I was only too familiar with a grown man who always let his emotions get the better of him. When I was a little girl, every time my father got drunk he would always cry for his mother, Harriet. Oh that man could cry. He would cry like a little girl crying for her doll.

“Undithuke ngomamam uHareti, you cursed me by my mother, Hareti.” He’d always use that to pick a fight with mom.

The sad thing was that Harriet was made up. Whenever he was drunk he’d always be in a state of delusion and would always cry for his mother, who by the way died when he was about six or seven years old.

Every weekend we knew that we had to go to my aunt’s house because my dad would come home drunk. He was buddies with the man who lived next door to our house. They did everything together and every time they got drunk they were never shy to bestow their vocal competences.

They sang with such confidence because they knew that they were both gifted vocally. Not equally gifted though because my dad sang better than his friend.

Though the singing was lovely, we didn’t enjoy it. We knew what followed the singing; the fighting. Their vocal display served as a warning to us and we knew we had to flee. This running away every weekend became normality.

There was this one time we ran to my aunt’s place, only to realize we had ran straight into the lion’s den. She had also been fighting with her husband and he had locked her outside. We all slept outside that night.

Things were always better when dad didn’t come home on the weekends. This continued until my mom decided she couldn’t take it anymore. She finally gathered the courage to leave him and we went to live with our uncle in Uitenhage. My older sister, Gumbazz, attended school in the then Ciskei. So it was my brother, Mkhululi, my sister Zukiswa and me, the baby of the family.

After sometime my mother had to go back to live in our house back in Port Elizabeth. This was after my uncles (her brothers) kicked my dad out of the house after they gave him a good beating too. She had to leave us behind because it was already in the middle of the year and we were attending school in Uitanhage.

This was not a pleasant moment at all. She left us with our cousins who were much older than us. Our older cousin had a live-in partner and they had a baby boy together. My older cousin ran a mini shop and a tavern.

Every weekend my mum would come over and she would always leave money that would carry us for the whole week. By Tuesday, my cousin’s girlfriend would tell us that the money my mother had left was finished so that meant we wouldn’t have any lunch at school. This gloom did not last long though.

My sister, Zukiswa who was a bit older than me, was always asked to help out at the mini shop. This turned out to be a blessing. By helping out she’d borrow small change -without permission – from the till. That way we’d have money to buy something to eat at school.

We never said anything to our mother about what was going on; we were too scared of what would happen when she left. We never said anything to our cousin either. This shitty situation continued until we went back home to our mother in PE the following year.

Finally we got home and life was much better. We were with our mummy, and daddy now lived at his brother’s house. I would visit him often, against my mother’s approval. Whenever I wanted something and my mom couldn’t get it for me I’d always go to my father. Not that my mother didn’t want to get what I had asked for, but now that I’m older and wiser I know that she couldn’t.

I would go to my dad and he would always promise to get me what I had asked for. My mum always warned me that I was setting myself up for disappointment. She told me that all my father would do is to give me false hope. My mother was right; she was always right. Something I learnt quite late in life.

I visited father almost every day and whenever I asked for something, he always made a promise for the next day. I guess he couldn’t bring himself to say he couldn’t. I wish he had, because I wouldn’t have loved him any less. That false hope caused me to resent him later on.

I never stopped hoping that my dad would do right by me. I had so much faith in him. How could I not? He was my dad; the man who gave me my first kiss. He was not always unreliable; he would sometimes leave me money under a rock, and that meant a great deal to me. One of the many things I will forever cherish about him.

That’s probably one of the reasons I decided to give Muzi another chance. I somehow fooled myself into believing that he would fix this and we would be perfect again. He was my architect after all and he knew how my soul was constructed. That was again, my mistake.

***

What could you not forgive in a relationship? Why?