Success and Failure

Sweetheart,
I was ruminating today on the differences between success and failure. Failure is hard, it can disappoint you, it can knock your self-confidence and cause you to wonder if you are following the right path for your life. But after failure there are only two options. First you can give up and if you think about it where does that get you. It simply has you failing again day after day. So the other choice is to have a stiff drink (or ten), have a good cry, listen to some stupid sappy depressing music and the next day pick yourself up, dust yourself off, be thankful for the lessons you have learned (admittedly the hard way) and go at it again.

Success on the other hand is trickier. On the surface it looks great you have achieved your goal, and no matter how large or small, that is a tremendous accomplishment. But there are harder sides to success. Firstly you have to want what you have achieved. This may seem obvious… “I have worked so hard for it, of course I want it!!” but to honestly answer this question you have to follow the path for a while, experience living the life. Success brings many things with it, be it a husband, or money, or fame or a million and one other things, but each one can act as a tie holding you in place. If you succeed at something but are not happy, be brave, create new dreams and goals to achieve. Never be afraid to change your life, it almost always works out for the best and if it doesn’t, change it again and eventually you will find happiness.

Success is also difficult because of friends. People speak of “a friend in need as a friend indeed” and I agree entirely, those people who stay behind you in times of trouble are true friends. People also say “go out and be brave if you fail I will still be here for you”, but they never say I will still be here and I will still be your friend if you succeed. That is a rarer gift. Surround yourself with friends who are happy to see you succeed, not ones that revel in your failure or hurt you with their jealousy and be one yourself, it is hard when things are difficult for you and a friend achieves their goals but take time to remember jealousy is pointless it only damages your friendship, your turn will come but in the mean time a friend is happy and deserves your congratulations and joy. A friend in good times and in bad that’s what you should look for, and strive to be everyday.

Your loving mother

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Facecream

Dearest,
When I was young, I used to listen to all the girls talking about their face care routine and I could never understand it, we were teenagers we did not need to smooth fine lines or chase away the ravages of time, if anything we were desperate to be older, and so I never used the creams and lotions of the other girls. Now I am older and I realise something important, it was not that we needed the creams then, much like our first bra it was a sign of impending womanhood. It was something else as well, it was habit forming. Habits are one of the hardest things to break, just look at smoking and yet they are also one of the hardest things to start, like flossing. Start using face cream when you are young, it will be a habit you carry with you for life and your 60-year-old self will thank you. With the ozone layer the way it is make sure it has a little sunscreen in it and just for me please try to use something organic. The benefits of face cream are well proven but the detriment to your health of a twice a day application of a bunch of chemicals I cannot spell let alone pronounce has yet to be entirely examined. I know I am being an overprotective mother with probably nothing to worry about, but please humour me.

Love, today and always
Mum

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Why are we here?

I suppose that this is an explanation for anyone who in his or her wanderings around the Internet stumbled across my blog and is wondering what this is all about. Firstly, allow me to apologise. I am not a writer, my words are insufficient to portray the strengths of my emotions, the depths of my love and the hope that my thoughts contain, it is my hope that you will forgive my lack of skill to see the aims behind it. I am writing this blog for two reasons. But let me first provide you with some background. I, like many young women in their late 20’s am single and I suffer from depression. I am a hardworking career woman but my greatest dreams are of a family of my own. I have an incredible relationship with my mother, but it was not always so, it has taken work and I am sure I will go into this a great deal at some point. A while ago my mother suggested that, as I did not like to keep a diary, maybe I should try framing my thoughts as letters, it was her suggestion that they not be love letters to a future boyfriend or husband but to be for, as she put it, the one person that will give you the greatest joy, a daughter. As a single woman with no hope of a family in the foreseeable future it seemed at first a little depressing to write to someone who hasn’t been born yet, but the more I thought about it the more I found myself having little conversations with her in my head, thinking at times “oh, I must remember to tell her this” or “when she is my age I hope she experiences that” and so it came that I started to jot down these notes. These letters contain the advice I want to pass on, the little everyday things that you forget once you are past them. I suppose the last question you might have is why a blog? Why out for the world to read rather than in a journal or diary as a private gift to be passed on one day. I am doing it this way because it is my hope that as the occasional person passes they might add their own input, improve and add on to my advice. If one experiential voice is a gift then a choir of voices is truly a treasure, and that is what I hope to pass on, the treasure of a mothers love tempered with a woman’s experience and polished by a thousand voices.

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