twenty-one

“The truth is, being contained in the back seat of the car, pinned down by my children’s bodies, their hands searching under my clothes for skin to caress, was bliss. It was also true – I thought as the veld whizzed by and we kept a lookout for kudu and baboons – those two weeks with nobody to attend to, nobody to interrupt me, nobody asking for food or comfort, had been bliss too. Being away and being alone had restored my sense of self. I had been able to think and to write.

Hope has always been my opium, the thing I couldn’t wean myself off. No matter how bad things got, I found a way to believe that even defeat was a sign that I was bound to win.

But I think I did believe that love had immense power to unearth all that was good in us, refine us and reveal to us the better versions of ourselves.

I did not see him as someone who had changed, but as a man I had never known. I doubted the love I had once been so sure of and concluded that he had married me because he thought I was gullible.

It would take a while for me to realise that each of my children had given me as much as they took. My memories of them, bittersweet and constant, were as powerful as a physical presence.