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“This is all I can do,” she said. “The police won’t help me. The government won’t protect
me. Only my God can protect me. But what I can do is use against him the one thing that he
cherishes, and that is his pride. By me living outside in a shack, everyone is going to ask him,
‘Why does your wife live in a shack outside your house?’ He’s going to have to answer that
question, and no matter what he says, everyone will know that something is wrong with him.
He loves to live for the world. Let the world see him for who he is. He’s a saint in the streets.
He’s a devil in this house. Let him be seen for who he is.”
When my mom had decided to keep Isaac, I was so close to writing her off. I couldn’t
stand the pain anymore. But seeing her hit with a bicycle, living like a prisoner in her own
backyard, that was the final straw for me. I was a broken person. I was done.
“This thing?” I told her. “This dysfunctional thing? I won’t be a part of it. I can’t live this
life with you. I refuse. You’ve made your decision. Good luck with your life. I’m going to live
mine.”
She understood. She didn’t feel betrayed or abandoned at all.
“Honey, I know what you’re going through,” she said. “At one point, I had to disown my
family to go off and live my own life, too. I understand why you need to do the same.”
So I did. I walked out. I didn’t call. I didn’t visit. Isaac came and I went, and for the life of
me I could not understand why she wouldn’t do the same: leave. Just leave. Just fucking
leave.
I didn’t understand what she was going through. I didn’t understand domestic violence. I
didn’t understand how adult relationships worked; I’d never even had a girlfriend. I didn’t
understand how she could have sex with a man she hated and feared. I didn’t know how
easily sex and hatred and fear can intertwine.
I was angry with my mom. I hated him, but I blamed her. I saw Abel as a choice she’d
made, a choice she was continuing to make. My whole life, telling me stories about growing
up in the homelands, being abandoned by her parents, she had always said, “You cannot
blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are
responsible for you. You make your own choices.”
She never let me see us as victims. We were victims, me and my mom, Andrew and Isaac.
Victims of apartheid. Victims of abuse. But I was never allowed to think that way, and I didn’t
see her life that way. Cutting my father out of our lives to pacify Abel, that was her choice.
Supporting Abel’s workshop was her choice. Isaac was her choice. She had the money, not
him. She wasn’t dependent. So in my mind, she was the one making the decision.
It is so easy, from the outside, to put the blame on the woman and say, “You just need to
leave.” It’s not like my home was the only home where there was domestic abuse. It’s what I
grew up around. I saw it in the streets of Soweto, on TV, in movies. Where does a woman go
in a society where that is the norm? When the police won’t help her? When her own family
won’t help her? Where does a woman go when she leaves one man who hits her and is just as
likely to wind up with another man who hits her, maybe even worse than the first? Where
does a woman go when she’s single with three kids and she lives in a society that makes her a
pariah for being a manless woman? Where she’s seen as a whore for doing that? Where does
she go? What does she do?
But I didn’t comprehend any of that at the time. I was a boy with a boy’s understanding