“Sir, 

Pray have mercy on my daughter Mina Rip who did very wrong in buying up stolen goods but who repents greatly what she has done. For her poor little ones sake may Sir alleviate  her case. They have been already fifteen months without a mother’s care”

Yours obedient

Christina Staegemann

Cape Town 3 June 1874″

I’ve found no record yet of the Governor’s decision.

*****************

Here we go!

Our next meeting is Saturday 21 January at 10h30, Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre, Guinea Fowl Road, Masiphumelele.

Something that’s been on our wishlist forever and which I’m determined to make happen this year: a place of our own.

Not necessarily to hold our meetings, because we need a lot of space for that.

What we need is a small 2 or 3 bedroomed house, preferably in Fish Hoek or surrounds, where we can work from, store all our things and maybe use as emergency temporary accommodation for moms in dire straits.

It’s happened too often, and again today, that desperate moms call me needing somewhere to stay because their partner or family has kicked them out, or as in today’s situation, she’s being evicted because the rent or rates is in arrears. Today’s mom is being forced to make a choice – come up with R800 for the sheriff or give up her children to the welfare because the social workers can organise shelter for her children, but not for her. The money isn’t the issue though, because even if she pays it now (if she had the money, which she doesn’t), next month and the next the problem will still be there. What she needs is a breathing space in which she can find her feet, without breaking her family up.

So – we need this house. We need to be able to offer a bed to someone who otherwise would be homeless. Even if it’s for a few days while she figures out a better solution.

As you know, we gratefully receive some financial donations from various generous donors. But this isn’t enough to pay rent and utilities on a small house.

Rent in Fish Hoek is average R6000 (about $750) a month for the kind of place we need. Add some extra for electricity etc.

Between our Young Mom Support & Girl Who Couldn’t Say No Facebook pages, we have nearly 500 people who “like” us. If each of those people were willing to donate $5 a month – how much could we do?

I know it’s not nice to ask for money. I know you’re all inundated for requests for help from many worthy causes. I know you don’t *have* money to give. I know all this, because I’m in the same boat!  It’s so horribly awkward to be asking, but I kinda feel I have to. It’s not for me. It’s not for my children. It’s for people who otherwise often don’t  have anybody to speak for them. I know that if I won the lotto tomorrow, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Even if you or your family can’t donate yourselves – can you help us spread the word of what we’re trying to do, to people who maybe CAN help us?

A little house. A bed for a mom and her child. It’s not a lot to wish for, is it?

Could give you a whole bunch of excuses but not going to because let’s be honest you don’t give a toss so let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

I haven’t blogged because I haven’t and that’s all there is to it

Right, now that we’ve got that out of the way

Am back today because since The Girl Who Couldn’t Say No has been available on Amazon to a much wider audience, I’ve had loads of emails & tweets from lovely readers wanting to chat.

What’s in the book seems like ancient history to me so I feel silly still talking about  it (good lawdy doesn’t the woman ever shut up about herself and so on)  but I realize with mild interest squirmy  mortified disbelief that there are readers who actually care and want to know what we’ve been up to since the days of the Not Saying No (hint: saying No a lot. To practically everything. Except cake.)

So it seems as though I’m not done talking about me. Sorry for you, especially those of you who’ve heard it all before (hi mommy)

To the new readers, in return for your time and money and taking up some temporary space in your heads, I reckon I owe you something.

So I’ve updated the website and made it prettier a lifechanging intertubal experience which will leave you breathless  different because we all know a change is as good as a holiday and all that

In the absence of any actual holiday, you’ll have to make do with this

I’ll not be signing off with any promises to be a better blogger because as we’ve established, that’s just silly.

The joke, of course, is that she doesn’t mean I’m “pleasantly different” or “someone or something that is new and different and makes everything seem more exciting” (thanks The Free Dictionary). What she is trying to say in her roundabout & clumsily offensive way, is that I’m weird. Strange. Odd. Baffling.

Yes, yes I am.

And I’m okay with that. I can – and do – laugh at myself. A lot. I don’t take myself very seriously. This is a good thing, I think. Humility is a colour which looks good on me – it brings out my eyes, don’tcherknow. And there’s just so *much* to be humble about.

Long, long ago in my youth (okay, right up til about 45 minutes ago, then) I had some issues with comparing myself with others. Not feeling good enough. And I won’t lie, that ol’ insecurity beast still sticks her bitchy nose in my business sometimes and makes me feel kak about myself. Today was a bad day, I admit. But mostly I have her beaten.  Into a bloody, mucousy pulp, which incidentally – is better stashed in a basement than attic. Colder, see. Slows decomp. Less smelly.

But back to my story.

I was lucky – I escaped the teen body image angst (which a LOT of women carry with them in their fashionable, definitely *not* fleamarket knockoff handbags all the way into supposedly sensible adulthood) by handily getting pregnant. Teen pregnancy is the perfect cure for “does my bum look big in this” disease – because yes, yes it does. And that’s that. It serves up a hefty dose of Get The Heck Over Yourself Woman, and I kinda never caught back up in the caring about cellulite race. A win there (and one they never mentioned in Juno).

Unless you happen to find the sight of me in my leggings offensive, in which case, darling – look away.

I never learnt the knack of peer pressure. I didn’t know I was supposed to be influenced by The Media. When the other girls were given the lesson on Starving Yourself To Look Like a Supermodel Cos You’re Supposed To Otherwise Nobody Will Ever Love You And You’ll Die Alone, I was eating Flings with my baby son and finding out who I really am.

Thing is, yes – I do feel sometimes feel like I’m not okay as I am – but it’s almost always fleeting,  in response to something some outside person has said, someone who doesn’t know me. Among *my* people (of which there are not many, another tick in the Freak Box for me), I feel fine. I feel valued, supported, loved, understood. By myself, I KNOW that I’m happy with me in all my freaky glory.

My point  was here somewhere. Ah, yes. I see the other ladies with their worries of fashion, ageing, weight and keeping up with the Kardashiwhatsits Jones’. I will, on occasion, have a look at a “woman’s magazine”. And I’m just kinda like *shmeh*. Whatever. That doesn’t apply to me. They’re not talking to me. Or about me. I might as well be reading an article on lost tribes of Borneo in National Geographic. It’s foreign. Interesting, sometimes- to learn about. But I’m as likely to get a facial (or even WANT a facial, or even pretend to know what that entails, actually), as I am to chow down on some tasty long pig with the South Seas cannibal dudes.

I know I don’t look as pretty as those other sparkly ladies. I know I’m chunkier, my hair’s not as nice, my skin not as smooth (it’s the Jik – not ideal), my *look* (using unfamiliar technical terms here, bear with me) not as polished.  Neither are my nails. Ever. I staple my hems when they come undone.  I am clumsy and shy. My repertoire of small talk is miniscule and I don’t hug, squeal or flirt.

Those sparkly ladies look like they do because they spend time, money and effort on making it that way. You only spend time, money and effort on things you care about. And just don’t care enough about that stuff. In the words of the immortal Granny Weatherwax: “I can’t be having with that”.

But suck it. I don’t apologise for any of it. I don’t try to hide any of it. Laugh with me when I tell you about it, because it’s funny, dude. If you can’t laugh me with me – go ahead, laugh at me because I admit to things you can’t. Says more about you than me, I’m thinking.

Life is very short. I want to do what I want to do because I want to do it.  That is what happiness is.

And so I shall continue to breeze freshly through life with my Freak Hat on, knowing that it will cost me sometimes. It’s a price I’m willing to pay, I guess. We all have a price on our head, the one we were born with – the cost of being truly ourselves. I’m paying it, and it IS worth it. Every day.

It was great to have a way to share the ups and downs, the cutes and the worries, the funnies and the frustrations, with readers who could likely relate. Also, it was a great way to practice what I loved to do – to write – about a topic that came so naturally and easily to me.

I’m never going to be a political commentator, a social media whatsit, a voice of authority or a person to be taken seriously about any topic whatsoever. I’m just me. A whole bunch of me, with a whole bunch of bits and parts, the most precious part to me being the  mom part. However. The world moves on, so it does.

Cute children grow up and slowly but surely I’ve lost the right to simply blog/blurt their every move to the outside world, as entertaining, amusing or helpful to others as it might sometimes be.

I post less and less about my own children, but this doesn’t mean that blogworthy things don’t happen anymore. It just means that we’ve eventually reached the stage where it’s no longer my place to write about them.

When they’re babies, toddlers, preschoolers – you still feel like they’re part of you, like an extension of yourself, simply the next chapter in a blog story that may have started with a pregnancy announcement or similar. It’s not like that anymore.

They are their own people and respecting their right to NOT be written about is very real now. Sad, because I love writing about motherhood and my own experiences of it, but there’s more than one player in a mommy story and I gotta get over meself, yes?

I’ll leave you with an ancient pic of my peeps who I love and who continue to conduct themselves in a Tweetworthy fashion on a daily basis, the buggers.

Whether you love it or hate it, an honest review or two would be much appreciated, although I know this is pushing it.

Thank you and goodnight.

xx

*Clears throat*
*Best Verimark ad man voice*

So from now until 5 June, hurry on over to Smashwords.com (see link here to The Girl Who Couldn’t Say No) , plug in the coupon code : SM96M and receive 10% off.

My Verimark ad man voice sucks.
Pretend it doesn’t. Humour me, thusly.

And hurry while stocks last. And all that stuff the Verimark man usually says.

Shortened version of my family tree, spanning genealogy from early South Africa, to England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Germany, France, Poland.
If anything rings a bell here, you’re welcome to use the information if remember to acknowledge your source
Work in progress, so obviously there will be gaps, missing info & mistakes, I’m sure. Please let me know if you spot any.

Click on the link below to open PDF

Tracy Engelbrecht Ancestry 2011

Instead, I’ve been immersed in the sticky tangly venus-fly-trappy branches of my very neglected family tree.

Started research 8 years ago (wow) and have pretty much gone as far as I can go with the resources I have. To break down the brick walls I’m stuck with will require any or all of the following:

a) wads of cash to buy gazillions of (likely) useless online subscriptions to various genealogy websites

b) wads of cash to buy the services of a professional paid-by-the-hour professional genealogist who will just go and look in the same places I will anyway. All of the pain of paying for it, none of the satisfaction of discovering the info

c) wads of unbelievable luck when  the 100th gazillionith time I search for the same names on the same site that I’ve been searching for them for eight years, they’re ACTUALLY FRIKKING THERE.

That doesn’t happen, ever. Except it did this weekend. And now I know that my 6x great-grandparents were probably called Moses Danielse van der Kaap & Anna Sophia Eermeyer / Neermeyer / Niedermeyer (John-Jacob-Jingleheimer-Schmidt and so on). They were (I hope I’m not premature in saying this) the parents of my 5x great-grandfather Daniel Danielsz. He and his wife Wilhelmina Magdalena Adamse had loads of children and vanished from the records without leaving much of a trace, besides a barely legible will in Dutch. Their daughter Petronella Maria married into the Boonzaaier family and from there on there is plenty of info to be had.

As poor fishermen, netmakers, ex-slaves and labourers living in the Riebeek Street area in Cape Town, there isn’t much information left about their families. Not famous enough, not rich enough, not anything enough. Not worth remembering, to most  people.

Years of painstakingly collating info on all the people with even vaguely similar names, living in the same area, got me to a point where I knew that Daniel’s father was probably called Moses. Daniel is often referred to as “Daniel Danielsz Moses Zoon” (s0n of Moses). But no Moses of the right generation was to be found. And there I sat.

Until I checked FamilySearch.org for the gazillionth time to find it had changed completely, and now offers actual JPG images to download of the Dutch Reformed Church registers at the Cape of Good Hope. These jpgs are much better as you can also see the names of the witnesses to the event; names which are usually left off when transcribing docs. Witnesses are usually siblings, parents, cousins  etc of the family in question. So you’ve got this whole other avenue of investigation to follow – names which can lead you back to the people you’re looking for. This, in case you haven’t caught on to my frantic raving, is a BIG FRIKKING DEAL. (To me. At least. Not to you, I’m sure. You just think I could use some fresh air and a nice jog, or something.)

So Moses & Anna were witnesses to the christening  of some of their grandchildren, giving me a direct link from my known family to them. I’d love to post the jpg here but for Familysearch copyright and all, so I can’t.

I guess it makes me a terrible nerd to get such a thrill from spotting the names of people 200 years removed from me.

I can live with that.

In case you’re interested, this is where you’ll find me lurking:

http://ancestry24.com/

http://www.national.archsrch.gov.za/sm300cv/smws/sm300dl

https://familysearch.org/search/collection/show#uri=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.familysearch.org%2Frecords%2Fcollection%2F1478678

http://www.tanap.net/content/activities/documents/Orphan_Chamber-Cape_of_Good_Hope/index.htm