One should want to live, not live to want!

This was a phrase that my husband coined during our regular Friday night get together with our blended family. A phrase that got me thinking about my journey in life and looking around me at those who merely exist by their possessions.

I grew up in a family that never at one time spent an evening just talking about life or something else. My father was a workaholic who believed that one should ‘work while you are young and reap the rewards in the latter years.’ We as a family had to help my father make this dream come true. While my friends spent their week-ends at the beach, my brother and I where sitting on the back of a van, selling pineapples that my father’s labourers harvested during the week. What an embarrassing time it was, when the school yard bullies would here us call’ pineapples! pineapples for sale!’ Monday mornings at school we would walk in the corridors with our heads lowered hoping that no one had remembered buying pineapples from our van. In 1994, when the unrest and violence spread to the farm areas in South Africa, my father decided to move our entire family to the suburbs, where here we would have to keep up with the Jones’. My father’s next venture was buying a take-away and superrette business which required us to work long hours in the shop serving lower income clientele and relying on the passing bus trade. My years in highschool was spent waking up at four in the morning to catch the first customers of the day and ended at eight in the evening.

Our family did not have a social life and the conflict between my parents spiralled out of control. At one point I called my father Hitler and regarded my life with my parents as a concentration camp. Eventually after years of chasing wealth in this business, my father threw in the towel and closed down the business. However that house in the suburbs, those fancy cars in the garage were a liability that meant my father had to keep two jobs and my brother and I as well as my mother had to work to keep up with the Jones’. Sadl, at age 53, my father passed away with a massive heart attack. The stress of trying to keep up a high lifestyle and his workaholic attitude killed him in the end. We as a family simply scattered about. Each one trying to rob the other for what was left of our hard work and tears. My mother and I rarely speak to each other, while my siblings and I simply don’t understant each other. Sadly, all I can remember about my father is the fact that he was a man who worked himself to death.