Papam

Papam, my parent's housekeeper and my sister's and my nanny, is a hard worker woman, who treated us like her own children, with love and respect, and at the same time discipline, and was there for us when we needed her.

Papam, whose name is Amparo, started working with us before my sister was born, around 1986. She has two daugthers of her own, older than my sister and me by a few years. Her girls were her life, and she had two jobs in order to support her girls through school, and offer them the opportunities denied to her in her youth.

Despite of her efforts, life played a trick on her, and both girls became teenie mothers, leaving Papam with the feeling of being a failure: How could it be, she wondered, that both girls got pregnant at the same time, when the older one was 18 and the younger one 14, and gave birth with a week difference? How could it be that the girls had not learnt in their childhood that a child is no guarantee to "tie" a man, when they had grown up without a father?

When I look back I see two ungrateful girls (now grown up women), who never appreciated the education they were getting, nor did they appreciate the guft God had given them in their mother.

Today is Papam's birthday. She is turning 55, and is a grandmother of 4 or 5 children. She has been in charge of raising one of them, as her youngest daugther left home, and her son behind, when she moved in with a new boyfriend. Papam has worked over the last 16 years to raise this boy, now a teenager, who seems to be a good student and will graduate high school soon. Her daugthers are no longer there for her, and of her grandchildren, only the one she has raised is there. I called her to congratulate her, and her voice told me how happy she was of hearing my voice, how it filled her to see that both my sister (who also called) and I remember her and her birthday.

It has been around 12 years since she stopped working for us, but we haven't been able to break the contact: she is part of our life, she took an active role in raising us and helping us become who we are, and I like to think that it wasn't her fault the path her daugthers chose, as I cannot imagine how she could be such a good influence for my sister and for me, and not for her own kids.

New Life

Although the last couple of weeks at work have been hell, I am pretty happy they have happened (and are still). I have always known how important it is for me to have a routine to follow, and how much I love learning, and the problems at work have led me back into working a routine for myself out, bringing me again close to things I value and had at some point let out of my life.

Sundays now involve church. It requires me to wake up latest at 930, so I can have breakfast before heading to church in Spanish. It had been years (around 10) since I went at least once a week regularly, and I am enjoying listening to the priest, to those words familiar to me from my childhood, and to the intepretations.Sundays now also involve- if available- Fromula 1 races. I lve watching them and cannot come up with why I stopped over the last 3 years. It is over now though, and I will be up at 6am tomorrow to watch the race.

I am back to the gym as well. 3 times a week, and always on the same days unless I have German class. Tuedays, Thursdays and Saturdays are gym days. I am still only on cardio, but plan to move to Step and give Zumba a try in the next weeks. I am sure it will be fun.

I felt horrible when I received my results from my German test saying I failed the Essay. However, now I feel lucky I failed. I decided to take some classes, and go now every second week to a private 2 hour lesson. I am re-taking the essay in May and will pass this time. In the meantime, I have homework to do during the week: Grammar, Essays, etc. I spread them over the days, and have started going to my favourite place to study, Starbucks, to do homework.

The uni semester will start soon, and since I know I will struggle with the language, as all the psychological terms I know are in English and not German, I have started reading a book over General Psychology in German, which I read on the train on the way to work. The days I go to the gym I drive, the rest I take the train, and taking the train gives more structure to my life.

I still love reading, jigsaws, writting and travelling, and use my free time in them. I have started to enjoy my life again. True, I am back to working from home (for real work), working on strategies to apply at work, analyzing emails and preparing answers, and also reading books recommended by my boss, and books about coaching and other topics that I think will help me overcome the difficulties at work, but this working from home does not feel like work, feels more like school and I enjoy it.

Answers

There are days in my life in which I look back and only questions come to my mind: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the point of living every day? Why am I the person I am? Could I have been somebody different had my childhood and teenge years been different, or was I doomed to become the grown up I am?

Today, and almost every work day over the past month, have been these type of days. I find myself confronted with an environment I don't feel capable of mastering, and the more I try, and fail, the more I feel overwhelmed and not suitable for the assignments I have been given.

For those who know me it is not new to hear that I don't show myself the way I am, and that I am an overly sensitive person, who can be almost destroyed by anyone. My age has not provided me with the wisdom to block people from hurting and destroying me, which gives me the only option of hidding behind a facade that shows me as a stronger person than I actually am. It is thus no surprise thatI also reapply this strategy from my private life in my work life.

Up to now I feel I have been successful: almost 5 years into the job and still most of the people around me don't know how I am, while I have been able to deliver my job as expected. True, I have not made many friends, but the few I've made I treasure, and I still feel lucky.

In the past weeks, however, the rules of the game have changed. I struggle at work, as I get requests like "be more friendly" without further explanation. I fear I have never learnt to be friendly, and I have no idea how to react to the request. If I ask what is meant, I get an " I don't know, just more friendly", which is just as puzzling. I get that my facade shows a self confident strong woman that does not exist. The engineer in me is real, but the woman who goes to work does not. And the friendly woman my new colleagues are looking for I have never met.

Questions and questions keep coming to my mind, and I spend all my free (non crying) time in trying to get answers. Maybe I would know how to be friendly if I had had the opportunity in school, maybe I was never supposed to enter the industry and my destiny was in getting a PhD and spending my life in a lab looking for some nanoparticle, maybe the people I went to school were right and I should not have insisted in living a normal life, finishing school in a regular school and going to college, or maybe, just maybe, the person who went to university, the relaxed woman who let most people see her the way she was, the woman who had friends and a social life, and was happy and proud of herself was real, and has not yet found her way over the Atlantic.

I do not have questions, and the last weeks at work have brought me back to the edge, and set me for the nth time in my life in front of a crossroads: do I face what's coming to me, and try to master it 'til I drop, or do I get a doctor's note, mentioning an upset stomach 1 day after coming back from South East Asia, which will get me straight to the "Tropical Illnesses Hospital" and keep me locked there until I go home on vacation at the end of the month? I am scared of escaping, Marco's words still hunt me ("Escape is never the safest path"), but at the same time I am scared I can't master ths situation one more time, and give up on myself after all I have fought over the last 15 years...