Nozizwe Cynthia Jele on the single parent, the nurse, the storyteller and the voice of reason

I. The Birthday Girl

It is the last day of June, my mother’s birthday as reflected on her identity document. This is not her real birth date. My mother was born on June 11 1954 but owing to the sloppiness of a certain home affairs official, or Undabazabantu, as they were referred to in those days, June 30 was registered. My mother has never bothered to correct the error; she is not burdened by small technicalities. Besides, she asserts, who is to say with certainty that the 11th is, in fact, the correct date? Her mother is illiterate.

My younger brother, Lindani, family members and I have planned to throw a surprise birthday party for her. As far as I can remember this is the first time she has ever celebrated her birthday with a party — she has never asked for one. The weekend of her birthday coincides with my father’s tombstone unveiling, a bittersweet time for us. My grandmother and mother’s three sisters, strong black women I’ve known all my life, and other family members are here to support her. The unveiling ceremony took place earlier — the dead are visited in the morning — now we celebrate the living. The birthday girl is emotionally overwhelmed as my aunt brings in the cake, with five burning candles, and everyone erupts into a birthday song.

“O, Nkosi yami,” my mother starts, but chokes. Her eyes glisten with tears. “Hhayi, Thokozile, stop crying and blow the candles. We want to eat cake,” someone says, and the room erupts in laugher. My mother blows out the candles.

II. The Mine Girl

My mother was born in the small coal-mining town of KwaMnyathi, outside Vryheid in Kwa- Zulu-Natal. She is the fifth child in a family of eight, the last of four girls. I take delight in listening to her growing-up stories — life on the mines, learning to brew sorghum beer to assist her mother who sold it to the community to support her family, entering nursing college — not as a preferred career choice but as a way of escaping poverty and the mining life. (Nurses-in-training lived on hospital premises and earned a little income in those days; four of my five uncles, her brothers, would employ the same strategy by joining the apartheid police force, a decision they would struggle with for most of their lives). But my favourite story is the one about how she met my father.

My mother had to find another hospital at which to complete her practical training. At the tender age of 20 or so, she could think of no better place than Johannesburg. Openings for trainee nurses had been advertised at an unknown hospital somewhere in the Eastern Transvaal. My mother and a friend reasoned that the hospital had to be fairly close to their intended destination; after all, Johannesburg was in the Transvaal, right? Not. Of course they would learn, upon arriving at the training col- lege in the middle of nowhere, that they were very far from the City of Gold. Nevertheless, it is here that she met my father, a tennis-playing local businessman. They had me after a few months of romance; my brother followed two years later.

III. The Nurse

The earliest memory I have of my mother is of her in a nurse’s uniform. She is wearing a knee-length white dress, brown stockings and brown shoes with thick soles. Her white nurse’s cap sits curiously perched on her neatly combed Afro hair and it will stay like that until she returns home in the late afternoon. The red epaulets with their colourful brass buttons — which, I would learn much later, represent a specific qualification: midwifery, primary health care — break the sterility of the white uniform. On chilly days she puts on a navy-blue jersey. She always carries a brown or black handbag on her right shoulder.

My mother leaves us in the care of our grandmother, her mother, and makes her way to the hospital, which is some distance away but visible from our house. Her strides are fast — tap, tap, tap — her body upright; there’s an air of assurance in her walk, her posture. She is beautiful, slim and fair, to my young self’s mind exactly the way a nurse should look. The greatest knowledge I have is that this beautiful woman is my mother and I’m proud.

My mother still practises as a nurse, specifically looking after TB and HIV/Aids patients in the Nkomazi District. Despite the frustrations she approaches her work with the same vigour she did many years ago. Helping others is truly her calling; I don’t see her doing anything else.

IV. The Single Parent

My parents separated for a few years soon after my brother was born. We went to stay with my maternal grandmother and my mother’s two younger brothers. I only have fond memories of my childhood days in Madadeni, a lively township outside Newcastle.

My parents were reunited after bumping into each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. Without wasting time it was decided that the “family order” had to be restored — mother duck and her ducklings had to return to father duck. Within months we left KZN for sunny Mpumalanga — my 10-year-old self kicking and screaming, my universe shattered, and my poor mother assuring me that we were going to be fine, that our father loved us so much, which is why he had come back for us. I had never thought of how it must have been for my mother for all those years, raising two children out of wedlock while her three sisters had married and moved away from home. I’ve only recently thought of the compromise she made in taking my father back, leaving a life she had rebuilt since the split — her job, friends, lovers — for us.

V. The Mother

I am a good daughter, have always been. I never went through the rebellious teenage years, my mother never had to take me to a boy’s family to report the “damages” nor did my parents ever experience the typical volatile moods, dropped phone calls or coded whis- tles that typically came just after suppertime. Then again, my mother was wise enough to recommend that I be shipped to a boarding school as soon as I started high school. I was, however, a lazy child, which got me into numerous troubles with her.

I could never be trusted to complete a simple household chore. I can’t count the number of times I found myself at the receiving end of a damp dishcloth, a wooden spoon with the complimentary titbits of drying pap, or a shoe right off her foot, because I had abandoned the pots, letting them smoulder into black ash, for one more game of “ma-rounders” or “shumpu”. The bigger offence here was interrupting my mother’s daily dose of The Bold and the Beautiful or Days of Our Lives and forcing her to salvage artfully whatever remained of the dish or make another plan for dinner before my father came home from work.

My mother has the heart of a saint. I remember when I was in high school, every few years I would come home during school holidays and find a “new” member of the family — a Sipho, Mandla, Thembi — some destitute child who needed a place to stay in order to complete his or her matric. She took them all in.

VII. The Learner and Storyteller

Another vivid memory I have of my mother is when she decided to go back to school. She had only gone as far as completing the Junior Certificate but had dreamed of getting her matric. I was in grade 7. The novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven, was a set book for her English class. I remember how she used to read this book out loud, describing with passion and empathy the story of Mark Brian, a young missionary sent to a Native Canadian village called Kingcome in British Columbia. Mark is suffering from a fatal disease but he’s unaware of this. My mother told the story as if it was a first-hand account; as if she was there in the village. She was terribly upset when Mark died. I was in my early teens at the time and had just discovered romance novels, which I thought were much more interesting than a book about a dying man in some faraway village. It wasn’t until much later when I picked up the book at a second-hand bookstore that I understood why my mother loved it.

VII. The Desperate Grandmother-in-Waiting

My mother and I have only one standing disagreement — the fact that at my age I haven’t given her a grandchild. When she was my age I was already 14 years old! Our conversation on motherhood started in earnest when I turned 30.

“I would love to have a grandchild or two from my only daughter, but I’m not pushing you. I’m only saying it would be nice to hold little Nombuso or Thembele.” Of course, my nonexistent children already have names. Over the years our discussions on this issue have shifted from friendly and advisory to mildly frustrated and, recently, downright furious.

“I just don’t understand why you have not had a child. I don’t understand where you get this idea that you must meet a right man and get married before you have children. Frankly, you have so many choices today, what with all this technology, you don’t even need a partner to become a mother. And you know I will help you raise the child.”

Ah, my liberal mother, who only wants one or two grandchildren by her only daughter. Nothing more. Why am I being a difficult daughter? This nonsense about waiting for the right partner must end.

VIII. My Hero and The Voice of Reason

As I grow older I’ve come to listen more and more to what my mother has to say. I now fully recognise and appreciate her intelligence and wisdom. Though she is a middle child, her opinions hold great weight with her sisters and brothers and even her own mother. I’ve heard her asked, directly or indirectly, time after time: “We sisi, manje wen’uthini? What should be done here?” My grandmother rarely takes a big decision without consulting her: “Uthini uThokozile?” My mother takes pleasure in this. “How the tables have turned, the youngest are the oldest. Did you know it was going to come to this?” Although I’m strangely starting to sound and even behave like her, I don’t have her wisdom.

I value each day I have with my mother. Perhaps the biggest regret is that I don’t see her every day, something I hope I can change soon. That and the grandchild situation, of course.

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BIOGRAPHY
Nozizwe Cynthia Jele is a South African-born writer who grew up in a small border town in Mpumalanga. She holds a BTech in environmental health from the then Natal Technikon and a BA in international business from North Central College in Illinois, in the United States. Cynthia’s claim to fame was winning first and fourth prize in the 2008 BTA/ Anglo-Platinum Short Story Competition. Her debut novel, Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word, won the Best First Book category (Africa region) in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2011, as well as the 2011 M-Net Literary Award in the Film category. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2011 Booksellers Choice Award.