Alright, I'm Ready

Deep breath.  I've spent a lot of time alone this week, thinking.  If any of you don't know, I'm currently extending my studies to do a second major in Marketing.  Am I not ready to return to KL? For sure.  Will I ever be ready to settle there? Probably not.  You see, unlike my mother, I don't feel like I have to die in the place where I was born.  I think, in a way, it has something to do with the different ways we grew up.  My mother moved around a lot growing up, but she grew up with stronger roots, having a constant father figure who loved his Muar, and that somehow went down the line to my mother. 

Me? I grew up between three houses in the same district, but I did not have the strong roots that my mother had.  While I have a strong Malay identity, I'm not even very patriotic towards Malaysia. As far as I can remember, I have wanted to get out of Malaysia, simply because I think there's a lot of the world to see, so it's no surprise that I fell in love with tourism.  Also, I spent my whole life feeling unsettled and decided at 16 that by hook or by crook, I had to get out! However, I must note that I have yet to make enough cash that will allow me to travel as much as I want to.  Australia isn't far enough.

I must also say though, that yes, I do realise that I am getting old, and some things that scared the living daylights out of me in the last year are growing on me.  My aunts can't be all wrong, but there's one thing they must realise by now: I can't make a man fall in love with me! It's not a choice for me to make! And also another matter: If settling down didn't mean settling in one place, I would have done it ages ago.  You get older, you learn your lesson.  I know now why the last two relationships did not work out.  Both of them would have been happy staying in Malaysia their whole lives and only leaving for short periods to visit other places.  I would not have been happy living like that.  As I told one of my exes, I can be faithful to a man my whole life, but staying in one place my whole life is another matter altogether.  By the way, I didn't dump him, we just wanted different things.

Maybe, I'm more like my grandmother than I think I am.  She was really close to her relatives, and continued to be close to them all her life, but she did leave them, and her home (Johor) when she married my grandfather.  As he was a district officer, she moved with him, from state to state.  Yes, I'm talking global when she moved around Malaysia, but at the time, with communications being pretty bad and transportation not as good as now, it would have been a big move away.  Somehow, I get it.  She grew up without a father too.  Like me, she had many uncles who took on the role of a father, but you know, it's never the same.  You're always the outsider.  So, when she married my grandfather, he became her home, and wherever he was, was where she made a home. 

When my grandfather passed on, my grandmother made a home close to where her children were.  She moved again, from Muar to KL this time, and that's where she spent the last of her days.  But she had a full life.  They traveled, my grandparents, and they saw more then without globalisation, than I've seen now with it.  Would I leave my kids for months to go on trips? Yes. My grandparents went around the world, by ship, when my mother was about 9 years old, and they turned out alright.  If anything, having parents absent from their lives a bit make kids stronger.

To tell you the truth, I'm not that ambitious.  I don't have a clear direction of where I want to work.  I think probably because the things most important to you would be the thing you didn't have growing up.  For me, that was the stability of a family that I could really call my own.  Yeah, after all, it would be nice to have a stable relationship to provide at least one area of stability in my life, and to give me some direction, but the point still stands: I would settle down if it didn't mean settling in one place.  The blood of the woman from the Turkish harem is pretty strong in me, I guess.  Home for me is not the place where I was born, and it might not even be a place.  In fact, I think, home for me will most likely be a person, and the other people this person and I end up sharing.  Only time will tell.  At least I'm coming to terms with the fact that it's about time. 

Comments

[milLa]

no, we are not getting older, but wiser, and settling down is not a solution is part of our journey in life... and yes, I too dont have directions in my life, just go wherever i want and watever makes me happy!!!