If there is one thing that Zinzi Zwane cannot stand, it is tears. Just the thought of crying, especially in public, gives me the creeps. It’s something that has to do with pride; I just don’t like showing my vulnerable side to anyone.
I can’t remember when last it was I cried and I have a serious problem when it comes to comforting people – telling them to stop crying. I just can’t stand the thought of seeing someone in their weakest moment. If mom starts crying (like she does that a lot nowadays!) the first thing that comes to my mind is to just get out and give her the much-needed space.
Like where do you start to comfort your own mother? What do you tell her? That everything is going to be alright in no time? Isn’t that a reversal of roles, me playing mother to my own mother? It’s crazy.
“Please don’t go Zinzi,” her desperate voice called after me, as I stood by the door, ready to step into the night and let it cool my own mind down.
“It’s over. Over, see for yourself,” I knew what was over before she even handed me the piece of white paper that was in her hand, “Over, like a dream after you wake up. Over, like a dream that has lasted all my life.”
I’m sure you have reached a conclusion by now – that that white paper contained the drab finale of all of my mother’s married life. Divorce papers! Her face looked whiter than the paper itself; pale and heartbroken.
I am used to my mom being the strong and determined woman who would rather go drink silently in her bedroom than to let us, her children, see that something was wrong. Although I have always known when things were wrong, all those teary nights and emotional breakdowns that she thinks we know nothing about, I know of them. I use to listen to her cry herself to sleep and the next day we will see her smiling.
I guess she realised that there was nothing to hide anymore. She finally saw that there was no pride in dying silently, that silence was not really a woman loudest cry. That sadness, pain, loneliness and reality are things that do not discriminate according to age.
Who hurts more—the mother who has been married to him for 19 years or the daughter who has known his father as nothing but a real-life hero, her umbrella against the world’s storms and rains?
Daughter? Mother?
What about Sim? Oh poor Sim, he is not ready for all of this. How can he ever be ready if mother and daughter, who are supposed to be stronger and prepared for this, are crying?
ZZ xxx
Dish it: Who hurts more during divorces, the kids or the parents?