Finally A Post!

I’ve been going up and down the blogsphere sucking my teeth at people who haven’t posted in a while, when I realized I haven’t posted anything since 2006. I’m feeling a bit stressed after being on vacation for 2 weeks. I haven’t taken this much time off in (hmmm since college) and it felt great. Now I’m sick and have a ton of work I don’t feel like doing but hope that this weekend will help me get over this achy, sick, head cold feeling and I’ll feel more like myself.

I spent Christmas and New Years with my mom, aunt, cousin and his family in Brussels. I had a great time listening to some of the same old stories I’d heard over and over through out the years and heard some new and interesting ones that made me think about fate, our paths in life and how one event could change the course of your life. I’d heard that my aunt didn’t like my dad and didn’t attend my mom’s wedding but I never knew why until last week. I’d asked my mom if she was hurt, angry or sad and she seemed to brush it off her shoulders.

My mom and dad meeting in Brussels in the 1960’s seems to have took my mom and her family down a different path that wasn’t anticipated when she and her sister left Haiti in 1964 to study in Belgium. The plan was that they’d get their degrees my aunt in Nursing and my mom in Chemical Engineering and they’d return to Haiti get jobs and settle down with someone from a “good” family. In the meantime my aunt finished her nursing degree applied and was accepted at an Anesthesiologist nursing program in Canada and was all set to go when my mom met my dad. Apparently my grandmother didn’t want her to leave my mom all alone in Belgium with this man (my dad) since my mom was still in school. So my aunt didn’t go to Canada stayed in Belgium and met her ex husband who was Belgian. After 40 years she’s still living there and recently retired. Two years after they married my mom moved to the US with my dad since his entire family immediate family lived in Jersey at the time. She never finished that degree in Chemical Engineering and when I asked her why she said something about being married was overwhelming and when I gave her that are you kidding me look and said “you’d never let me get away with that” she agreed and said hell no I wouldn’t have. She did eventually get an undergrad degree in business.

This sequence of events makes me really think about fate and our paths in life. Sure if my mom didn’t marry my dad I wouldn’t be me or even alive but what if they’d gotten married and she finished the degree she initially started, would they have moved? What if my aunt ignored my grandmother and went to Canada would I have practically lived up in Montreal where she was supposed to live? Would I be the same person? I am, who I am largely as a result of my experiences and believe that slight changes could have played a role in how I view the world I live in.