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.

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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

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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