The Thursdays of 1999

There was a precise day when the concept of ‘home’ that I carried in my head changed.

It changed so much so that whenever the topic of home or family or parents came up when I was a girl, I would take a deep breath in, ready to explain the nature of my family. At ten years old, I was still under the impression that all families were replicas of the ones I saw in soap adverts, where everyone laughs at the dirty toddler, and they happily wash him up with the above-mentioned soap.

Every Thursday in 1999 went like this.

After his morning run Dad woke my brother Greg up at 06:30. Dad was an athlete. He did the Comrades and other such extreme activities and that is where his heart beat hardest. He woke me up at 06:45 because I always got ready faster: we bathed, I got dressed into my maroon pinafore uniform, ugly brown shoes and blue jersey. Mom would be making our breakfast — usually Frosties, or toast for me (I was going through a phase where I thought I was getting too old for cereal with cartoons on the box, which in hindsight — never actaully happens).

While we ate, Vuyo Mbuli spoke to us from his comfy-looking chair on the Morning Live set on SABC 2. Mom would be doing her hair in the bedroom while Dad fed Lady, our Staffy-Bull Terrier.

Dad would leave for work first; he had just been promoted to Division Manager at the Johannesburg Anglo Gold Mine plantation. Mom drove the three-minute drive to Holy Rosary School, I kissed her goodbye and she went to St Benedict’s; my brother’s school and where she was a very passionate and excellent maths teacher.

This all sounds very pleasant, except Mom and Dad were on the verge of divorce, and I never got much sleep because they fought almost every night.

Still, I would usually have a great day at school; I had lots of friends and enjoyed learning. After school on Thursdays I had choir practice until 15:00. Brownies only started at 16:00, so for the hour in-between I went to Kailynn’s house and we ate toasted cheese sandwiches, did our homework and played hide and seek until we went to Brownies. We called ourselves the Brownie-buddies because of these Thursday procedures.

“I don’t feel like going to Brownies today” Kailynn sighed out on a Thursday in November. I nodded in agreement even though I loved Brownies. It was 15:45 and almost time to go, but there was a ring at the gate. Kailynn’s mom went to get it. We shrugged and put our little Brownie hats on. I imagine we must have looked incredibly cute.

“Robynne, it’s your Mom love, go get your bags.”

I was full of the kind of confusion a little girl would have when her Thursday routine is interrupted strangely. I said goodbye and got into the car. My aunt (who lived a good while away) was with us. I remember the feeling I had. I remember it with every neuron in my brain that contains memory access. It was the feeling someone feels when they know they have just lost a fight; the ball that rises in your throat and the swelling in your cheeks just before you cry.

“Dad has had an accident my girl. We’re going to go home okay?”

Our Honda CR-V made a strange sound as we pulled into our driveway.

There were cars parked on our grass and pavement. There were sympathy smiles. There were hugs. There were lasagnes and fruit baskets. There were Greg and Lady sitting on the couch watching Digimon. My Granny and Grandad’s faces blurred into questions asking me about school. There was a lemon meringue, and I secretly got excited about having a piece later.

There was the melancholic feeling I got when everybody had left and I walked past my Mom’s bedroom. There she was, crying into my Granny’s lap. The kind of crying where your shoulders jerk up and down, and the tears run into your nostrils and mouth and you can’t breathe and you spit when you speak.

It was this day that home became a place I began to help run, and not the place I was just a youngster in. I became more my Mother’s sidekick and less a child. I tried to be the best version of an adult I could be in a ten-year-old body.

It took me a while to learn the story to tell teachers and friends when they asked what had happened:

…Dad had been working on the plant and there was a cyanide poisoning leak. His colleague, Aidan, was stuck at the bottom of a tank and Dad and another man went down to get him out. Dad breathed the cyanide in too and he collapsed… Rushed to hospital, declared 85% dead… In a coma for two weeks… In hospital for nine months. A disconnection in the signals to Dad’s brain meant having to learn to walk again, talk again and his eyesight was blurry, like when you look through a plastic ruler. Dad was declared disabled.

At the time I didn’t even know what Cyanide was; I thought my Dad actually worked in a forest full of plants.

When Dad came home everything became this “un-normal” kind of space, different to the soap adverts. But there was something that made it exceptional among all this change.

My Mom — with all her poise, empathy and heart — forgot all the problems that hung over her and Dad’s marriage. She helped tie his shoelaces, held his muscular body up while he learned to walk again and, because he couldn’t drive, she was now a chauffeur to her husband as well as her children. It was this, and somewhere between the day Dad walked around the block by himself, that my concept of home was slowly piecing together again.

Even after Mom and Dad did eventually get divorced, they became friends, and they laughed together. I think they laughed because they knew nothing could be much worse than getting cyanide poisoning. I think they laughed because they were grateful.

And in a way, I got a strange feeling when I was about to leave home for the first time. I wasn’t only going to miss my special family, but I would miss the person I was at that time and place. I would never be that grown-up little ten-year-old again.

But I had the memories of a home in my head that were strong and affirmative; it was the spot where expressions of tenderness and support gushed out without any awkwardness or any dread of ridicule. Where Moms could cry into their Mom’s lap, and I could pour out all my unreserved communications to confiding hearts.

It wasn’t a soap advert, but it was home.

It wasn’t a soap advert, but it was home.