My mother along with her three siblings moved out of Makgolokhukhu’s house.
They, mere teenagers, found a stand and built two conjoined rooms with their bare hands where they would live away from the daily torment they received from their aunts.
Those two rooms still stand to this day and within them carry the heavy stories of their childhood.
Read more | BOOK EXTRACT | Freelance Like a Bos
When it seemed things were getting better, the young man was back in her life and she was pregnant again – this time, with twins but they would be gone before she could even hold them in her arms. Another tragedy that she had to move on from.
Again – she went back to school holding on to the hope that education would save her. But the cycle kept continuing as is expected of cycles. Not long after, she was pregnant again. This time giving birth to a healthy baby boy she named ‘Bafitile’ (meaning others have passed), in remembrance of three of her babies who didn’t stay long.
Bafi, as we all fondly call him, was her tha kgaletsoalo (the first-born child who would ‘ease her worries’), the one who would take the first and worst hit of both my parents’ trauma, but mostly our mother’s pain.
Five years later my second brother Tumi came along. In less than a year, I arrived. My mother’s first girl child. And my mother describes it as the happiest day of her life.
With a jubilation brewing from within, she named me Nthabiseng. She claims it had nothing to do with the fact that ‘Nthabiseng’ was a very common name that year (Nthabiseng was a common name in the early 80s that made a comeback in the early 90s.)
She would tell us how we came along and ruined her life. How she could have been something important in this world but was stuck in godforsaken Mamone toiling away in the maize fields to raise us. She convinced us that she paid a huge price to give us life and we owed her as a result.
It was custom in our village that the wife of the last-born boychild inherit the work of tending to the maize fields, looking after her husband’s parents and their home.
Mama and her husband could not build for themselves anywhere outside of the communal yard or move out of the family house. Only during the first few months of the wife moving in, could the mother-in-law show her the ropes, how to cook for the family, tend to the maize fields and look after the house and thereafter she was all on her own. Her ability to carry out these chores without complaining gained the approval and praise of both her husband and parents-in-law.
When I was old enough to perceive my environment, my mother worked the fields. They were a two-hour walking distance away from our home. Almost every day, from ploughing to harvesting season, she awoke at 4 am and returned home at dusk.
To say my mother was present for day-to-day parenting duties would be to idealise her. Her presence was an anomaly and craving it felt like self-torture. One had to give up or pretend to be okay with the situation.
When my younger brother Kagisho was born, I was cast into the role of caregiver. And while my brothers where older than me, there was a bizarre expectation that a girl child is best equipped to take care of a child. Makgolo looked after Kagisho when I went to school and I had to take over the moment I returned. Life continued this way with my mother waking up every day to live a life that wasn’t hers and resenting us for it. I too resented my mother for taking away my childhood.
As my resentment started to grow, it was quickly replaced with fear as my mother’s body was crumbling under the stresses in her life. Her face became the face of a battered women when she faced downwards for a long time and the swelling would last for hours. Her fingers hardened and became painful when she placed them in water for too long. Her teeth were rotting, causing her immense pain, and she had fainting spells. I am yet to meet a person who has experienced tooth aches as severe as my mother’s.
She would be in so much pain that she would pace around the yard and then bury her face amongst the pillows on her bed, on her knees with her hands on her head. These episodes came with the worst headache.
And each time she would go get the tooth removed only for the next one to rot and bury her again in intense pain. It was a never-ending nightmare.
When she wasn’t experiencing these tooth aches, her face would swell up so badly that she’d have to hide herself and avoid visitors until the swelling went down. She’d say that her face wasn’t painful, only heavy. We found relief in that. The nurses and doctors my mother saw could not help her. None of them could figure out why her face was swelling up and how to help her.
We accepted it as part of her life – our life – and did our best to remind her not to do too much labour. When she was out in the fields, she had to steal moments of rest to avoid being gossiped about. She said, at first, the women who had fields next to ours thought she was being physically abused at home, until they started witnessing the swelling happen right in front of them.
Read more | BOOK EXTRACT | Caster Semenya's The Race To Be Myself is the book we all need to celebrate ourselves
There was constantly some mysterious illness attacking my mother that made me live inconstant fear of her death. When washing dishes or clothes in the river (we lacked piped water), my mother’s fingers would contort and harden, and she would be in visible pain.
Just like the swelling she would have to wait it out. We didn’t know how to anticipate it. Some days she would go through dozens of loads of laundry and without pain and on other days she would experience many episodes throughout the day.
These were all frightening, but things seemed to get even worse as my mother started losing consciousness at random places and times. The first fainting spell my mother had, she tried to hide from me and my brother, Tumi. I suppose she was worried that we were too young and would struggle to process it. I came back from school expecting my mother to still be in the fields, but she was home laying down on her bed which she shared with Kagisho and me whenever my dad was away for work. He was away most of the month except for every last weekend. Happy to see her, I asked why she was home so early, and she told me that there wasn’t much to do in the fields that day.
There were days when that was the case and all she had to do was watch that the birds didn’t eat the crops. I believed her. But later that afternoon after my older brother had returned from school, I overheard my mother tell him about how she fainted in the fields and the women she was with were so scared that when she awoke seconds later, they all decided to accompany her home.
My mother had been having fainting spells since she was a teenager but this was a first for us.
Little did we know that they would torment her for years to come and create a fear that would take root in my little heart adding to my reasons for becoming an anxious child.
This is an edited extract from The Girl Who Survived her Mother by Moshitadi Lehlomela (published by Tafelberg, an imprint of NB Publishers). The recommended retail price is R295.
