If you ask anyone about my family and I, they will tell you that we all love to entertain people; the main reason is that my husband and I originate from large families; in both our houses prior to marriage we had extended family living in with us, we are both used to having the umpteen siblings, the aunties, the uncles, their kids, wives and husbands all under the same roof. Since we got married we had people staying in with us for more than three days at a time, and because we both work full time, we developed a routine that prepared our guests to do without us, such things like shopping, and outings are carried out on their own, we only really see them in the evenings upon our return from work. We also managed to entertain lots of friends in the evening and during the weekends, sometimes our guests count can be more than 40 adults plus their children, we all have fun and when they depart we feel happy that we made our friends' day, and they made our day in return.
We continued this practice even when we traveled abroad, in all the countries that we stayed in, we had our friends either visit for lunches, dinners and breakfasts, or stay with us during the weekend, that way both the kids and us didn't feel lonely whilst in foreign lands.
I am imagining what is going inside your heads when you read this preamble! give me a break, I must start complaining, one cannot be tolerant all the time you would say? how come this woman is describing happy memories by having invasions of people in her house! Well, its true, we all never complained, we love the crowd, and we feel great after they leave. However, phew, at last, in few occasions, I did feel edgy by having certain guests; as mentioned earlier, we work full time, in actual fact we work 24/7; thus we cannot spend all our time entertaining, we do not mind having people over provided that they do their own thing during the day, and talk with us during the nights; one day I had a friend over, I am not going to mention the gender so she/he doesn't feel bad when they read this blog, that person is not going to stay with me anymore as the agony of having that person surpasses any major operation, tooth extraction, stomach ache, headache, you name it of those agonizing diseases that give you extreme pain, and it will not reach the level of anxiety that I had had when that friend was around. You see I receive lots of phone calls from my students, and when a student calls its either a disaster was about to happen, or had happened, which means that the call must be taken. The guest gets irritated, and asks me to put the phone down. Also I receive lots of emails, so if I attempt to reply to my emails, the guest gets upset, and feels abandoned; I also have lots of meetings, and visits, these I had to cancel, as if I even mention them, the guest world is going to be a ruin and whatever tornado you can think of is going to pass by the guest's world and destruct it; so the week went by with the same situation day in, and day out. I cannot begin to explain to you how heavy my time became, the arrow of the clock was not moving, I found myself looking at every watch in my drawers, and every clock in the house to make sure that they are working. I shouted at the kids, kicked the hell out of my cat, pulled my hair (or what is left of it) out, almost broke the shower handle as I hit my head with it, talked to the plants, took four of those stress tablets at the same time, etc. Basically, I turned into a madwoman during that week.
However, in front of the guest I was charming, smiley, adorable, and congenial. The Guest never felt that its existence was turning my life into a living hell. What to do, thinking, thinking, really I couldn't think of any excuse to get rid of this guest. So when the time was up, I almost fainted as I couldn't believe that I am returning to sanity after all. The Guest called one day and mentioned that a trip is appearing in the horizon, I said, well, I will be out of the country forever! so if you hear that I got lost in Antarctica, you will know the reason.
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