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When I return from America I am like a love letter that has been torn up and put back together again. There are pieces of me missing. Recognising this, Mummy is gentle with me. Sometimes she speaks to me as though I have just returned from the frontlines of a war. Baba doesn’t know what to say and so he avoids me and tries not to look irritated on those rare occasions when we bump into each other in the house. He leaves early most mornings and comes home late. I spend a lot of time crying. I am heartbroken over a man and he doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge. He has no idea how to relate to the woman his child is becoming.

I pretend to be busy when he is around and I sense he is grateful. He is still angry about me living in sin and deciding not to come home, and I am still angry at him for behaving like a misogynist patriarch. I am angry for the time he spent ignoring me. There is a heaviness between us that has never existed before and yet it is freeing. I no longer have to labour under the yoke of Baba’s approval. I have disappointed him – deeply – and I am not sorry. In fact, I am proud. That he may never understand this only bolsters my resolve and sense of righteousness.

It is left to Mummy to try to patch things up between us. She is reassured by the fact that I have no money so she knows I will live at home for a while and that proximity alone will go a long way towards forcing a reconciliation.

She is right. The fog of lovesickness begins to pass. I am grateful for the peace. Grateful to be home alone in the day when Mummy and Baba and Zeng are gone, so I can cry and eat and have my privacy and aloneness. I am grateful, too, for her cooking. For her unspeaking presence – for what she doesn’t say but notices nonetheless. Mummy’s mothering is light – it is not always delivered in lectures.

Slowly, I begin to feel my way out of the anger at Baba and the loneliness and rage at Jason. I laugh because of Zeng. She is in her final year of high school and while I was at university she grew up. She is funnier and sharper and more naturally witty than any of us. She is the baby, though, so her heart is wide and it is open.

I whine about Baba. She nods in understanding – they have had their own clashes. Eventually though she is tired of it and she says, ‘Talk to him, babe, this is getting boring now.’

So I do. I wait for him to come home from work. It gets later and later but still I wait. When he arrives he sees me in the TV room. He understands immediately that my presence is an invitation and so he joins me. We have not done this since my arrival a month ago. We sit and talk about nothing at all and it feels fine. I see his love and disdain and decide to live with them both because I am tired of fighting. I decide to love Baba in spite of the things he chooses not to understand.

So there is peace again in the house. Mummy is happy, even though she is smart enough not to rejoice too loudly. She smiles more and begins again to tease Baba and me about our bond – about the ways in which we are similar, from our left-handedness to our hard-headedness.

* * *

I start looking for a job. I fill in applications and busy myself with perfecting my CV. The Australian High Commission is looking for a programme officer. I don’t know what this means really but I meet the requirements – an undergraduate degree in international relations or politics, an interest in policy, and experience working on social issues. I write a winning cover letter about how much I want to support the project of building a new non-racial society. I triple-check my CV and fax it off.

Within a week they phone to invite me to interview. I put on my only suit – a maroon blazer with shoulder pads and matching pants. I wear low black heels and carry a shoulder bag as though I am a grown woman. I put on my most serious face and try to look calm.

My American degree and the years spent in many different parts of the world intrigue them. I worry they will hone in on these weaknesses – that the panel will see that my global experience actually distances me from the community projects they fund; that I may find it hard to understand the contexts in which their projects operate.

These worries come to nothing. The panel is only too happy to hire me. I speak English in a way that suits them and yet I am ‘local’. Never mind that I am South African in name only – simply because my ID book says so and that, in reality, there is very little about me, beyond my DNA, that is local.

I get the job.

The night before I start work, Mummy sits me down in the living room. ‘Let’s talk, my girl.’ I know she is going to give me a talk about saving money and how I mustn’t use the phone at the office. She surprises me.

‘Remember the camping trip?’

I smile and know immediately what she is talking about. ‘You mean the camping trip that never happened?’

We both laugh at the memory of it. A decade has passed since she tried to pitch the tent while we stood perplexed and giggly and unsure what had taken over our mother. The rain had come pouring down and saved us from having to spend the night in the woods. We had packed up and gone home to our small duplex in Hunt Club and watched movies, the four of us squeezed onto the couch – three brown girls and their mama. I was thirteen then and aware of my budding breasts and spreading thighs even when nobody was looking at me. That aborted camping trip had made me forget myself for a few hours – had let me put aside my self-­consciousness and self-absorption.

Tonight, sitting in the dim light, I am no longer awkward. I am tall and pretty in that way all women are in those fleeting years when they are no longer girls but have only just become women. I can see in Mummy’s eyes she can’t quite believe I am now a woman poised to march into the world without her.

‘Yes, the camping trip that never was.’

Mummy smiles. I can see she is happy that I still remember that day. I think for the first time about what life must have been like for Mummy in Canada – the loneliness without Baba, and the difficulty of navigating a new and strange place. Mummy always protected us from feeling unstable, from sensing her own anxieties, so I assumed, as a child, that she had none.

Tonight, as she tells this story, she takes me back; she paints a fuller picture of the woman I never saw because I was too much of a child to worry about anything but my own needs.

She begins.

It is a warm spring day in 1985 and she is happy because she has survived her first winter in Canada. For months she has woken up in the dark day after day after day and pulled on her boots and braced against the cold to shovel overnight snowfall. She has made breakfast for her children and then made her way to the office over ice and through storms, month after unending month, alone and tired and lonely.

She works as a junior accountant at a small firm, despite her years of experience. She sits in a cubicle and does basic balance sheets and income and credit statements. The work is mindless and not well paid, but it is work and it matters for the future she is building. On this particular day, when the boss approaches her cubie, her mood is good because finally the sun has decided to shine again. She is humming gently under her breath but when he approaches her she stops. He is querying something minor – as usual. She clarifies quickly and slightly nervously as is her custom, but he does not seem to understand what she is saying. She considers just conceding and saying, yes, you are right it is my fault. The trouble is the implications of the error he is implying she made, but which she did not, in fact, make, are significant.

So they go over it again. The third time, he sees that she is correct. He wants to say, ‘Oh! I see,’ but he doesn’t. He is embarrassed because she is contradicting him in front of the others and the mistake he has made will have financial implications. So he stands over her desk and decides to shout. He turns red in the face, and bellows, saying she is in Canada now, not Africa, and here things are done professionally. Then he calls her a bitch. To be precise, he calls her a dumb bitch.

At this point in telling the story, Mummy has raised her hand and is holding out her palm as though the boss is standing right in front of her, as though she still needs to guard against him.

She resumes her story.

After he has spoken these words, Mummy remains silent. SiSwati rushes to her lips, but stays in her mouth, locked just behind her teeth. She feels as though she is skating, like that time she fell after getting off the bus. The ice had surprised her and her legs, in boots that were not sturdy enough, had betrayed her.

The boss hears her silence and knows that he should stop but he does not. He makes it worse. He says, ‘This is not a charity, it’s a business! Don’t come here and tell me how to run my business.’ He is screaming and no one else is moving or talking or doing anything, but watching this display although their heads are down and they are pretending not to listen and someone is in the kitchen, frozen, afraid to move even when the microwave beeps.

Then he stops bellowing. He stops and he looks at her and sees that she is only looking and not saying a word and he begins to be afraid and he doesn’t know why. So he turns and, with his shoulders slumped in defeat, although you could argue he is the victor, he walks quickly to his office. He slams the door. This is his way of acting for the sake of the others – as though he is angry and has a right to be.

She knows he is not angry, only frightened because she looked right through him as though he were dead and he is not the sort of man who knows what to do with that. He cowers in his office, afraid that, like some voodoo priestess, she might steal a hair from his jacket or drive a pin through his eye.

She does not, nor would it ever occur to her.

She packs her bags and nods goodbye to her colleagues. The sting of humiliation and the urgency of rage force her to slow down. She does not move quickly, though she wants to. Something in her body tells her to be deliberate and slow. Finally, when she is done, she walks into the corridor and waves at her colleagues. They are aghast. She smiles but says nothing. Then she turns and looks through the window. He is sitting at his desk and senses someone is there and so he looks up. She looks back. She looks at him long and hard. Not mean or even hurt, just clear-eyed and firm as though she is remembering every detail so that the moment never fades from her mind’s eye. He flushes and looks down and this satisfies her. Then she puts on her great big coat. She puts it on and walks out and never returns.

No amount of sorry can undo what has been done. Mummy cannot even tell Baba because as usual he is gone. He has a six-month emergency relief assignment in Ethiopia so she cannot confide in him. She cannot ask him – as she might if he was sitting in bed, listening to her story – how it is that this man can speak to her this way. She cannot say, ‘Me? Talk to me that way? Does he know who I am?’ She cannot fume aloud and say that she did not move her children and fix her eyes on this country only to be called an African bitch. She has no one to say these things to but she thinks them and they keep her strong and she resists the tears because if she allowed them to, they could drown her.

Mummy gets into her car and drives away. She drives steadily and slowly but she drives away, knowing she will never return. The day is bright and the winter is over. She goes to school and fetches her girls. She is there when we come out of the building. She stands there and smiles as though she is a Canadian mom with time on her hands and cookies in the oven at home and we are surprised as she encircles us with her arms and then we are surprised again when she says, ‘Let’s go camping,’ and we giggle in the back seat all the way there.

Once we are in the camping grounds we shout instructions to each other, trying to pitch the tent and when the heavens open up and the rain pours down on us we laugh and are happier still when she says, ‘Let’s go home, girls.’

The following week the office calls and she says, ‘No, I will not consider it. I am not coming back.’

She looks for another job and in the interview the head of HR is surprised when she says in her soft and tired voice, ‘I left because my dignity is not for sale,’ and something about the way she says it makes that company offer her the job.

* * *

When the story is over Mummy and I sit with the television light flickering on our faces. I wish I knew this about Mummy when I was in college and heartbroken and looking for answers about racism and fortitude. I think about how often I turned to the words of poets and writers and great thinkers; of the times I ran to the library with its heaving shelves full of books in Minnesota, when all along Mummy has been here.

I see clearly for the first time how much I have taken her for granted, how much I have focused on Baba because he was the freedom fighter and she has always just been our mother – strong and determined but, in my mind at least, apolitical. I see what a mistake it has been to think that, just because she doesn’t talk about racism, she has not felt its lash and its sting. I regret this immediately and recognise it as a function of my adoration of Baba. I have loved her, but it has never occurred to me that she ought to be an object of my admiration – a hero just like Gogo Lindi.

I am embarrassed suddenly, even as my chest swells with pride. Like most children, I have only seen my mother as I needed to see her, not as she has always been. I am lucky, though – she has had the grace to wait, to find the perfect moment in which to turn my face towards her, and then to take the time to whisper, ‘Listen, my girl, and look at me: this is who I really am.’