Chapter 38

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

It was only when turning round to walk out of the church that I came to a realization that I was actually in a congregation of a few hundred and started wondering what the people walking out must have been thinking of me. One guy came to me and gave me some hope. He told me that if that pastor’s healing is true, he agrees with my message of how it could have happened. He wanted me to know that he at least agreed with me. This must have been my man Friday, Robinson Crusoe’s companion on the island.

I was left feeling sadly happy. I can only relate this feeling of being sadly happy to a divorcee. A divorcee is happy to be free but sad that things did not work out. I was happy that I had had my very first experience of what it could have been like for Jesus or any of the prophets when they went to take God’s message to the people. Its no wonder Jonah had tried to run away and Moses had insisted on God giving him something miraculous to show the people. I can only imagine the anxiety that Moses must have been feeling when he threw the staff down expecting it to turn into a snake. He must have been sweating like a pig.

To me, a church leader is someone who walks up to you on the street (since lets face it, few of us know these pastors personally) and has a conversation with you that goes something like this:-

Churchleader: Praise the Lord sister, my name is Pastor so and so and am here to bring you a message from God, amen?

Me: Amen.

Churchleader: Sister, I am from such and such, I used to do this and this and then God changed my life and I was healed. I want to tell you that God heals. If you just believe in God, he will heal all your wounds of whatever kind. The Bible says this and that.

Me (in excitement): Amen, Hallelujah Pastor. Praise the Lord. Pastor, I also have a message for you from God.

Churchleader: What? For real? You have a message for me from who? God? God talks to you? Who are you?

Me: My name is …………

Churchleader: Forget about your name. I mean what makes you think that God could have sent you to me with a message? I mean WHO are you? Can you prove any of that stuff you are talking about?

Me (Tongue tied and thinking): Did this guy just walk up to me and give me some tales about himself and expect me to believe them without question. Then when I try to tell him something he asks me to prove it? God help us. (Me walking away).

I mean lets face it, when Jesus went to tell the scribes and the Pharisees about him being the son of God, am certain they must have told Him that if the Son of God was on earth, they would know because he would have made a majestic entrance on a golden chariot wearing a golden crown with angels surrounding him. The Son of God could definitely not be on foot wearing cheap clothes and making furniture. It’s no wonder that Jesus trashed that temple. I could have done the same today.

I am not some nobody from nowhere! For goodness sake, I am one of the people that pastor was telling his tales to. If he was truly a man of God, no matter who he imagined me to be, he could have at least acknowledged the courage I had in walking up there to deliver my message. And, he ought to have arranged to meet with me to correct whatever misconceptions he thought I had. I was left asking myself how I could possibly believe someone telling me that his HIV status was changed from positive to negative. How stupid was that. I was left with a realization of how gullible church goers are.

I wondered what the other pastors of the church were left thinking. They probably knew that the guy was lying about his HIV status but decided to just let him deliver his message which to them sounded quite entertaining. Little did they know how entertaining it was going to get! They were probably left thinking that if those idiots could believe that guy as demonstrated by that young lady, they will believe anything we tell them!

When my husband came home after reading some of my writing on this blog, he told me that I was making a fool of myself because although he agrees with what am writing, no-one else will. That confirmed to me that I was on the way to being like Jesus and then the fear of God rose in me.

I realized that Jesus was not Oprah Winfrey or Tyra Banks who are swimming in money and are worshipped and praised for supposedly telling people the truth about life. I realized that being close to God meant being far from riches and fame and being ridiculed. I wondered whether that meant that I had to give up even the little that I had or I could at least keep that. I cringed at the thought that I could end up like Job!! I wondered whether my passionate project was going to cave in and make a buffoon out of me. I was not ready to be like Jesus if that’s what it takes.

I imagined that the people who must be the most like Jesus are those who make fools of themselves everyday, like my mother and her mental illness!

I apologized to God profusely for making fun of his creation and promised NEVER to make fun of Him again. Then I prayed for Him not to make me like Jesus or any prophet for that matter and just let me be me.

Chapter 37

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

Today was thinking day, Sunday. I bundled up my nephew and his cousin sister, my daughter, and off we went to church. Today I learned NEVER to make fun of God. In the morning, I was giggling at the thought of Him sitting by himself somewhere and coming to the realization of what a big mistake he had made allowing us the freedom to choose what we wanted to do. Little did I know that a big mistake was in store for me.

God decided that He would give me something to think about this thinking day. I also discovered today what it must be like to be like Jesus. Most church congregations if asked whether they would like to be like Jesus would gladly scream ‘yes’, completely oblivious to what Jesus’ life on earth was truly like and just imagining the fame He acquired long after He was gone. I discovered that during His lifetime, Jesus was probably the biggest fool to walk the face of the earth in the eyes of most people who met Him and I DO NOT ever want to go through what he went through if that’s what it takes to be like Him.

I mean just imagine if a guy comes up to you today and tells you that he is the son of God. Being truly honest with yourself, would you believe him? I am certain that I would not. At least not until he performs a few miracles to prove it. And even then, I would be left asking myself whether he is a Christian or a devil worshipper. I would also probably escort him to my mother’s doctor for a check up.

Jesus tried to spread his message to people and all he got was ridicule, embarrassment, persecution and crucifixion. It was not after He was long gone that people started asking themselves: “By the way, was that not the Son of God?”

If you truly WANT to be like Jesus, you have to be ready to experience the ridicule, embarrassment, persecution and crucifixion that He experienced. I had a taste of some embarrassment today and I could not imagine ever going through the same experience a second time. I dare you to try it. It is an experience to live for.

Today I had a conversation with the visiting pastor at the church I go to. Yesterday I was gladly preaching the message of being infected with God to students in school and got many congratulations from my colleagues on what a good message that was. Heck I even pledged to donate a mirror to the school with the message engraved on it! I suppose the euphoria of my revelations had not quite died out by the time I attended church today. The conversation went somewhat like this.

I was sitting among a congregation of a few hundred people. Yes, the church is pretty big and even that number of people is not sufficient to fill it up. The pastor was introduced and stood up to give us his message, presumably from God. I cannot remember his name but he told me that he was basically a thug, what I could relate to a member of the Mungiki in his country. His mother had dedicated him to God and was a prayerful woman. Eventually, after many years of thuggery, he developed an illness and after someone prayed for him, he was healed without needing an operation. After that experience, he joined a church and was now a preacher who had evolved from imitating other pastors’ methods of preaching to finding his own method. He confessed to having been diagnosed as HIV positive after he had changed his ways and after seven years, God miraculously healed him, he married and had some kids. I did not need any proof for what he said. I believed it without question.

You can imagine what stupid me was thinking when the dear pastor told me about his healing. Immediately I thought that the proof I needed about my preaching to the children yesterday had been presented to me on a silver platter. The pastor must have been healed because he started loving himself and doing good at which point the HIV infection was replaced with an infection with God. Woohoo!!

I was soooo excited that I forgot about my knowledge of church leaders as hypocrites of the highest order. When the pastor asked if any of us had a testimony after he had prayed for almost everybody to find healing, I put up my hand and waltzed to the front to give my message, the one God gave me to bring to the pastor. I grabbed the microphone and told the pastor in the presence of a few hundred people, about my revelation about being infected with God and how that must have been how he was healed and I told everyone that in order to be healed like our dear pastor was, all they had to do was to change their ways, start loving themselves and doing good.

Nobody clapped when I handed back the microphone. And as I walked back to my seat, the pastor told the congregation that healing does not come from being excitable and before you love yourself you must love God first. He also said that his HIV status was confirmed by machines. This was because I had asked him whether he saw the virus and he hesitated before saying no. He said a closing prayer and people started filing out of the church.

As he said the closing prayer, I was left wondering whether loving myself is not equivalent to loving God seeing as God created me in his image. And goodness, if I cannot love myself who I can see and feel, how can I be expected to love an invisible, intangible God? Does this pastor think that I was a starry-eyed teenager or someone who escaped from a psychiatric ward somewhere? Does he not know that I am an experienced self-employed advocate of the High Court of Kenya? These machines that confirmed his HIV status, who said that they cannot confirm his infection with God? Isn’t the fact that the machine was reading a positive reading at one time and then changed to negative when he found God itself a confirmation that God had entered his body? I said earlier that I felt alone on this quest of mine. Today, I felt like Robinson Crusoe.

Chapter 36

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

After confirming that my relationship with my husband was conducive to my quest, I decided to analyse my relationship with my children.

The first thing that immediately came to mind is that I had to change my relationship with them and start teaching them about God. Something I had never bothered with before I started on my search for my missing ‘something’. My daughter was still a baby and my niece and my nephew were primary school going children.

As far as my daughter was concerned, I decided that I would read the bible to her to start with and pulled out a children’s Bible I had purchased for my nephew when he was younger.

My niece and my nephew were already being taught about what the Bible says in their CRE class. I check my nephew’s homework on a daily basis and assign him my own homework in different subjects every day in addition to the school homework. Yes, I am demanding. I was therefore fully aware that their CRE class does not cover the idea of God being a hunk made of tiny little pieces called human beings or the meaning of WHO I AM, or connecting with your perfect self inside you, or about how God communicates to us by making us feel passionate about what we need to do, or about how the refusal to acknowledge the existence of God inside us is a dangerous thing, or about how doing good connects us with God, or about how deep thought constitutes prayer.

Soon after I started considering this issue, my rotary club organized a day for us to visit a school whose students we were told had ‘gone to the dogs’. Our assignment was to talk with the students and give them motivation to hang in there and reap the fruits of hard work. I signed up for the visit primarily because I was curious to see what children who had ‘gone to the dogs’ looked like and who their brave teachers were. Until the minute that I got up to introduce myself to the children, I had no idea what I was going to tell them. We had been told that drugs, alcohol, sex, sodomy, teenage pregnancies etc. were a part of these children’s lives. I was pretty sure that telling them to work hard and study hard was not going to get me anywhere.

When I started talking to the children, I told them that I was bringing them a message of love. I asked them whether they loved themselves and their answer was yes. I told them that throughout the time that we would be talking to them, from that day on till the day they died, they should be asking themselves one question: ‘Do I love myself?’ and if they do, then they should choose to do good. I asked them whether they knew what a good child does and they gave me a list of answers. I asked them whether they knew what lawyers and doctors and pilots and engineers do and they looked confused. I told them to concentrate on what they knew which is being good children.

After the introduction, the children and ourselves were divided into three groups. While talking to my group about God, I addressed with them the question I had asked them to keep asking themselves about whether they love themselves and if they do, they should do good. Thankfully, they all remembered. Next I picked on one boy who stood up at which point I asked him to go get me the HIV virus. He smiled and shook his head and said that he could not. I asked him why not? He said he did not know where to get it. I asked him whether he had seen it. His answer was no. I asked him whether it existed. His answer was yes. I asked him how he could know it existed yet he had never seen it and did not know where to get it from. He looked confused. I picked on one girl and asked her to stand up. I asked the boy whether he knew if she had the virus. His answer was no.

I then asked him whether he knew how to get infected with HIV. He gave me the answers in a flash. Unprotected sex, blood transfusion and dirty needles.

Going back to the question: ‘Do I love myself” and if the answer is yes, I do good. I asked the children whether the Bible says that God is good and God is love. Their answer was yes. So I told them that loving yourself and doing good is how you get infected with God since God is love and God is good. Just like with the HIV virus, you cannot see either God or the virus infecting you. I asked them whether they would like to be infected with God. Their answer was yes. I explained to them that EVERYTHING in the world belongs to God who they told me was the creator of heaven and earth and if they were infected with God, they could have ANYTHING their heart desired and whatever they wanted because God created our president and his long motorcade of Mercedes benzes, he created the big mansions that were staring at the children from the hill across from the school, he created the cars we came in, he created the whole world, even the president of America. If that’s what God has done, what could he not do for them?

I was left hoping that some of them got the message and would aspire to love themselves and make good choices in their lives believing that God would infect them and give them anything they wanted. I was certain that their teachers got the message and they could at least repeat it to them when necessary. I promised to buy them a mirror to be looking at themselves and asking the question whether they love themselves.

On my part, I was astonished at that revelation. Later on I sat and thought deeply about what I had taught those kids wondering whether I had lied to them. The HIV virus can be detected under a microscope but can a microscope detect an infection of God? I did not think so but I believed that what I told those children would give them hope because it gave me hope. All I had to do is love myself and make the good choices in my life. Then God would infect me and I could have anything I wanted. I decided to believe that since science could detect infections in our bodies that cause illnesses it could also detect a good infection if someone passionate about science could think about it.

While still thinking about how simple it was to teach those children about God and how he can help them, I went back to the idea of passion ruling my life. I wondered how it was that God could make me have that strong feeling that made me know what I needed to do. To answer that question, I went back again to the idea of God being a hunk made of little pieces of which I was one of. I then looked at my hand and asked myself how it was that I was able to tell my finger what it needed to do.

Science came to my rescue because I remembered studying about the nervous system and how the brain sends messages to different parts of the body using electrical currents. So according to science, an electrical current travels through my nervous system, hits my finger and makes my finger do what I want. So by parity of reasoning, what God does is He sends me messages by electrifying me into action. A strong surge of this electrical current is what passion is. Then I asked myself whether my finger trusted me to make sure that it will succeed in what am telling it to do. I was wondering about my faith in God at the time. As a finger of God’s body, could I trust God to ensure that what He was telling me to do would not harm me? The answer was yes because I knew that if I did something to hurt my finger, I would be hurting myself. By parity of reasoning, God would not tell me to do something that he knew would hurt me because He would be hurting Himself.

That was the point when I took a deep breath and jumped up and sang Kirk Franklin’s ‘Stomp’ song. I was jazzed up by that revelation.

But one more thing came to mind. I asked myself what would happen to me if I decided to give all the different parts of my body the freedom to choose what they wanted to do. I thought back to the story of creation and remembered that on the seventh day, God rested. To my mind, this ‘resting’ that God was supposed to be doing was not resting at all. He was reflecting on what he had just done. He had given his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his neck, his arms, his legs, his toes etc, the freedom to choose what they wanted to do and he realized what a BIG MISTAKE that was.

Chapter 35

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

Meeting my husband and getting married all happened in a flash. One day I was standing in the court corridors happily single and 6 months later, I was someone’s wife. I cannot say that I knew what to expect going into marriage. What I knew is that I was passionately attracted to the guy I was getting married to who was at the time willing to act in my best interests and I in his.

Timing was responsible for our meeting. Just like timing was the cause of my meeting my motor cycle day dreamer. I think that it was the choices we were making in our lives that made it possible for us to meet at the right place, at the right time. After I got to know my husband, I felt like I had known him for centuries. Like I had already met him before and before we were separated, we had agreed to meet at that time and at that place on that day when we met.

Examining our relationship to ascertain whether my husband was a means or an obstacle to finding my perfect being and thus my missing ‘something’ was an interesting experience. I did not fear divorce. Even at minimum thinking level, I knew that the experience of being married to my husband was a means to my finding the perfect me.

I decided to write down what I thought to be the recipe for a good marriage like mine.

To start with, we all know that whereas marriage to the right person is heavenly bliss, marriage to the wrong person is simply hellish. I was glad that I did not settle for good or better and expected better than best. It was a pleasant surprise to have my expectations exceeded. If you want a good marriage, then do not settle for anything less than better than the best. However, do not expect your timing to coincide with that better than the best if you are not making better than best choices in your life! You have to work on yourself and make yourself into the person you are looking for as best you can.

DO NOT carry any baggage into marriage. By baggage I do not mean children, I mean the heartbreak and other bad experiences you had encountered prior to marriage. Simply put, you must not judge your current partner based on what others in the past have done to you and do not expect your partner to compensate you for anything s/he does not even know about. You must be ready to start on a clean slate. To ensure that your baggage stays outside of your marriage, its back to you working on yourself to make yourself the best you know you can be before marriage.

DO NOT expect your spouse to be EVERYTHING you ever wanted. The only person who is that is your God, your perfect being. Your spouse’s role in your life is not to fill any void you may be experiencing. It is to bring out the best in you and propel you to greater heights than you would attain on your own. Most people who are happily married have oddly been in previous relationships which turned out to be hellish. This is because everyone you meet will either bring out the best in you or the worst in you. The person you marry must be one who brings out the best in you.

Marriage does not change anyone. The same person you are before marriage is the same person you will be in marriage. Marriage is not a life changing experience. Your life must continue even after marriage. You must continue pursuing your passions even in marriage and that person you marry must be someone who will facilitate and not inhibit that pursuit of your passions. You will need to make some adjustments to your home life, making sure to keep Feminism, Petty Squabbles and Vultures completely out of it, but that’s all.

Marriage is necessarily built on trust. If you cannot trust your spouse, then you are in for a rocky marriage. Trust is a choice you make. You cannot be with your spouse all the time and know where s/he is all the time. In any case, you do not have the time or energy to keep a tab on your spouse when you are busy pursuing your passions. Let your spouse continue with his/her life while you continue with yours. At the very least, you each need space to think and plan. Your spouse is simply your very good friend with whom it is mandatory to share a house and a bed.

When it comes to sharing a bed with your very good friend, you cannot avoid intimacy and you should have nothing to hide from him/her. Self-consciousness in marriage is an oxymoron and it will cause unnecessary tension.

If you want your spouse to know something about you, simply tell it to him/her. Trying to give hints or second guess or mind-read only causes frustration. Keep Petty Squabbles OUT!

It is very important to know that your relationship with your spouse is a confidential relationship. Not something to be talked about and discussed with others. The solution to your problems with your spouse lies in talking to him/her. Keep an open mind, remember that you are brought up differently. Talk and listen and be willing to understand a different view from your own. You are married to the person so only you know how best to address a difficulty you are having. Telling outsiders about your relationship problems only gives them something to snigger about and gives them comfort that your life is not as good as they imagined. Very few people will have your best interests at heart. Keep the Vultures OUT!

Feminism did not end the stereo-types assigned to men and women. It entrenched them. DO NOT assign any stereo-type to your spouse. The truth is that if a man sleeps with another woman, he makes a conscious choice to do so. It has nothing to do with his invaluable object going out of control or the other woman. And if a woman cooks and cleans, she makes a conscious choice to do so. It has nothing to do with her nature. Agree with your spouse on how to split the housework both at home and at the office based on your passions and abilities. Remember that you and your spouse are equal in different ways. There is no such thing as exact equality in any relationship. Keep Feminism OUT!

Good sex on a daily basis is a fantasy. It cannot even qualify for a dream come true. If that’s what you are hoping to get in marriage, forget it. I will repeat that you must not carry any baggage into your marriage. Do not expect your spouse to compensate you for any sex drought you experienced prior to meeting him/her.

In marriage, when it comes to sex, what counts is quality NOT quantity. I think that the best catalyst for good sex in marriage is rejection. Why? Because if you do not have sex when you want it and have to wait for it, the time you do get it, you are turned on to the maximum. The truth is that if your spouse does not want sex when you want it and you insist on it, bad sex is all you’re going to get. And good sex does not come from thinking about what you are doing and planning about how it will be done. It comes from doing what HAS to be done.

I mean if you are going to be bedding the same guy or same chick night in, night out, and you are looking for good sex, then the foreplay should last for a few nights. I think that when she has a headache or he’s tired and instead of sulking and going to look for it elsewhere, you extend the wait by revenging once, good sex is in store for you. After all, you cannot be married to someone who does not want to have sex with you!! In law, a marriage is not a marriage if it is not consummated, this means that, unless you are having sex, there is no marriage!

Chapter 34

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

Vultures are those creatures who respectfully stand aside and let the warring parties rip each other apart into shreds. Divorce lawyers are some of these vultures but the king pins of these vultures are members of either sex whose delicacy is young marriages. Petty Squabbles had just about finished off all the old marriages and their rotting corpses were not edible, even to her siblings, Vultures.

Out in the battle field, Vultures have a modus operandi that should be used in educating military forces the world over. A Vulture knows that marriage is an endangered species and those who are in it or about to get into it are TERRIFIED of it having seen what happened in the old marriages both before and after the feminism war. Women are afraid of going back to when the house housework was exclusively their territory and men are afraid of the relentless surge of women doing the housework in the office.

The problem with men is that they cannot put up a spirited fight for long. I think it is in their nature. Just like their invaluable objects that all women love cannot perform for more than a few seconds or minutes at a time without needing a break. Women on the other hand, are possessed with an apparently super human supply of energy that can make them put up a spirited fight for such a long time that by the time the men have taken their break and are ready for more, the women have gone and taken what was left to fight for. It’s also in the women’s nature. Their invaluable objects outdo men’s by far.

Because of the nature of men, the men have become demoralized and given up the fight. They decided to just let it be and accept that women’s staying power is not something they can keep up with. Men stopped fighting ages ago and settled into their new role of trying to understand what a woman wants. Despite the men’s surrender, Petty Squabbles is still alive and well. When it comes to petty squabbling, women win, hands down. Their ability to argue about meaningless gibberish for days on end, is incredible. Vultures are completely alive to this fact, after all Petty Squabbles is their big sister.

Feminism, the mother of Vultures is a very good provider for her children. She has ensured that Vultures are getting more than enough to eat as she makes sure that women continue to imagine that the men are still fighting.

What Feminism taught her Vultures is that in order to survive in this world of scarcity, the best weapon to use against your enemy is illusion. Illusion is used in the work place to ensure that employees stay employed and in politics to ensure that the poor remain poor. At the home front, feminism uses illusion to make a woman believe that her husband is her enemy. If the women stopped to think this through even at moderate level thinking, they would realize that their enemy is the Vulture. Every married woman has been attacked by a Vulture.

One of the illusion lessons taught to Vultures by their mummy is that nobody knows what love is. Nobody knows that love is acting in one’s best interests and if you want to know who loves you and who does not, all you need to do is check who is acting in your best interests and who is not.

One type of Vulture who attacks women, is the female friend who women call up to discuss about her problems with her man. All this Vulture has to do is to perpetrate the propaganda about all men being dogs and ensure that Petty Squabbles is eating well. This Vulture will be the first one to snap up the man after Petty Squabbles has succeeded in kicking him to the kerb.

The other type of Vulture is the male business man or professional who women run into while at work outside the house. All this Vulture has to do is to perpetrate the propaganda about how men are trying to hold back women, they do not trust their women and they do not think that women can take care of themselves. This Vulture knows fully well that he will not get into a feminist woman’s skirt by asking her out. He too is terrified of Petty Squabbles who is his big sister, so what he does is create the illusion necessary to make it appear as if what he is making is a business proposition. This Vulture puts women under the illusion that business can be conducted at his house, in a bar, in a hotel room, on a flight to God knows where or in a car on the way to the Masai Mara because normal business hours are just too short.

Men are at loss on how to tackle this Vulture whose tactics are so effective, the minute the man tries to reason out the working hours, he is attacked with a fury that has the same staying power as Petty Squabbles. Of course the man, being a man, knows exactly what the Vulture is after, something which the woman is unable to decipher in her relentless surge to free herself from her man, a freedom which, if she stopped for a minute to think about, is not something she really wants. The woman does not realize that her man is acting in her best interests and the Vulture has only one thing in mind. Before long, marriage or the idea of it is dead and buried.
This is the reason that my husband and I had to make the pact not to allow Feminism, her daughter Petty Squabbles and the Vultures anywhere near our marriage.

Chapter 33

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

Petty squabbles are those arguments you have with someone and if during the argument, you get the chance to breathe, you become tongue tied because you cannot for the death of you understand what the hell it is you are quibbling about.

Marriage is normally between two people who share a house and a bed. Housework is a dual role occupation. There is the role of providing the finances to build a home and there is the role of building the home. These roles are equal roles. Equal in different ways. Traditionally, a woman’s role is to build the home while a man’s role is to provide the finances.

With the introduction of feminism and the emancipation of women, women (me included) have, for good reason, refused to be stereo-typed and prevented from pursuing their passions which have nothing to do with working in a house. What women seem to have forgotten in their pursuit of freedom is that the work you do outside the house is still housework. Few men know this.

During my early days in legal practice, my feminism was manifested in my refusal to be labeled a Miss so and so when addressing the Court. Before I was admitted to the bar and thus permitted to address the Court, I would visit the courts and find that whereas the men stated their names as Kimani, Otieno, Onguto etc., women always put a title in their names and stated their names as Miss So and so or Mrs. So and so. I vowed not to be known in my legal profession as somebody’s daughter or somebody’s wife. I stated my name simply as Njeri. In a while, everyone knew me as that girl who calls herself ‘Njeri’ in court and thought it amusing in their own ways. Eventually, other young lady lawyers started using their first names in court. Now that everyone knows me as me, I can use any of my names in whatever combination I please.

The main bone of contention between a housewife and her husband is that her husband does not appreciate the work she does merely because it does not generate money directly. She also resents the fact that when he goes out to work, he does not seem to realize that the activities he is engaging in out there affect what is going on at home. The work that is done outside the home is still housework. Women knew this for a long time before the feminism revolution began and then all hell broke loose.

Feminism was introduced in a haphazard way intended to cause a revolution. Propaganda about how all men are ‘dogs’ and cannot be trusted was churned out like a gospel. In all the euphoria, instead of women going to work outside the home and practicing what they were preaching to their husbands, they decided to teach their husbands a lesson and make them compensate for the many years of men going out to work, staying out late, sleeping with their secretaries and work mates, drinking themselves silly, diverting the income to uses that have nothing to do with the home and the like.

Two wrongs have never made a right. Unfortunately for women, the revolution that they thought would free them from men, took away a vital element in their lives, the men. When all is said and done, even the most ardent and extreme feminist critic of men will admit that a man possesses an object that women, even those who are not attracted to men, yearn for and will pay some big money to acquire a substitute for.

Feminism has left us in a whirlwind. Women are in trouble. They don’t want to do the housework at home and when they go out to do the housework at work, men take advantage of their naivety and abuse them. Some women imagine that they can have what the men had. Of course that is not possible because only maybe 2-3 men in the world are willing to stay at home and do the home housework while the women go to work outside the home. In fact, the men who do not mind doing the house housework themselves initiated a quiet revolution that sneaked up on women, took over ownership of the women’s housework role and put men at the forefront of house house work.

The best chefs in the world are …. Men! The people running cleaning and laundry companys are ………. Men! The people running home improvement companies are ……… Men! The best tailors and clothes designers are …….. Men! The best shoe designers are …….. Men! I mean women are also good at these things but lets give credit where it is due. The men have excelled and given the women a run for their money in something that women mistakenly thought the men did not appreciate. In effect, feminism did not free women from men, it entrenched the role of men in the work place and brought out the truth in the phrase, IT’S A MAN’S WORLD!

When women woke up to the men’s quiet revolution, it was too late for them to take back what was theirs and they had to settle for sharing it with the men. This only served to fuel the propaganda about how men are ‘dogs’ and the resentment women had for men intensified. Women surged on with their war against men oblivious to the fact that they were their own worst enemy and that they were fighting a losing battle. Now everybody is at work outside the home yet somebody has to do the work at home. Who might that be? Enter, Petty Squabbles.

Feminism’s first born child named, Petty Squabbles, went on the rampage and attacked everything about marriage. Marriages the world over started to crumble. The divorce rates rose to an all time high such that lawyers, the world over, started specializing in divorce law and joined in the war against marriage after they realized how lucrative a broken marriage can be.

In time, the corpses of marriages were strewn all over the battle field. During the war, Feminism gave birth to many more children, she ran out of names to give them and eventually settled on giving them all the same name regardless of their sex. The name is Vultures. Vultures grew up and ran out to play.

Chapter 32

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

When I was single, before I met my husband, I had resolved NEVER to get married. I had had my heart shattered to smitherines and had decided that I was just fine on my own. I was actually a very happy single person. My life was so well organized and I knew what I wanted and where I was headed, all on my own. I cannot now remember what that was that I wanted and where it was that I was headed.

I told myself that the reason I got my heart broken was because I had settled for less than the best when I was the best. Good and better were not good enough for me. Looking back on this experience. I saw clearly, the danger of atheist philosophy. I was yearning for God and trying to find Him in the people I met, expecting them to understand and know me completely. An impossible task for them.

Most people who know me well will tell you that I am too good to be true and that they cannot figure me out. These days I do not try to explain myself to anyone and I am not surprised when people doubt me. I just get on with my life and hope that they will come around eventually and see that I am just like them. Just like now on my quest, I was alone. I am a veteran at being alone in a world of billions.

After that heart rending experience, I decided that if ever I was to allow anyone close to me, whether as a friend or a husband, that person would have to be better than me. As good as me was not enough. I needed someone who could bring out the best in me and challenge me to be better than the best person I thought I was. Although I was happy, I was still missing ‘something’. I was convinced that such a person does not exist but I still hoped that there was such a person. I knew it was too much to ask to expect there to be more than one such person.

When I got to know my husband, I realized that he was better than me. I was still a giving person at that time but his giving outshone mine by miles. I was working out on a daily basis at home but he was working out on a daily basis at his gym. I was employed and working for myself, just on the brink of breaking free and he had his own office for many years. He was older than me but the things he had achieved by the time he was my age, I was nowhere close to achieving. This guy actually made me feel small when I thought I was big. He was like me but better than me. I did not bother myself with whether or not he understood and knew me, I only wanted to know if he would act in my best interests.

When we met, he was driving a Toyota land cruiser prado while I was driving a Toyota rav 4. I thought our cars clearly represented how we were related. We were manufactured in the same factory, our designs were similar but our performances were worlds apart. We were the same but also very different. As a rav 4, I needed to work extremely hard to catch up with that land cruiser.

I have a friend who knows my criteria for a suitable mate off-head. I had told them to him enough times for him to recite them like a nursery rhyme. Absolutely no smoking. I hate cigarette smoke but I detest the smell of nicotine on anything that is not an unlit cigarette safely tucked in an unopened packet. This does not mean that I do not have friends who smoke, but the smoking will ensure that I keep a substantial distance from them. This friend of mine is a smoker. I will never understand why people choose to smoke. It is not an addiction as many will say, it is a choice. If you stop and think deeply about what you are doing when you smoke, you will realize that you are making a choice to smoke and you are responsible for the consequences of that choice whether to yourself or to others. Everyone, even the smokers know that it is not good to smoke. Shallow thinking makes sure they keep at it. As I said, I can only control what I think and do, so I accept the smokers’ choice because it is theirs to make even though it affects me.

Alcohol was a dicey factor because I could drink sometimes. But I was not sure that a guy who drinks could control his alcohol intake as well as I could mine. I also do not like the smell of alcohol on anything other than an alcoholic drink. The behaviour of an intoxicated individual, which I had experience of, was out of the question. I decided that I did not need to make any decision on this one since anyway it was not relevant in my happily single life at the time.

Never in a million years would I share a man with another woman. But, if my man wanted another woman, I would not stand in the way of their relationship. The lives of both my mother and my mum fortified this requirement.

I could not imagine a man younger than me understanding someone as complicated as me so I was not ever going to hook up with a man the same age as me. He had to be at least 5 years older than me.

My home for me was my refuge. It was a place to run away to from all the madness and stresses of the world. No way was I going to live with someone who brought home that madness and stress. Only a person whose presence improved the silence of my empty apartment could qualify.

My husband was surprisingly available and a teetotaler when I met him. He qualified on all counts so I only needed minimum thinking to respond when, after dating for 3 months, he asked me why it is that we were not getting married. I told him that I did not have the money and he looked at me and laughed. Another 3 months later, we were married.

I remember when we decided to get married, we made a pact with each other. That we would NEVER engage in any ‘petty squabbles’. Petty squabbles are the mothers of broken marriages as far as am concerned. The mother of petty squabbles, is feminism.

Chapter 31

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

I remember that in the Bible, when Moses was sent by God to free the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, he asked God who he should tell them has sent him. God told him to tell them that I AM sent him. That God is WHO I AM. God is who I am as a perfect being. God is the sum total of us all in perfection. I have God in me. I have love and I have goodness in me.

We all do. All of us in our perfect state create one perfect being, God. We are connected to each other creating one humongous body called God. Some of us form the head, others the belly, others the arms, others the legs, others the lungs, others the toes, others the heart, others the intestines etc. That is why each of us is different, special, unique. Each of us has a peculiar function in this perfect body called God. All of us put together in our perfect state, like all the different parts of our bodies, make God.

As human beings, we are created in the image of God so that we can understand who God is and realize the importance of our roles as part of Him. Our true selves are a part of God but until we can see God, we cannot appreciate who we are and what we are. A finger does not know its importance until it can see itself as part of a body.

This revelation brought up a million different questions in my mind. So what happened to this body called God that made it necessary for me to come to earth and learn about God and what my function is in His body? Who is Jesus? What is all this about the world coming to an end? Why do we have families? Why are there men and women? Why am I attracted to my husband? How are children created? Why are there different races? Why do we have animals and plants and insects? Who is Satan? Do ghosts exist? What about demons? Where is hell or heaven? I almost gave up. I was not ready for this kind of attack on my brain. I had to apply emergency brakes, stop with the questions and take things one step at a time.

I decided to confine myself to the pursuit of my perfect being. I thought that if I worked towards becoming the perfect being that I have inside me, I would realize the purpose of my being born and find my missing ‘something’. I decided to take a closer look at my relationships with the people around me because I realized that if any part of me is wrong, I could not achieve the perfection I needed to fit into my special role in this perfect being known as God.

I was however disappointed and downcast about my quest. I felt like I was labouring in vain. Looking at others around me, I realized that God must be taking his last breathe in Intensive Care Unit because hardly anyone I knew was trying to discover what their role in the body of God was and to realize their perfect being. Unfortunately, like forgiveness, not every one is ready to give up the distractions that the world has to offer and look for God at the same time. Like the atheist philosopher that I used to be, or the prophets in the Bible who were subjected to persecution and ridicule or Jesus who was crucified, I was alone on this quest but I was passionately determined to find my missing ‘something’ so I kept at it. This was a fire I could not put out until it had burned to the last spark. My quest had gone out of my control. I could not stop there. I was fascinated by the discoveries I was making and felt even more excited about finding the missing ‘something’.

I felt like my mind had traveled thousands of miles yet my body was still where I started. Apparently, the ‘something’ I was looking for was within me so my body did not need to go anywhere to find it. It is my mind that needed to expand within itself, to explore the uncharted areas.

To start with, I picked up the Bible I had put down and decided to read it from the first page. My approach to the Bible was now based on God being inside the people in the Bible, not outside them. At the back of my mind was a picture of a huge model of a perfect man, like one of the sculptures of the Greek gods with a tight six pack cubed belly, muscular body, a hunk. This guy is God and He is divided into innumerable tiny little pieces like the cells in my body and I am one of those little pieces. The other little pieces are everyone else and in God we are all alive. I placed myself inside God’s head thinking that I must be part of His brain since I was thinking unlike everyone else around me. Every time the Bible mentioned God, I understood the reference to be either to the whole perfect hunk that we all form or the perfect individual that each of us is.

I also resolved to start going to church. Hypocrites or no hypocrites, I thought that I needed to do that for the sake of my children. And not everyone in church is a hypocrite. My children needed to search for their God and find out why they were born. Sunday school was a good starting point in planting the seed of curiosity that would assist me when I tried to explain my understanding of God and the revelations I had experienced to them.

Next, I looked at the guy I was married to and asked myself whether I made the right choice. I mean was my relationship with this guy a means or an obstacle to my pursuit of God inside me, a perfect me? Was the relationship making me a good person, a loving person or not? Did I need to make any changes?

I was a little afraid to consider these questions because I was afraid of what I may find out and what changes I may have to make going by the changes I had made so far. I stopped to think about my options seriously and saw that if I did not address my relationship with my husband, I would be cheating myself that all was well and I could not live with that.

The passion I had for finding my missing ‘something’ was like a tsunami. The fear of divorce was a drop of water. So I surged on.

Chapter 30

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

The refusal to recognize that yearning inside you makes you start behaving in weird ways which you are unable to understand.

Many of us have thought that we have fallen in love with someone in our past and when we break up with that person and meet them at a later date, we ask ourselves what the hell we were thinking. Others spend a few hours with several containers of alcohol and some cigarettes and maybe some white powders or green grass and the morning after, we will be asking ourselves, what the?! Others will go on a rampage jumping in and out of bed with whoever is willing not caring about who we are hurting completely oblivious to the fact that we are hurting ourselves the most exposing ourselves to unimaginable risks. Others eat more than they need only to later realize that the yearning remains. Others visit holy places, go to temple, church, mosque, synagogue, read holy books, preach, go to religious classes and retreats to learn about God.

Very few of us recognize this yearning as something real and something inside, not outside of us. We imagine that that thing is out there somewhere and we go out looking using whichever methods we think suit us. When all is said and done, until we come back and look inside ourselves, we will never satisfy that yearning.

When I considered the question of God and sat for long hours thinking about Him, I realized that God is love. I said that love is a state of mind, not a feeling. God is that person I think about when I think of a perfect me. God is who I am in perfection. I realized that there is a part of me inside me which is perfect and which I yearn to be connected to. All of us have this perfect us in us. When I love someone, I recognize that perfect part of them inside them. I don’t care about the outside of them and how it makes me feel. It is what I think of them that matters.

That perfect person inside of me knows me inside out and I cannot hide from Him. He knows and understands me completely. He created this body that I am in with the intention of showing me who I really am. He is only visible in this world through me. I am created in His image. When I die, He ceases to be and I am united with Him. He is not a human being. I suppose the best word to describe Him by is Holy Spirit.

God, my perfect self, is good. When I do things that make me feel good, I am connecting with God. That is why I was looking for good things to do to make me feel good. Giving makes me feel good. Sharing makes me feel good. Exercising makes me feel good. Working for myself makes me feel good. Pursuing my passions makes me feel good. Having faith in myself makes me feel good. Spending time with those I love makes me feel good. Laughter makes me feel good.

We all know what is good for us. No one outside of us needs to counsel us and tell us how to solve our problems. Refusing to believe and acknowledge God inside us, refusing to act in accordance with the directions given by the perfect you, refusing to do good, attracts diseases the origin of some of which are scientifically unexplainable and which spread and affect everyone around us sending the whole world into a panic.

Allowing that flesh eating microorganism to flourish inside you not only affects you but also affects those around you especially your loved ones who are already connected to the perfect you. It will cause you death at an early age. It will send you on wild goose chases. It will blind you with jealousy, selfishness, self-centredness, pride, fear and the like. It is a dangerous thing.

So, I can definitely say that changing from an atheist to believing in God was the most positive change I made.

Chapter 29

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

Changing my attitude towards lift sharing and accepting the sharing as part of life was also a positive change. At least when I was being a mean driver, the car I was being mean with belonged to me. In the lift sharing business, the lift I was refusing to share did not belong to me. I was stupidly imagining myself as the owner of the lift because I got into it first. I will repeat here that pride is a gynormous monster that can make you do stupid things and convince you that you are doing the right thing. At least if I owned the building where the lift was, I could start feeling like I own the lift and refuse to share it. I was nowhere close to ever owning a lift of my own yet I thought I deserved to ride in the lift to my floor undisturbed. Enough said. I am glad that that is in my past.

The exercise routine has been a challenge but I have kept at it and am feeling fitter and healthier. I do a lot of planning when am working out and some very good ideas creep into my mind at that time. I also feel re-born after a good sweating session. That alone is enough motivation for me to keep at it. The other day I went shopping for an outfit and discovered that my body was amenable to a wide variety of clothes, including figure hugging ones. That made me feel real good too.

When it comes to controlling weight, dieting does not cut it for me at all. I just look at pictures of people in famine stricken areas and note that there are no fat ones. You obviously cannot grow fat on eating nothing even if you suffer from some medical condition that makes you balloon faster than others. That medical condition will not save you from starvation if you do not eat. I tell myself to try to eat healthy and eat to satisfy hunger, not cravings, and exercise twice a week.

I have no time for thinking about food all the time and counting calories. I find that when I keep busy thinking about my life, who I am, where am headed and finding the missing ‘something’, I even forget to eat. Forgetting to eat is not a good thing so I try to keep to my meal times as much as possible. Occupy your mind with deep thoughts to keep food and other distractions out of your mind. You can only think about one thing at any one time, make sure it is something passionate enough to sweep away cravings of any kind. That’s what I keep telling myself but I will admit that there are times I just have to satisfy the craving and do so gladly, knowing that it will be a strong justification for my next workout.

My aim is not to look like anyone else, I just want to look like myself and be happy with what I’ve got and maintain the size I feel comfortable with. No body is perfect and when all is said and done, to quote King Solomon, fat or thin, we all die the same way.

Forgiveness is now second nature to me and am proud of myself for changing. It was not easy but after a while, I actually felt good about being on talking terms with everyone in my life and letting bygones be bygones. Learning how to forgive was a huge lesson for me. After I succeeded in doing it, I felt like I had graduated a class and could now move on to more strenuous exercises of the mind. I think that’s how I got to thinking about God.

As far as God is concerned, I realized that when I thought I was an atheist philosopher, I was cheating myself. The truth of the matter is that as human beings, we all yearn to find someone who knows us and understands us completely. Someone who finishes our sentences, someone who knows our different looks, someone who shares our sense of humour, someone who can tell when we’re lying about how we feel, someone to share secret jokes with, someone to be naked around, someone who makes you feel comfortable being yourself completely. We are excited when we visit a fortune teller or a palm reader or read our horoscopes and discover that someone out there knows something about us which we did not know anybody else knew.

The truth is that no such person exists outside of you. You will find those different qualities in different people but never in one person. If your own mother in whose womb you were formed, and your own father who raised you from babyhood cannot know and understand you completely, such that you leave home and go out looking for that someone out in the world, don’t cheat yourself that you will ever meet any person who does.

I have realized that not believing in God is a dangerous thing. When you refuse to acknowledge that yearning inside you and accept it as something that connects you with your true self, your God, the yearning does not go away, it becomes a flesh-eating microorganism which science has not yet ‘discovered’.

Just because we cannot yet see it under the microscopes we have today does not mean it doesn’t exist. I have seen it eating at a lot of people I know and when I discovered it in my body, I almost fainted. It is the most hideous thing ever.

Chapter 28

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

So I was set. I had chosen to let passion rule my life and ignore money which I was certain would follow where my passions lead me. I had also chosen to believe that as a child of an invincible God with potential invincibility in me, I have the ability to acquire anything I wanted.

In convincing myself to make these choices, I considered what I had seen become of children who had been completely neglected, let out into the world without an education and with no-one to care for them. These children become gum sniffing street children who we in Kenya, snidely refer to as ‘chokoras’ meaning children who scrape out a living in garbage bins and dumps. I think in England they were called street ‘urchins’ when I was there.

Governments, Non-governmental Organizations, charities and philanthropists the world over have put massive efforts trying to salvage these lost children, establishing homes for them trying to give them direction and act in their best interests. Most of the time, the minute these children get an opportunity to run away from these homes, they grab at it completely oblivious to the opportunities they are throwing away and the abilities they are refusing to exploit.

If God had not sent me here to get an education and familiarize myself with my potential abilities, I would have become the lowest form of brat possible. I would have become a ‘chokora’ in heaven. Imagine that! While everyone else is busy flying around on wings in heaven and shouting at me to just let my wings out and fly too, I would be busying myself looking for my car keys completely oblivious to the wings on my back! No way was I going to become a heavenly ‘chokora’ thank you very much. I needed to be able to exploit my invincible abilities in heaven to the maximum. I decided that my pride would ensure that I am the most invincible of the invincibles in heaven and to achieve that, the sooner I wisen up to my abilities the better. I think that if I die before realizing my abilities and learning how to use them and control them here on earth, it will be too late to do it in heaven.

At this point, I was delirious. I needed to take a reality check and digest what I was actually doing with my life. I had to be certain that I was on the right path to finding that missing ‘something’ in my life and not wandering in some dream-world . I felt like I had not just changed, I had evolved into a creature I could not recognize.

I had changed my attitude as a driver. I had become a giving driver, happily giving way to my fellow road users and feeling a better person for it. I realized that when it comes to road accidents, timing is everything. It still amazed me that I was at that junction at exactly the right minute; the right second for that guy to crash into my car. The route I had used to get to that junction is a route which I use almost on a daily basis. I noticed that between the petrol station where I had stopped to fuel my car on that fateful day and the junction where the accident occurred, I now give way to between 5 to 10 road users.

It goes without saying that the time it takes for me to give way makes some difference to the timing of my arrival at each part of the road as I head towards my destination. It does not necessarily increase the time it takes to get to my destination but it alters the timing of my movements towards my destination.

I realized that perhaps if I had been a conscientious driver, taking into account the needs of my fellow motorists, I would have noticed the several opportunities I had to give way along the road and thereby delayed my arrival time at the junction and saved myself the excess I had to pay to my insurance company to fix my car. It is very possible that I could have avoided that guy and his formula one fantasies had I just stopped even for a minute to give way. The speed at which that guy was moving made a minute seem like a day.

Of course time is not the only factor. The fact that we were both alive in the same city and able to control machinery that could collide also contributed significantly. I have considered calling up the guy to find out what in God’s name he was thinking but I have also asked myself this question which has prevented me making the call. If I was such a mean driver and I got away with only having to pay excess to my insurance company and seek alternative means of commuting while waiting for my car to be repaired, what kind of person is that guy who ended up in a coma in ICU? I don’t think am ready to find that out just yet.

Flowing from this reasoning, I examined my driving a little more and realized that it was still flawed. It is a crime to use your mobile phone while driving. But like most minor traffic offences, many Kenyan drivers, me included, do not allow themselves to appreciate the justification for such a law. I used to keep my mobile phone next to me while driving and when using it while driving, I would keep a watchful eye for any police officers who might nab me. I noticed that the silly coppers had no idea I was holding my phone if I switched to speaker phone when they materialized. How clever was that eh! I did not see the need to get a hands free device. I thought their direct contact with my ears was unhygienic and unhealthy for my ear drums!! Little did I know that using the phone could cause a lot more damage to my health than the hands free device. I thought seriously about what I was doing and decided that I had better stop it.

I decided that these seemingly irrelevant choices of not caring about the needs of my fellow road users and disregarding traffic rules are bound to catch up with me some day. And considering how competitive and proud I am, I would mostly likely create the most gruesome road accident Kenya has ever seen. No thanks to this too. Now my mobile phone stays in my bag until I get to my destination.

Changing my driving was definitely a positive move. What about lift sharing?

Chapter 27

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

Faith in yourself and your abilities is a characteristic known as self-confidence. I have found that the class of people in the world with the highest level of self-confidence are those people labeled as “Brats”. A brat is a person, normally aged between 1 and 8 years old (sometimes a lot older), who believes that they can have anything they want and control everyone around them. The self-confidence that exudes from this class of annoying creatures is unbelievable.

A careful study of this class of people revealed an interesting fact to me. Their self-confidence does not come from their belief in themselves. It comes from their belief in their parents or guardians. They seem to believe, seemingly mistakenly, that their parents/guardians are capable of giving them whatever they want, whenever they want it. All they have to do is want it and demand it with however much vigour is necessary to get it. They almost always get what they want.

Brats may have it all good but I was not attracted to their lifestyle and could not imagine myself turning into one at this age. So I diverted my attention to children in general. I realized that children draw their confidence from what they believe their parents/guardians are capable of. Children are the poorest members of society, completely dependent on someone else to provide for them and vulnerable to the severest forms of abuse. Yet, dare you give a child a free hand. You will be surprised by how controlling they can become. At which point they turn into those creatures known as brats.

Most children eventually grow up into adults and start building a life for themselves.

I concentrated on this line of thinking for a long while and wondered how I could apply the confidence of children and their growing into adults to build myself the self-confidence I needed to fight the fear of pursuing my passions.

I realized that I needed to believe in someone greater than myself. Someone who I believed could give me anything I wanted whenever I wanted it. This was easy since I had already chosen to believe in God, my creator and giver of life. Now I gave my God the characteristic of invincibility. I chose to believe in a God who is capable of providing me with whatever I needed. Why else did He bring me into this life? I decided to adopt the same concept of God as my husband’s and attribute to my God ownership of all things on earth. Whether or not He is the God of everyone else is not my concern. He is my God.

What was difficult was accepting the superiority of God. I am a proud person and accepting anyone superior to me is not easy. I think I am capable of a lot and can be as good as the next person given the chance. So I needed to think hard and deep to find a way out of this predicament and move on with my search.

I went back to the concept of death and related it to the concept of growing up. I asked myself what happens to children when they grow up. I realized that they become adults just like their parents, capable of practically everything their parents are capable of such that their parents’ role in their lives was significantly diminished and the children could actually choose to disassociate themselves from their parents if they wanted. I have witnessed this disassociation quite frequently especially when a parent becomes needy.

This line of thinking intrigued me. It was like I was telling myself that God is only superior to me in the same sense as my dad, mum and mother. And just like I have grown up and become almost equal to my dad, mum and mother, with the same capabilities as they have, when I die, I will become almost equal to God with the same capabilities as He has.

So for now, in this life, as a human being, I could accept my inferiority as if I were a child waiting to grow up and flourish on my own. Life is merely a big school where I am taught the lessons I need to help me grow up into a responsible member of the heavenly society where my God lives and where I will go when I die/grow up! Wow, ok, sounds very interesting.

Could I really believe this to be true about my life? That was a choice I had to make.

Before making the choice, I thought seriously and deeply about what that choice would mean for me. For starters, it meant that God was like a parent to me. He created me after all so I could accept that. I could even accept His superiority in the same way that I accept my parents’ superiority without question. To me, the fact that life was given to me through my parents makes them infinitely superior no matter their faults or weaknesses.

What did it for me was the thought that I had the same capabilities as this God of mine who is invincible and when I die, I will be able to freely unleash my invincibility. If God just gave me a free hand without letting me go through the school of life, guess what I would have become? A brat!! I fully understand Him not wanting that to happen and I appreciate His decision not to let it happen and acting in my best interests. I guess He loves me too.

My proud self could not let go of that idea of my potential invincibility. It convinced me that it was best that I believe in myself and my abilities by believing that my God is an invincible God who loves me. For now, in this life as a human being learning about how to control my invincible abilities, my God can give me anything I want if I only ask for it with the same humility and respect as I have for my parents.

Just like I accepted my parents’ decisions about my life because they knew better than I did when I was a child, I can accept God’s decisions about my life because He knows better than I do now.

All I need is to listen to what He tells me and act accordingly. Just like I did with my parents. That strong feeling I get called passion must be the means by which God tells me what I need to do.

Therefore, in order to succeed in life, I need to follow my passions and have faith that as a child of an invincible God, success is inevitable.

That is my formula for success and that is what I chose to do.

Chapter 26

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

You can have faith in yourself and your abilities, whether or not you believe in God. But, I have found that it is easier to have this faith when you do not believe in God.

When I was an atheist philosopher, I thought that I was alone in the world with no-one to help me so I did whatever I thought I needed to do to survive. I believed that I could make something out of myself and was determined to prove to my parents that I could make it on my own.

When I joined university, I immediately looked for a job to earn money to maintain myself. My first job was as a bar maid. I HATED it but it was the only one available and my determination would not let me pass on it. I hated the guy I was working for, I hated my workmates, I hated the clients, I hated the cigarette smoke, I hated that I had to clean up after closing time and miss the bus then have to pay for an expensive taxi, I just hated it. But when I got paid, I was happy enough to convince myself to stay on while looking for another job. Eventually I got fired because I did not go into work on New Year’s eve which, unknown to me, was mandatory. My phone call explaining why I could not make it was not good enough. In reality, my boss hated me too coz I was not bar maid material at all. He told me that I looked more like a nun than a bar maid! So it was a fantastic excuse for him to get rid of me.

I had not been in England a long time and did not quite understand the terminologies used by the English to tell you when you were fired. When I went to work after missing the New Year’s eve shift, my boss told me that he was sorry but he had to “let me go”. I asked him where it was he wanted me to go. He looked at me shocked and irritated and told me, “I mean that you are fired”. Oh, was my response and off I went.

My next job was at a potato factory. I did not mind the job, what I did not like was how far it was from my university. I had to take 2 buses and the ones that stopped near the factory were rare. I got the job when the weather was still warm and standing at a bus-stop for nearly an hour waiting for the bus was bearable. Come autumn, then winter, I was desperately looking for another job.

I remember one night when I had missed the bus and had to wait for the later one. It was during winter, the wind was blowing and it was drizzling. My ears and toes were numb and my clothes were getting wet. I was looking at all the cars driving past me and their passengers who were nice and warm and wondered why it was that I could not get a ride from any of them. I was so cold I even considered hitching a ride but when I remembered the horror I had seen administered to hitch hikers in the movies I decided against it. By the time the bus came I was crying but I was thankful that I was alive and well.

I was a quality inspector at the potato factory. I knew all the different varieties of potatoes grown in England from King Edwards to God knows what else. My job was to pick out a bag of each type of potato at random from each of the conveyor belts, weigh it and test the potatoes for various diseases, the signs of which I had been trained in. I did not start as a quality inspector, I was promoted after a few days when one of the quality inspectors needed time off and decided to train hardworking me so that I could cover for her. Previously I was working at the conveyor belts packing the potatoes. It was an easy enough job and there were many opportunities to work double shifts because my co-workers who were permanently employed in that drudgery were always looking for an excuse to miss work. I, on the other hand, was looking for an opportunity to make enough money to impress my parents. We had a good symbiotic relationship.

After the potato factory I got a job very near my university hostel as a house keeper. I liked the job because it was convenient and I worked alone in the house when the daughter was at school and the parents at work. I had my own keys. I would get into work and find a note on the kitchen table telling me what extra work needed doing other than the usual washing dishes, cleaning the daughter’s rooms, hoovering and dusting. My boss was very happy with surgically clean me and paid me well for my work but the pay was not enough.

My next job was the last one I ever worked and I stayed at it until my last day on campus. It was my dream job. The highest paying I could possibly get as a foreign student and with working hours that suited me just fine. I had to resign from my house keeping job but had no regrets. The job was at a motor way service station. I was assigned to work in a shop and sometimes at the restaurant. My working hours were from 10pm to 6am. In the beginning I would go to work then catch my sleep in between lectures and tutorials. Eventually, I stopped going for lectures unless I had a day off and only attended the tutorials which were compulsory. I would get the lecture materials from my class mates and read books at our library. During the holidays I would work even double shifts from 10pm the previous day to 3pm the next day then sleep for 14 hours straight to the day after, getting up just in time for my next shift. I was willing to pay any price to make my own money and save my parents the bother of having to work for it for me. My reasoning was that if you’re not working for what you have, someone else has to.

My dad’s moto was “educate your children, that’s all they need, anything more is a dream come true”. He was not mean but he hated weakness and expected us to rise up to the challenge of being alive and fending for ourselves. He gave you what you needed and threw in something nice every now and then at his discretion. So I knew I was alone in the world and the sooner I got used to it and worked my ass off to survive this grueling world, the better. I had no choice but to believe in myself and my abilities since the existence of God was a fairy tale told to silly kids at Sunday school similar to those told at nursery school.

Now that I had chosen to believe in God, who was superior to me, believing in myself and my abilities was not easy. If I am inferior, how can I be capable?

Chapter 25

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

I did not need anyone else’s passion to assess. Those few people convinced me that I was on the right path in choosing passion over money.

I felt like I needed to give something no matter how small. This was because I was scared. The idea of not worrying about money when money has been my greatest worry since I started earning some of my own was daunting. I thought that if I at least gave something, God would give me the money I needed for the passionate project I was considering starting.

For a while I had been considering making tea for the security guards who guard the gate and barrier into our estate. The weather had been unusually cold and I used to look at them and think that I should give them a hot drink. What kept me from doing it was because I was certain that as soon as I gave them anything, they would ask for more. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and asked my house keeper to be making them tea in the evenings. They were so grateful for the tea that a few days into the tea giving, they asked me to employ them because their boss is a torturer!! I made it clear that tea was all they were going to get and left it at that.

I could not become a teacher. I was still happy being a lawyer and I was not satisfied with how far I had gotten. I thought that I needed to challenge myself and take a step towards achieving more in my legal profession. I realized that I had become complacent.

Fighting the fear is not easy even though I was already my own living example of how passion had helped me become what I was. I went back to the faith in myself and my abilities issue I had thought about when assessing my husband’s passion. I wondered how I could acquire this faith. Without it, I thought that I would fail.

My husband goes to church. He goes to church on Saturdays. He started going to church ardently almost 2 years ago. Actually, it was meeting me that interrupted his church going routine for a while. He has always been a member of a congregation somewhere. In the beginning, we used to go to church on Saturday as a family.

For Saturday church goers, you are expected to be in church the whole day from 8.30am till 5pm engaging in various church activities planned for you. I assure you that you need to have been raised in such a church to be able to accept this as your routine. Thankfully, my husband is only interested in the sermon which comes between 10.30am to 1pm. So we did not ever go the whole hog. Once in a while a great interesting preacher would visit and teach something awesome. I still remember one preacher who preached about “death in the pot”. He was fantastic. If he was the resident pastor of the church, I would probably have stuck to it.

On Saturdays, my husband, me and my nephew would get ready and go to church at around 10.30am. My niece is in boarding school and if she was on holiday, she would come too. My nephew always fell asleep. Sometimes my husband would too. Eventually I decided that I did not need the pretence and I would find something productive to do on Saturdays like sleep in a little longer, more so when I was pregnant. My husband still kept at it, even now. These days he says the good sermons have become more frequent. In reply I say, Good for you!

As far as my nephew was concerned, I enrolled him at ligi ndogo on Saturdays and took him to a Sunday church for Sunday school. I would drop him in church at 11am and pick him up at 1pm. On the first day of Sunday school, I went with him and even attended the main church while he attended the Sunday school. I was not impressed but he was. So he kept at it and I slept. Just like me and my mum huh?!

Now I was thinking about faith. I knew that the reason my faith was shaky is because it was based on what I had been taught from childhood. That life is tough. You need money to get what you want. Making money is tough. Getting what you want is tough.

No-one ever gave me the formula to success yet everyone said that I needed to work hard. There are so many hard workers I know who are nowhere near success. I mean the guys who wake up at the crack of dawn to walk or cycle several kilometers to work in factories or flower farms and the like. Manual labourers chipping at stones at a building site in the hot sun. No doubt these guys are hard workers. But where is the success? Same applies to university graduates who are thrown out into the world with a beautiful piece of paper testifying to their hard work only to find nothing for them to do.

We are mortal beings. We die. We have no control of when and how we die. We are vulnerable to disease. Criminals attack us. Wild animals will eat us if given the slightest chance to get at us. Mean people around us will abuse us. Our hard work amounts to nothing due to apparent scarcity of jobs and money. How can we possibly have faith in ourselves and our abilities in such a world?

The answer depends on whether or not you believe in God.

Chapter 24

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

My mother is a passionate person. All her life since my dad left her, she survived without thinking about money. She survived on her passionate hope that one day her children would come back to her and know that she is their mother and that she loves them. To me, her survival is a miracle. If I went through what she experienced, I would probably have committed suicide.

I remember when I was very young and she would come to our house to see my second born brother and me while the eldest was in boarding school. She would try to talk to us and we would keep a distance from her not recognizing who she was and treating her like a stranger. This from children who she had carried in pregnancy for 9 months, given birth to, breastfed, changed their nappies and wiped their bums, bathed, weaned, potty trained, spent sleepless nights by their side when they were sick, had interrupted sleep for months on end, and a lot more of what mothers of babies and young children go through. My dad did not allow her to come and see us and eventually after she tried without success she decided to let go.

She once told me that her illness was God’s way of protecting her from the traumatic experience He knew He had in store for her when He decided not to let her raise us. So her illness to her was a blessing. She accepted it as the only means by which she could survive the hours, days, nights, weeks, months, years and decades that she would be kept away from her children for a reason she could not accept or understand. Unlike me, throughout her illness she believed in God and accepted that it was His will that we should be raised by someone else for a good reason unknown to her feeble human mind.

She loved my dad dearly and unforgiving, hardhearted me was surprised to see that she was heartbroken when she heard that he had died. It was as if, after more than two decades of being separated from him, she still hoped that he would one day come back. She continued to live in the same property that he left her in and even after she left hospital she insisted that she could only live where her husband left her. What was it about my dad that two unrelated women could love him so passionately that they are willing to sacrifice so much for him? Both of them gave selflessly to ensure his happiness.

If, God forbid, my husband was to get up today, pack up my children and drive off to live somewhere else away from me and not let me see them, even if some of those children are not mine, I would assemble the Kenyan army and attack him with all the ammunition available in their arsenal. If he took my children and went to live with another woman to raise them, the US army would not have enough ammunition to launch the attack I would have planned for him. I would kill him or myself before I think that “Good God Almighty has a good reason for not letting me raise my children”.

What I have learned from my mother’s acceptance of my dad’s decision to deny her access to us on the basis that it was God’s will is that love of a parent is not something children actually need. In fact, love in form of hugs and kisses and nicknames and occasional sweet treats and birthday parties and all that stuff is not something a child needs. The love that a child needs is love in form of food, shelter, clothing and an education. There are mothers and fathers who do not love their children and they show this by neglecting the children. Being a parent does not mean that you love your child. And love is not exclusive to parents and children. It exists in a variety of relationships.

My mother loved us because she realized that she could not provide us with what our dad was able to give us and her fighting my dad was not in our best interests. Until I came to this realization, I always thought that she did not love us otherwise she would have fought for us. In actual fact, it was because she loved us that she left us alone. She acted in our best interests.

We are disillusioned about love from our childhood thinking that love is a feeling. I have realized that in fact, love is not a feeling. Love is a state of mind. I can be annoyed with someone and still love them. I can be happy with someone and not love them. Love is what I think of someone not what I feel about that person. The fact that two people are attracted to each other does not mean that they love each other.

Love is a state of mind. When we are in a state of mind of loving someone, we act in their best interests even if our actions appear to hurt them. Discipline is a way of showing love to a child because without discipline, a child cannot thrive. Discipline cannot be administered painlessly. When you spare the rod, you are not showing love. It is when you use the rod that you are showing love.

My mother knew that we would be hurt by her actions and that is why she could only hope that we would grow up and come to a realization of why she did what she did and appreciate that she did it out of love for us and not to hurt us. It has not been easy to accept this approach towards her. It is much easier to allow the hurt to cover up the truth.

I know that I love my mother because I have acted in her best interests. I did not have any emotional bond with her, not having had a relationship with her for more than half my life, but I cared about her a lot and wanted so much to help her. Love is that state of mind that makes you want to act in someone’s best interests, disregarding your own if necessary. I can relate this state of mind to everyone whose best interests I have safeguarded and sacrificed my self interest for. I have done this for all the people I love.

Accepting my mother and her illness has not been easy for any of us. Ironically, it was my mum who taught me how to accept my mother. What I learned from my mum’s acceptance of my dad is that passion makes you see the true value of a person beyond their humanly appearance. I cannot explain how she could foresee at the time she met my dad that he was the man she would be happy with and that he would make her richer than she ever dreamed of. But I can explain how this revelation works in reference to my mother.

My mother’s humanly appearance is of a disease ridden, destitute, and needy person who any person in their right mind would be justified in running away from. But I don’t look at the person she is now when she is alive in this world, I look at the person she will be when she departs from this world and I am left standing at her grave side. At that time, all the disease, the destitution, the neediness will be gone and all that will remain is the woman through whom God chose to give me the life that I am living. A woman full of passion for life and love for her children.

Chapter 23

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

Next on my list for assessment of her passions was my mum. This is the lady who raised me. I call her my mum because I was 2 or 3 years old when I met her and she is responsible for my being alive and well today.

I must say that I have never seen anyone do anything as passionate as what she did. I have seen pictures of her when she was young. She was a drop dead gorgeous light skinned, slim, long-haired lady. Even now, she is still a beautiful woman. She could have had any man she chose. She however chose my dad. At the time, my dad was a penniless divorcee with 3 kids under 10 years of age!! I cannot imagine what her mother told her when she went to her telling her about the man she had decided to marry. I think at that time my dad was a shop attendant.

She was a police officer when I met her and as soon as she decided to stay with my dad, he made sure she retired from service and became a secretary. I can’t imagine that she allowed my seemingly ‘nobody’ of a dad to dictate to her what career path she should follow. From what I remember, she tried very hard to break away from my dad but in the end, she decided to stay. She tells me that she did not know that my dad was married let alone having 3 little kids when she met him. He looked too young to have been there done that and got 3 t-shirts. He dropped the bomb shell on her after he was certain that she had fallen for him. What a cunning …… guy!!

She also tells me that I was the reason for her decision to stay because she was worried that my dad would not be able to take care of us and she fell in love with me. The other two kids were my older brothers. The eldest was rebellious and the second born was indifferent but I was just looking for someone to take care of me and I thought she was the one. I used to cry whenever she left and always asked my dad when she would be coming back. Apparently my dad in his shrewdness figured out that she had a soft spot for me and would use me as an excuse to convince her to come home and at least visit, if not stay, telling her how much I was always asking him to bring her or take me to her, and he had no idea what to tell me! Men!!

I have realized that we children do not appreciate that our parents were once young people who made the same stupid mistakes we are making now.

Only a very strong feeling, a passionate attraction for my dad, could have made my mum decide to stay with him and his baggage. Now that I have my own experience of raising children who are not mine, I can appreciate what kind of conflicting emotions my mum was probably experiencing with us. But my experience is still not as complete since the children I take care of are not my husband’s. Taking care of children who are not yours is a very challenging affair.

For starters, ignorant people will snigger and laugh at you thinking that you have taken in the children because you are unable to have any of your own. It is no laughing matter when you try for one of your own and it doesn’t happen for a long while, or perhaps never!

Others, who pretend to care about you, will tell you that it is not your responsibility and you should just concentrate on having your own children especially since you cannot tell the genetic make up of the other children and what kind of behaviour they are likely to challenge you with. In truth, as long as a child is related to you, when they grow up to be useless bums and probably criminals, whatever their problems will be, they will end up on your doorstep. So taking in the children has a selfish angle to it as well. I will take care of you now so that I don’t have to later. Of course it is easier when they are young. Even a child who is not related to you is a member of your society and if you can make a useful person out of any child, you will have contributed to making your world a better place.

The biggest challenge of all in raising children who are not yours is to justify your treatment of the children so that the children and people around you do not think you are being biased. This applies whether or not you have your own children. It is in fact easier when you have your own children because it allows for a somewhat real comparison to be made than when you do not have any and are judged based on imaginary sons and daughters of your own who you would be treating differently. It is impossible to argue with someone’s imagination.

The children themselves and others will be watching keenly for an opportunity to question any seemingly biased treatment. The point that these people miss is that no-one can possibly treat children who have come from different places the same way. What one has to ask is whether, considering that the child did not grow up with you as a baby, if that child was still yours, would you not treat them the way you are treating this child? If my niece and my nephew were my children taken away from me at a young age and reunited with me at the ages I met them, I do not think I would be treating them any differently. Comparing my treatment of them with an imaginary daughter and son of my own at the same age is very unfair.

In order to protect myself from any of these challenges which can cause severe frustration, I do not bother myself with where the children came from and when. I deal with the here and now and treat them like I would someone who I had to share my life with like a younger sister or brother. There is no love between you and the children when you first meet, neither of you know each other. So the first step is to get to know each other as friends and work from there. Potential friends are everywhere and they can be found in little people looking for someone to take care of them.

I can say that adopting a child is the greatest act of selfless giving I know. And am grateful to my mum for having done it for me and my brothers. I know that she did the best job she could and in actual fact, she succeeded in sealing the cracks of our broken family and making us feel completely at home. She was no different from the noisy, champion whooping mothers of many of my school mates and we all turned out well.

I cannot tell what kind of person I could have been if she had not been there for me, but am glad that I am who I am today. She played, and is still playing, a big role in ensuring it. I respect her greatly for that.

It is very obvious that in deciding to stay with my dad, my mum never bothered to think about money. Passion was all she needed and look where it got her.

Chapter 22

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

My husband also came from a humble background. He was born in the village and his home was a mud hut. He was nevertheless fortunate enough to secure an education in public schools and performed well enough to be admitted to university to study law. Yes, he is also a lawyer. A much more successful one than me. We do not work together and for good reason. His way of seeing things is parallel to mine. Yet we a married! Strange world!

Looking at him made me realize that passion is what drives us to do what our heart desires. For as long as I have known him, he never makes decisions based on how much money he has and I am always amazed at how he proceeds first from his goal, then he takes time to think about the formula for attaining that goal and then he does what he knows he has to do and voila! In the meantime, he is laughing at me screaming, “Look, we do not have the money to do that!” And almost pulling out what little hair I have left with anxiety. He is the best living example I have of someone whose life is not ruled by money. He is also a very generous person, a teetotaler and deep thinker like my dad. My grandmother always tells me that my husband is her son-in-law (my dad) come to life.

I have a tendency to reach a point in life when I feel that I have worked hard enough. For my husband, as long as there is any breath left in his lungs, he will be starting a new project, not knowing where the money to complete it will come from but being absolutely certain the money is there and he will get it. I was happy with myself after I settled down in my firm but my husband keeps me on my toes telling me to get up there is more work to be done when am just catching my breath waiting for the harvest after a long day planting. When I moan and complain about all this determination and hard work, he tells me that we should not let even the smallest opportunity to make a difference in the world pass us by! Yah right, this is when my shallow thinking makes me walk away saying “I couldn’t care less if the world went to hell” and whispering, “I am not my brother’s keeper!!”

To him, hard work is serving God and letting an opportunity to serve God pass you by is a loss that he could never bear.

I still do not understand this reasoning. As far as I am concerned, I am a hard worker so am already serving God. What more does He want? Or why can’t He just do it Himself? Stupidly, I am very happy when all works out well and then my husband will say; “See, I told you it was easy!” Well, am sorry that I cannot see it that way. For me, starting a project not knowing where the money will come from is like diving into an empty pool hoping that someone will fill it up before you hit the bottom.

The truth of the matter is that passion makes you do things which appear stupid unless you have faith in yourself and your abilities. I must admit that my faith in myself and my abilities is not built on rock. I think it is built on some kind of soft stone.

My husband does not believe in bank loans and overdrafts and credit cards. He believes that ALL the money in the world belongs to God and all he has to do is make an application to God telling Him what he wants and why then God grants it. All the long winded applications to be filled in banks giving all your personal details except for your inside leg measurement and sacrificing everything to the bank is nonsense to him. Simply put, his bank manager is his God.