want to live my whole life wishing for something to happen in the future. I want to be happy today.”  I gasp. She is going to be the one raising me, not the other way around. 

Jump

I am sitting on the beach terrace in Crete. Phone rings, it’s from work. I can barely hear; reception is so bad. I am considering saying ‘sorry, let’s talk soon when I am in Finland’.  Instead, I move away from the terrace. I hear now. The Finnish branch is closing. We are being shut down. I have been offered a job at the headquarters in US. Can I consider moving to US?  I have been dreading a moment like this forever. Something comes around and I feel too scared to take a risk. Yes, I said. I can consider that.