The Shaik Clan

I have two sisters , a brother and an amazing Mom! The Shaik women though, are a seriously crazy bunch. Well if you don’t believe me ……read on.

Like most matriarchal groups we share an uncommon bond and an enormous capacity to love each other unconditionally. We live in Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Gauteng and Greytown. Time and distance doesn’t seem to dampen the strength of our affection or deter from us keeping firmly in contact telepathically, or via bbm face book and the phone.

We have developed a reflective outlook on life that forces us to laugh at ourselves first before anyone one else gets the chance to do so. This enables us to
Enjoy the highs and lows that life has to offer with no regrets. We constantly attract our selves to situations where we are forced to examine our place in our
families, communities, country and the universe at large. It is not uncommon to find a Shaik woman, face upturned to the heavens, making an impassioned plea for direction because she has taken the road less described and found herself in unchartered terrain. Each dead ends forces her back to her roots and mom is always a phone call away to provide some words of wisdom, and a few hearty jokes later, the pathways reveal themselves where previously only tangled undergrowth crowded footpaths and made the journey impassible.

I endure relationship advice from the sisters only that I may execute the exact opposite to what they have decreed. I listen patiently to anecdotes they proffer and plot my strategy to avoid the pitfalls that that they have made. In this way I escape the calamities of mistakes they have made but in true Shaik style fly head long into brand new mistakes all the same.

The Shaik Curse. All Shaik women are followed by the Shaik curse and will never shake free from it with any intervention yet discovered. Curse one, when we walk into a room people notice us. Curse two, we love with every fiber within our hearts and our souls capacity to extend the emotion is enormous and grows with every heart beat spent. Curse three, our children are an extension of our souls and we put enormous pressure on ourselves to leave a legacy that will enable all their dreams to crash upon their lives like the waves that pound unceasingly on a sandy beach. Curse four, a shaik woman will never be caged, she is a wild creature and while boundaries will be seen they will never be obstacles for her.

Many people see the value in being able to walk into a room and immediately be noticed, for their looks or style of dressing or just the energy they walk in with, however Shaik women know that attention of this nature has the ability to create situations where significant others may take serious discomforts from.

While having the capacity to love is also a noble and beautiful trait in women, it seems that the ability to love too much is just as perilous as having no capacity to feel and demonstrate the emotion. When you love, you somehow expect some form of reciprocation so you can imagine that when you have the capacity to love without reserve you expect too a “wuthering Heights” response from the object of your admiration. A soul mate is what a Shaik woman needs and searches to find. The Heathcliff kind of passion for Cathy that burns beyond the grave that could be misconstrued for serial stalker is her secret ambition. Of course in the Shaik woman’s mind she would be the only one who would have the ability to tame the beast within the man and live happily ever after. Yes the contrast of danger and safety is her ultimate yearning and her mission never loses its focus.

Curse Three is her unshakable dedication to her offspring. The Shaik woman is an earthly creature. She is very in touch with her basic instincts, and procreation is just a natural order of things. Her responsibility to her child is seen in her ferocious protection of them. She never reneges on her responsibilities and she understands the role for social and community interaction. It takes a village to raise a child who is well rounded. Now that the world is a village her child is groomed for the village. Their minds are exposed to everything she can lay her hand and mind on. Very little is hidden, but she values their ability to think and from a young age they are primed to critically observe their world and debates, also seen as arguments could find frequency in her home. Her capacity to love means that physical displays of emotion and words of comfort and encouragement are in abundance, even though cat fights and painful jibes at poor judgments might be frequent.

Curse Four deals with the sense of being imprisoned. Walls, narrow mindedness, restrictions, lack of understanding will see a Shaik woman retreat into a cacoon she has spun for herself. She will bide her time and plan her escape. When she escapes it is like the unfolding of the wings of a butterfly. Where once she crawled on her belly and ate what she could reach, she now floats elegantly from beautiful flower to flower and selects where she would feed on the nectar within.

Will a Shaik woman ever find fulfillment with her inherent tendencies for the seemingly unattainable…or will she settle for a life in shadows, nestled with her cocoon waiting forever for the time to emerge reborn and completely evolved. The butterfly soft and gentle OR the fiery phoenix who allows itself to ignite in flames and from the ashes emerge as new time after time.

One thing is sure a Shaik woman will never take an easy well described path, and if she were given a choice she would certainly choose to be a Shaik woman time and time again.