A Project that Taught me alot
A Project That Taught Me alot
by Romy
Assalam alaikum sisters my name is Romy
I am a mum of 5, home-schooling 2 of them at the moment. I am a Resilience and parenting coach, I
teach about emotions coach you and support you in your journey towards emotional resilience,
peaceful parenting and much more. I am a very passionate person, I DO want to change the world
with the permission of Allah, love organic-harsh chemical free anything, love babies and birth, ( yes I
am a Doula) , gardening and Essential oils. But when I look at my journey subhannAllah, my love for
knowledge it is what shines through, so it made a lot of sense to me: joining my kids in their learning
by home-schooling them.
I like deep involvement, deep conversations, and it shows in what I do subhannAllah. My moto its
flexibility. Now that you know me a bit better let us go on with today’s topic.
So I was thinking about what to write about in the Blog for months, and had no clue, I knew it was
going to be personal, and most likely about emotions, but could not think of anything!!!
Until the Islamic Civilizations project came about and my experience of it was all about emotions ...
I got the topic I was hoping for , We were researching and making a presentation about Al Andalus, a
place very close to my heart, and the place I would try and imagine while growing up, the place my
biological dad came from, before he migrated to Uruguay at about 10 years old.
I didn’t know about my dad until I was 9, and those news shattered my perfect world and revealed
that my step dad which I loved so much, was not my real dad, and my real dad which they wanted
me to meet ,its from Spain, a fisherman from Galicia.
At that time I refused to meet him, I refused to turn my life upside down, because of the needs of
the adults around me, but it did have a huge impact on me and I was left with day dreaming about
Spain ,I always wanted to know how Spanish live, how Spain look like and that connection I built
with it was in my head getting me closer to the dad I didn’t know.
Fast forward, I did meet my dad when I was 18, and I loved him a lot, loved his Spanish accent, loved
his personality ,his completely different ideas, his openness to talk about life and to listen to me. But
we clashed, he was a hurricane, and I was a smaller version of the hurricane, as passionate as he
was, subhannAllah, so I never got on with my dad, and never called him dad. When I was 20 I moved
to Australia with his help, I moved to Spain for about 7 months, and in my return to Aussie land, I
became a Muslim alhamdullillah.
So the project and my raw emotions about my identity, my origin, if you can call it that way and my
dad who passed away about 4 years ago. All those thoughts and feelings I thought were now neutral,
I was over it .... Came flooding right back, in a not so conscious process, but I could definitely feel I
was off and did not know why.
So I saw myself falling back into old patterns of behaviour , first the avoiding, I couldn’t start the
project we watched some videos, but then we didn’t go back to working on it till I realised it was
nearly due, and I couldn’t avoid anymore.
When finally working on it I realised it was all about me, this was my project, my Andalus, I was
getting a bit fixated on colours, and that the final result was like “I” pictured it. Which can be a bit
harsh on my kids, who I usually let be the ones doing most of the work they can do. This was
showing me another sign that I had emotional stuff going on about it.
And lastly the sadness it brought up , I got very emotional about the content, and my thoughts about
it, the thoughts about my dad, his life, his struggle with alcohol addiction, why he migrated to
Uruguay and left his beautiful Spain, the correlations the suffering of the Muslims when they were
made to leave as well, and finally hi sickness and passing. I was thinking about his support, I learned
a lot from his weaknesses and specially his strengths which I silently admired and loved, his beautiful
strong Galician accent.
And his making sense of me becoming a Muslim by remembering that there was a Moro ( how they
call the Muslims in Spain) in his family, so according to him I might be following that blood line and
connecting us back to Islam.
A beautiful sister asked me, are you ok? at the event because I looked soooo tired, I was mentally
tired, all the thinking, memories, and grief, left me exhausted, mentally drained.
Al Andalus project took me in a Journey full of strong emotions, of getting to know myself a bit
better, and the realization that I will get stuck on thoughts of the past, but with the knowledge I
learned and now teach others, I can bounce back real quick, and I don’t need to get stuck on it for
weeks, or get depressed about it. With this understanding I can go through life feeling it, being
myself, showing up authentically, and with confidence and resilience. Deeply experience tawakkul
and appreciate the tests, since “Allah doesn’t burden a soul more than it can bare” Qur'an, 2:286
Jazakallahu kheir for reading
If you resonate with my story, please comment.
I’d love to hear from you and your feedback
Much Love Romy