Every single day, my mother and I played a cat-and-mouse game of who could love and adore my father more than the previous day.
Was it fair to say that I won most of the time? For whatever reason, for whatever reason. I always loved my father unconditionally, but now that he was in the autumn of his years, he sorely tested my patience. Nothing was too humiliating for me. I washed him in the shower. There were no secrets between me and my father. I towel-dried his body, and as I rubbed lotion into his legs and his extremities, I erased the stigma that he had endured over many years since his bipolar diagnosis and suicidal ideation were set in place.
My father and mother taught me everything that I know. I was not a university graduate as my siblings had been. My sister had gone to the University of Cape Town, and my brother had achieved a double major at the University of the Witwatersrand. My brother later continued his studies at Nelson Mandela University, but those postgraduate studies had been disastrous.
If we had just had parents who believed in us, maybe we all would have settled down long ago and moved overseas. As it were, it was my sister who had achieved this, done the impossible, before my brother and I had even got our act together.
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I will talk of my own experience here, my own childhood. I believe my upbringing was different to that of my brother and my sister. You will see that I speak of my sister to a lesser extent. I cannot speak on behalf of my sister. She has extricated herself from my life. She has deleted me from all her socials. When she telephones, she speaks to my mother and berates my father for not being white. She cross-questions my father. Where are your teeth, my sister will ask my father nastily. Why hasn’t he got a haircut yet?
Well, we have been busy, I want to retort, but the expression on my mother’s face silences me.
When we run out of medication, my mother walks to the nearby pharmacy. My mother begs, borrows and steals money for us to survive on my father and mother’s pension, and the disability grant that I get goes towards groceries for the house. My father’s pension only lets us get by on groceries until a week or so before the end of the month is upon us.
People don’t know how we live.
Certainly not the congregants of the Gospel Hall, who, besides Sister Dorelle, Sister Ingrid, and Sister Alice, were the only individuals who came to the house after my father received radiation therapy for his bladder cancer. They covered their heads and sang choruses as only the brethren can. The music reached both my head and my heart. It comforted me a great deal.
If I say my father was a freedom fighter, my mother and brother took me to task about that.
They sneered, while I scratched my head. It is all coming back to me, living in a dysfunctional family, my father would return home late at night from community meetings; he would sleep a lot, and I understood from an early age that my father needed his rest.
My mother, on the other hand, would forget that she had three children. My mother would forget that she needed to cook for her family and clean the house. She would lay on the couch and watch a soap opera called Loving, that was popular at the time.
I grew up much too fast. I was watching Dynasty and Hotel in the evenings, long after my parents had gone to bed. They never heard the television. I was in Sub A, which would make me younger than six years of age. I went to school between the ages of four and four and a half. I didn’t understand what the grown-ups were getting up to on the screen. Some it was yucky and some of it made me blush. Some stuff I found boring, so I would switch the television off and go to bed and read an Enid Blyton, or Roald Dahl book underneath the covers with a torch.
My immediate family, my siblings, my mother, and even my beloved father, my estranged paternal and maternal family see me as a mental patient. The churches in the surrounding areas see me as being a mental patient. I haven’t recovered from anything. I haven’t completely recovered from my last psychotic episode, my last manic episode, my last hypomanic episode, even though as I sit here and write this, I am quite well, and even though as I sit here, I am of sound mind, even though as I sit here, mentally, I am of sound mind and body.
What is stigma?
It is the nervous dispositions of an individual. It is the ignorance of a person about the mental and sexual aberrations that an individual suffers from.
We all suffer from mood swings to varying degrees.
Some people self-medicate with a glass of wine in the evening, for example. It is my belief that for many people, it doesn’t stop with one bottle of wine. It is difficult to practice self-restraint when you are under the influence of narcotics, and mood-altering drugs.
In most cases, the virulent use of narcotics and mood-altering drugs in the body’s system are unstable. This can lead to violent acts, such as murder and mayhem such as domestic violence, that there is no turning back from.
Apartheid was a heinous crime against humanity. It was an atrocity that led to the collapse of the South African nation. Can Black Majority rule save us all?
In the eventuality that it cannot, many are turning to the rule of law under the Democratic Alliance party, but I don’t believe that a country can be ruled by a minority party, whatever their intentions.
Of, for and by the people. In other words, it was liberty, egality and fraternity, that led to the fall of the Bastille.
People need to be educated, and not miseducated on learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, drug addiction, alcoholism, pornography, and these days we are all facing and fighting an addiction to doomscrolling, surfing the
Internet, being on our devices at all times of the day and hours of the night. These days we even can interact with bots, and they can interact with us.
Even in the year 2026, George Orwell’s predictions in his book, 1984, are truer, more realistically depicted, more relevant than ever before.
Yes, Big Brother is watching!
