Growing Older

So, I passed up another year in my life...I am now a big 25 years old and feeling as though I might be growing younger. Oh, and when I say "passed up" that is actually not correct, because I am embracing each moment given to me. So, passed up really just means, I am passing up the number 24 for the new number 25. Now who thought I would be 25, single, and living in AFRICA??? Not me.

Can I say a humongous THANK YOU to everyone for the overflow of cards and gifts passed through my parents for my birthday?! I was overwhelmed with gratitude and unworthiness as I opened, one after another, encouraging cards, letters, and even gifts from people I have never met but now love more than I could ever understand. There is something irresistible about love unwarrented.

Having mom and dad here was good and bad. Good in that I was able to get all the loving I wanted. Bad in that I didn't know how to absorb it all. I broke actually with their arrival. To transition from self-reliance, to have the availability of two loving parents...I could function, I didn't know how to adjust. I struggled BIG TIME with having them here. My anxieties rose, my emotions from the past three months that never truly had an opportunity to just flow, they flowed like a mighty river. Daily I was a mess, a failure, a crazy woman. Thoughts of the future are too much for me right now. I have decided that I have to just settle the future in my mind and not address it again until it is my today.

I love my parents, and bawled like a baby when I said goodbye to them. We enjoyed each other more when we were away from Roan. There just isn't much in my small house and township to keep two restless adults busy with. They were challenged in ways I probably don't even know. They walked into something with only a daughter who doesn't much enjoy explaining everything to depend on. I am the type that likes to let people jump in...and I think I forced them to do the same. They took my moods graciously, still let me put my head on their shoulder while I was grouchy and touchy. They still loved me, still told me they were proud of me, even as I aired my failures freely through my sobs, they still held me, encouraged me, were proud of me. They think I am a success...I can't even understand.

It is good to be back in Roan. I struggled being away from my small town Africa. I have been seeing a lot of the learning that is unconsciously happening in me. I see Africa in a different way, the struggle in me continues. Wanting to be around equality, wanting to be free of poverty, free of the realities of their being an otherness in the world that I am responsible for. And yet when I have an opportunity, like going to the tourist trap livingstone, I can't ignore Africa still, I can't run away from knowing the reality of the lives of the people I am surrounded by. But much of africa is fake, you can go and come home bragging on being in Africa and understand maybe even less about Africa than when you came.

I am still processing a lot, but in my much older and wiser mind, I am sure I will figure it all out...right? :)

Love and Peace to you all, and again, another thank you for making my birthday a success, I felt loved.