More recently, I have called her by her name or, depending who I’m talking to, I use the title that person would have used to refer to her. When I was a grown-up with my own kid, I’d refer to her as my son’s grandmother. To be precise, as a child I called her ‘malume’, meaning aunt, because that’s how my cousins referred to her. I called her many names but ‘Mother’ wasn’t one of them. After all, she hated being pregnant with me and I was an embarrassment – validating my existence by saying ‘Mother’ may upset her or, worse, invoke more hateful feelings. I should call her Mother but I’m not too sure the title fits. That was the response from the woman who gave birth to me some years back. ‘How can you insult me like that?’ Mother said, weeping and making sure her voice caught in her throat. Had I been a proper woman with a healthy bunch of feelings, I may have reacted differently, but I was far from being impressed. To my utter disbelief, what followed were ugly emotions and a screaming match. ‘Who is my real father? Did you have sexual relations with a certain white man on that farm where you lived? What’s my real surname?’ All I remember was asking the most important question in my life and waiting patiently for an answer. I don’t recall discussing the weather to break the ice. I should think I greeted Mother when I arrived at her house for I am polite – maybe not always, but most of the time. The adult me, with two children of my own, needed urgent answers. After so many years with the people who were supposed to be my blood family, I’ve learned a few lessons there are things they prefer to do differently and most, if not all the time, no explanation is given.Īfter Mother told me I was an embarrassment to her and her family, she never once mentioned the subject to explain what she meant by it. As I drove past cheerful hawkers at the roadside, the thought that I had been the hated pregnancy threatened to wreak havoc in my mind. The thought of not having dealt with Mother’s unfortunate statement did cross my mind as I drove pass Spruitview Shopping Centre, crossing the set of traffic lights that would see me closer to the house – it’s not my home, never was, never will be. My brain couldn’t program the magnitude of that piece of information since I was barely a teenager at the time, so I did what I do best – I saved it under the To Do List somewhere at the back of my mind with the hope of revisiting it when the time was right. Well, to say I wasn’t shocked by Mother’s words would be an understatement, but did I show any emotion? Absolutely not. If for one reason or other my head refuses to process some information at a given time, I don’t waste my time trying to reason it out – I just shelve it. Over the years I had perfected the trick of shutting down completely – emotionally, that is. I understood the embarrassment bit, but the hatred? I didn’t understand that.
Of course, the woman was only seventeen or eighteen years old when she was pregnant with me. It was such an embarrassment for me and my family.’ The closest she had come to it was when she said: ‘I hated being pregnant with you. While others in the family had shed some light on what they knew, the only person who knew the whole truth had stayed mum, not once volunteering to talk. The matter had been bugging me for many years. I really took care to make sure there would be very little distraction because I considered my mission to be crucial. I counted on the fact that the dearest husband would not be home either, because he drove big trucks for a living and was likely to be on some long-distance trip to deliver something for his employers. It was a weekday when school-going children would not be at home. To me it was the most natural thing to do, to drive for forty-five minutes to what was then the East Rand (now called Ekurhuleni Metropolitan after all the democratic name changes). There was no fuss really I don’t even remember saying a prayer about it. I took a bath, got dressed, ate breakfast, grabbed my handbag and was off to the parking lot and into my car. I called in sick at my place of employment – I was a practising journalist for a daily newspaper, but there were no breaking stories on that day and I wasn’t going to be missed in the downtown newsroom. One particular day springs to mind when I forgot to ‘feel’ but rather decided to exercise my right to know the truth. ‘I feel’, ‘I really feel like’, ‘I think’ – that’s all one seems to hear when surrounded by so-called real women. It seems that as far as women and issues are concerned, a lot of emotion is involved.
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