Tomorrow is a new day.

Tonight, I struggled to put my two year old to sleep. Oh he was such a cheeky monster. I was at the end of my tether. Feeling irritated. Touched out.

Like I was about to explode into a million pieces of piercing anger, all directed at his little baby face with those big eyes and those rosy cheeks.

But I did not do it. I breathed. I thought of the sunset. Gleaming through the room, burning through the curtains.

I lay there still as a statue. Still as stone. Dead.

He touched me on my arms and kissed my wrists and climbed all over me and chattered away. Counting things, talking about things we did that day, asking to kiss ‘mum-mum’ (what he calls his little sister) – who was soothing herself to sleep with her thumb in the crib next to me.

When he finally fell asleep it was 10:30pm and there was no time for anything.

I took myself to the shower which turned into a bath, because the plug found its way to the hole and the bath started filling up.

I saw an unopened face mask beside the bath, the paper ones that you peel and place on your face and let whatever serum they soak it in do your magic. It has holes for your eyes and nose and mouth. I thought, why not. Been wanting to do this for months. Catching sight of my reflection in the bath taps made me shudder. Horror movie things.

I lay back in my unplanned bath and just felt tired. Guilty. Defeated. Like a failure. I felt like I failed my child because I did not manage him adequately. We did not do much today.

My legs felt sore and I just did not feel anything emotional.

Just numbness.

Couldn’t stay in the bath too long so I hauled myself out and … here I sit.

I don’t know why I couldn’t stay long. I couldn’t relax. My mind feels like it’s teeming with thoughts but I simultaneously have nothing to do.

My babies are sleeping.

Tomorrow is a new day.

Tomorrow I will do better.

It is not…

Hello.

It is not anti semitic to oppose apartheid.

It is not anti semitic to oppose zionism, which stands for ethnic cleansing and brutal murder.

It is not anti semitic to condemn the ripping apart of small children bodies. Children who do not have air raid shelters or air raid sirens. Children who can be seen on video screaming in terror every time an airplane flies above their house. Children who can be seen in literal shreds.

I have seen children whose heads have been blown apart, pieces of their bodies hanging together by shreds of skin.

It is not anti semitic to oppose the strongest army in the middle east, to oppose a propaganda machine which imprisons the natives of a land in favour of white european settlers.

This is apartheid. It is happening again.

Why did we overcome Hitler, only to allow the trauma of a past generation to inflict horrendous crimes on a new one?

I support all Jews and condemn antisemitic attacks, but I condemn Israel severely. I condemn its propaganda. I condemn its war crimes on Palestinians, on their children, on their livelihood. I condemn its apartheid.

Enough is enough.

Why are people so afraid to speak out?

Because Israel and its propaganda has seeped into every part of our lives.

This is not a religious issue. If it was, Christian Palestinians would not be massacred along with their muslim brothers and sisters.

This is a human rights violation.

To say there are two sides is to be wilfully ignorant of the truth. The truth is that Israel has a 500,000+ army, an iron dome which deflects most attacks, while Palestine has nothing. Palestinian refugees cannot even return to the villages from which they were expelled, and Israeli law states that only people of Jewish religion can apply to build homes and can take over ‘abandoned’ land… land which Palestinians are not allowed to return to in the first place.

This is not a conflict or a clash. This is not an equal war. This is the same thing that happened in South Africa.

Wake the fuck UP.

Preordained?

When I was 11 years old, I prayed for my husband. I prayed hard for him, every single day, for weeks on end.

I wasn’t praying to GET a husband. Or to find one or to obtain one. I was praying for D____. My current husband.

He was not sick, I was not married. I did not pray for him like old women pray for people in books.

I just got on my knees daily and said, ‘Oh dear God, please please let me marry D____ when I grow up.‘

Just like that.

I have no idea why I did that. I knew him since I was 4 years old. He was just my friend’s older brother. He had this huge smile and these really white teeth, and the blackest hair you ever saw.

When I was eleven he ceased to be just someone I saw from time to time. I was so in awe of him that I could barely look at him. And so I totally ignored him, did not look at him, and just prayed every single day…

Dear God, please, please let me marry D____ when I grow up.

And then, just as suddenly as the crush overwhelmed me, it was gone. I grew up. Grew older. Grew taller. My prayers were peppered with other dreams, possibly equally as fleeting. I moved across the globe. I fell victim to dastardly plots. Miserable schemes. I obtained an education. I did regretful things. I totally forgot about him.

And then I married him. It was a sudden thing too. It felt pre-ordained. I always tell him it is that big smile of his. The minute he smiled at me like that, when we were both adults, my heart did a funny funny thing in my chest.

It was a courtship and a marriage. We were both so young and so…. small.

We have a photo book of every year of our marriage and in our first year, 7 years ago, we looked like children. Heck, we WERE children.

Green as green can be.

A few months into the marriage I was standing somewhere, and he was walking towards me, and he smiled that big smile of his, and suddenly, as though it were an echo through time, I heard my own little voice say, ‘Dear God, please please please let me marry D______ when I grow up.’

I was pretty shaken up to be honest. I had completely forgotten about that episode in my life. Some things are fated to be.

This year was a pretty tough year on our marriage. When I wrote my 7 Year Anniversary post in January, I had no idea what was about to implode. We are not a soppy pair. We are pretty regular and don’t really do public displays of affection. I think I might have put D____ on a pedestal a bit. Something which has certainly crumbled this year. When you forget each other, negative things are bound to creep into a marriage.

I think, in my hopeful and growing mindset, that I finally understand what those old couples who have been together for decades and decades mean when they say ‘love takes work, love means sometimes turning a blind eye, love is choosing each other despite the heartbreak and pain.’

Some things are preordained.

I don’t know what possessed me to pray relentlessly for my husband.

But I guess and hope I will be doing that until I die. Pray for him, that is. In the way old women pray for people. YOU know, like in books. Pray for their souls and whatnot.

Unless he does something truly truly awful and he knows what it is already as I have vividly described the scenarios to him.

Dear God, please please please let me marry D_______ when I grow up. And let this marriage work.

Do you pray? Do you believe things are preordained?