A Need for Women to Recharge

After a good year of giving out dazzling beams in the dark, my garden lights have decided to shut down. So I frantically looked for answers as to how to rejuvenate them and when men gave conflicting suggestions, I turned to my trusty source of speedy information – the internet.

That was the beginning of my lessons on solar energy and the myriad of batteries on supermarket shelves: Nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd), NiMH, energisers and others. I removed the lid of each light to reveal a simple circuit pattern. I checked with the diagram on the webpage. A perfect match indeed. I was certainly making inroads into a world that was hitherto unknown to me. I thought it was a splendid invention indeed, how solar energy could be harnessed to power simple domestic objects. Most importantly, what struck me was the need for re-charging. Same as humans. Women, especially need to be re-charged because they are givers most of the time. Whether we are wives, carers, mothers, daughters - at home or at the workplace- we are on duty 24/7, public holidays included. Without realising it, we become so committed and responsible and this in itself becomes an imprisonment with no early parole for good behaviour. Truth be told, there is a need to escape from the madness called routine. Those who work outside the home have weekends off but this can be a misnomer as weekends are usually used to clean the house and to catch up with other domestic chores left undone during the week. Those who are homemakers may face a tougher job in trying to define the concept. They may even have to convince the uninitiated, particularly the husband and the children, that homemaking is actually a round-the-clock sentry job and being a stay at home mother is not exactly akin to playing mah-jong and watching soap operas all the time. We all need to be re-charged.

Have you ever seen how droopy plants spring to life almost immediately when we water them? Or how a hungry baby grabs a milk bottle? When we are re-charged, then only do we have so much more to give to others - something different, something new, something exciting. Even if we run on petrol or diesel we will stall along the way unless we manoeuvre ourselves to a nearby kiosk and get re-filled. We just cannot perform at optimum levels all the time. Recharging can be anything that ranges from shopping, going on a holiday or just being out of the home. It is said that shopping is excellent retail therapy as when we are up, we shop and when we are down, we shop even more. Tammy Faye Bakker once said that shopping is a great deal cheaper than having to go see a psychiatrist regularly.

Recharging can be going to the movies. Even with satellite television and Dvds, to me nothing beats watching movies on the big screen and chomping delicious morsels complete with piping hot latte as I watch actors and actresses fly towards me in 3-D version. Recharging can be sipping coffee in the company of friends, whether in a café or at home where the air is pregnant with the smell of piping hot scones in the oven. It is the sharing of both the serious and the trivial that we enter into different worlds and get a glimpse of another person’s life and feel privileged to be privy to it. So now I am enjoying the ultimate recharging process. I am on vacation back in my home country among the familiar. The epitome of a decadent lifestyle of feasting and relaxing and catching up with friends and loved ones. I remind myself constantly that if I soak up enough sun, then my winter nights ahead will be very warm indeed.