I roll my eyes and ask, “What does she want?”
“No, she says she can take you to Home Affairs on Saturday to get your ID.”
“Tell her I’m going next month with Natalie. Papa can take us.”
“OK, but I think you should do stuff with your mom every now and then, Zellie.”
“Yes, Papa, I will. Just not my ID,” I answer through the door.
My grandpa tries hard to force moments on to my mom. I know she doesn’t care. And the truth is, I care even less. It’s OK not to have a mom you do stuff with. This way I learn to do things on my own. When I look at my friends I can see how fucking lost they all are without their moms. Felix, who has the biggest mouth, calls his mom to ask what he should eat. And when he’s sick and the doctor gives him meds, with instructions on, he first gives it to his mom to check how many pills he’s supposed to take. I don’t even think he gets along with his mom. All I know is she’s managed to become something that he can’t function without. And I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
Independence has been hammered into me since I was a kid. To need anyone is embarrassing. And if your mom is like mine, you soon learn that people do foolish things when they think you need them. I even went to UCT and UWC’s open weeks on my own. Even Natalie, who I’ve walked from late-night parties a few too many times with, thought that trip was too much and said no thank you. A university is the sort of journey that you do not dare to go on without one of your parents. I think we were raised to be ghetto experts. We have all the skills to survive here but not out there.
I only notice the postman as he’s walking away from our postbox. I get up nervously. I try to feel indifferent, but small shocks move through my body like sunlight on ebbing water. First I look right and left like I’m crossing the road, and then in the postbox so that I don’t feel so desperate. Inside the postbox lies a brown leaf, a grey pebble, two manilla envelopes for my grandma and grandpa and one white envelope addressed to me.
I walk in and place the manilla envelopes where my grandpa can see them, so that I don’t have to tell him the postman was here. I’m not in the mood for a conversation about mail. I go sit down back at the window and consider opening the letter for a moment, but I decide against it. Because if the contents of that letter don’t agree with me, I’m going to walk around the rest of the day like someone with food poisoning. And there’s still a sweet 16 that needs to be celebrated tonight. And my friends are still coming around later. If I look down, they will want to know why, and then I’ll have to explain why. And once I start explaining, I can’t stop. Then I start explaining everything, from childhood to now. Then I’m going to start explaining that we’ll never get out of this place if we wait on our parents for permission. How can you expect a mom or dad that wouldn’t even sign your indemnity forms at school to sign your freedom papers?
But today isn’t the day for all that. Today is a day for my friends to come around and laugh at my expense. Today I have to act like it bothers me when they make fun of me, because that makes it funnier — a good sport is boring. It’s not every day that something unusual happens. Sometimes, most of the time, we are like people rummaging through an ashtray for half-smoked cigarette butts for story that hasn’t been told a hundred times already. It’s not every day we know what the joke is. A lot of times we just laugh because no one has the energy to cry.
Tell us: What do you think of the narrator’s thoughts on getting out of the ghetto, and being dependent on one’s parents?