My amazing Gogo

Our family has been blessed to have to most amazing live-in domestic worker since just before I was born. Her name is Evelyn, but my brother and I have always known her as Gogo (the Zulu word for grandmother).

She first knocked on my parents' door when they were living in Ladysmith, a small town in KwaZulu-Natal. She was looking for work as her employer at the time was abusive. My mom couldn't believe how little money she was asking for to work fulltime, and how badly her employers treated her.

My parents took her in and were impressed with her work and willingness. When they moved back to Johannesburg a few years later (I was just a baby), she decided to move with them. While my mom worked fulltime at the Johanneburg General Hospital (she's a GP), Gogo looked after me, carrying me on her back like a Zulu baby and teaching me Zulu songs and stories. At one point, I knew more Zulu than I did English.

When my brother was born very, very sick, Gogo was invaluable in keeping things running at home while my parents stressed about operations and hospital bills. She would keep me entertained for hours, letting me "help" her with her cleaning the house while we sang together and she re-cleaned the bits I'd done ;-)

As my brother grew older, she did the same with him - carried him on her back, tickled him into fits of laughter and sang to him in Zulu. I remember him telling my mom when he was about four that he was going to marry Gogo when he grew up.

I have such fond memories of Gogo from different stages of my life - how she would laugh at my brother as he tried to learn to kick the ball and fell on his bum because he was kicking with both feet at the same time. She has the most awesome laugh.

She would break up our sibling fights and shout at us when we'd been naughty. We would cry for disappointing her and she would pick us up, hold us to her ample chest and hum soothing songs to us until we were smiling again.

She's a champion knitter and used to knit the squares for me that I was given as homework for school in about 10 minutes flat, or patiently unravel my uneven scarves to fix all the stitches I'd dropped. When my parents bought her a knitting machine for Christmas, she turned her talent into a business, knitting school jerseys and taking orders for all kinds of knitted wear.

Every birthday, my mom and I would get a hand-crocheted or knitted item. She worked a whole year to make a beautiful crocheted bed cover for my folks and a dining room table overlay for my mom's enormous 10-seater table that's been lugged from house to house with us for as long as I can remember. I had the most beautiful knitted clothes for my dolls from Gogo and my Gran, and even had miniature crocheted handbags that made me feel all grown up. I remember when we were renting a house in Dunvegan, Johannesburg, how she carefully built me a mini washing line with a few loose bricks and a string of purple yarn so that I could imitate her doing the laundry - washing my dolls' clothes and hanging them on the line to dry.

While my mom instilled a love of plants in me, Gogo taught me to value the veggie patch. At each house we lived in, she would cultivate potatoes, marogo (a plant that many people think of as a weed, which is a brilliant spinach substitute), mielies (corn) and whatever other veggies would grow well wherever we were living at the time (she moved with us from Ladysmith to Joburg to Durban to Pretoria... she said she'd move anywhere with my family except overseas).

As I grew older, I began to feel guilty about the fact that she was living so far from her own family (she and her husband split many years ago, but she has children and now granchildren to think about).

One day, I had decided to give her a pedicure and was in her flat painting her toenails when I brought it up. She laughed and said that she was very happy with us. I asked if she didn't miss her home. She said yes, sometimes she did, "But Mommy and Daddy (she always refers to my folks this way when she's talking to my brother or me) are good to me. I have a nice house here, friends, food, money... I get to send money home for my children and I go on holiday and see them. And when they get too much, I come back again." All of this punctuated with hearty laughter.

On occasion over the years, some of her children have visited us. They are all older than me, but I loved meeting them. I remember being amazed when Elsie, one of the older kids, made me a mini Zulu broom out of long grass prettily woven with coloured thread at the top and shyly handed it over. I treasured it for years.

Now that Gogo has two grandchildren, she makes sure to bring us new photos after every holiday to show us how they've grown. She is a good soul and the glue that keeps her family together. She organises jobs (often with my mom's help) for sons, nephews and cousins, mediates family arguments over the phone, picks up the slack in her lazy sister's family and oversees all finances. When her ancient grandmother died recently, she went home and put together the funeral and made sure everyone behaved themselves.

She must be in her early 60s now, although she looks like she's in her late 40s, and last year she told my mom she's building a new house in Ladysmith. We've visited her home before to drop off furniture my parents had given her, and at the time she had three long, skinny houses with sheet metal roofs and the traditional mud walls. But her new house is brick and mortar with roof tiles and framed windows and she's extremely proud of it. Her sister is so jealous that she's apparently stopped speaking to her.

Gogo has been wise with her money and savings, as well as clever in her entrepreneurial ventures, and she's now the talk of the neighbourhood in Ladysmith with her big, fancy house. I'm proud of her and how she has supported her family, but I'm also really sad now because she's retiring this month.

When she told my mom about her new house, she asked when she could retire. My mom said whenever she was ready, so Gogo asked if she could finish last year, work this year, and then when her house is ready, retire.

My parents don't actually need a fulltime or live-in maid anymore - I'm not at home (and I make a big part of the mess), my mom is no longer working and my brother will move out (into Gogo's flat) soon, so they were really keeping Gogo on until she was ready to finish up, so since Gogo's request they've starting getting things in order for her.

The new house in Ladysmith is done now, except the tiling. My parents have bought the tiles Gogo wanted as a Christmas and retirement present and put a large lump sum into a bank account for her pension. They said she can have all the furniture from the flat, so this weekend, my dad has hired a truck and we are going to load up the furniture (which is quite a bit - the double bed, microwave, lounge suite, mini-stove, two eating tables, six chairs, the coffee tables, bedside tables etc...) and drive through to Ladysmith on Saturday morning.

I'm getting all teary thinking about it. Gogo has been such a large part of my life since I was born and I can't bear the thought of her not being around to talk to, hug, swap veggies with, laugh at my brother's antics...

But I'm glad that I'll have the chance to see her new home in all its glory and to see her homecoming. And I know it's not goodbye. She has a cell phone so I can call her and we can SMS each other, and she has told me that when I have a baby she will come to stay with me for three weeks to look after me (but we all know that's not in my immediate plan).

But it's still the end of an era and it saddens me no end. I am thrilled for her that she will be able to retire and enjoy having her beautiful house where she can spoil her grandkids and plant another veggie garden, but I will miss her so, so much. This has come so much faster than I was expecting.

I am so blessed to have had her in my life for 25 years. I will miss seeing her so often.

Thoughts on a Friday

Thanks for all your comments on yesterday's post. TM is doing ok. I saw him briefly to drop his wallet and licence off, and he said he was meeting up with one of the senior guys in our church for a counselling session in the evening. He's handling everything well, although he's obviously upset that the pedestrian died on the way to the hospital.

For some reason that upset me too. I didn't know the man - I didn't even see his face at the scene (I stayed away from the huddle of paramedics around him). I couldn't figure out why it had upset me to the point that I was teary all day until I clicked... It's because this man died without dignity.

The last people to see him alive were the paramedics, the police and the tow truck drivers. He lay there in a puddle of his own blood, with no family or friends, letting go of life as the men around him (the tow truck drivers, actually) smoked and joked around.

That was truly sad. May his soul rest in peace.

I'm very glad that it's weekend. The week was rough even before the accident, although that really helped put things into perspective. My GHD breaking, being told by the guy who sold me my phone that he can't actually activate my contract for six months and the fact that our business lost a client this week suddenly don't seem like the end of the world anymore.

Wishing you all a weekend of appreciating the little things in life, celebrating beauty in the ordinary and being close (whether physically or in thought) to those you love.

Doing the right thing is hard

On Tuesday we had to do something very sad.

As I think I've mentioned, the abusive neighbours had two cats that they seemed to look after, once upon a time. Then they kicked them both out the house. The poor animals were so confused. And the one was really sick. As in it couldn't breathe properly, was covered in scabs, had puss streaming out of its nose and eyes and was a walking bag of bones. The neighbour man told me that it had FIV (the feline version of HIV), which meant that not only would it not get better, but it might infect other cats.

So, as you've probably guessed by now, we took the poor thing to the SPCA and had it put down. It was the right thing to do, but it was really, really hard. I sat in the boot of my hatchback car, with the cat in an old laundry hamper. It struggled to breathe so much that every breath sounded like someone in the last stages of emphysema. And yet, even as it sat there, pitifully spewing mucous out of every orifice (sorry, that was graphic), it tried to cuddle up to my hand to get some love. My heart broke.

I bawled my eyes out the entire way there. Not because the cat was being put down, but because there are people in the world like my neighbours who can beat their child black and blue in the face and let the family pet get the point where it is needlessly enduring ongoing suffering.

Surely when you have children or you take on a pet you sign up for responsibility?

Anyway, by the time we got to the SPCA I had mascara smeared all over my face and could barely get the words out to explain to the SPCA staff what the situation was. All I could hear was that poor cat's laboured breathing. The lady told me that there was nothing we could do; it was too late for him. I knew that, but it was still really hard to know that the cat's last moments were spent in pain that could have been avoided.

Ok... waiting for tears to clear... sorry. I'm starting to think that this post was a bad idea.

But my point... Last night, the horrible man comes to our flat and asks if we've seen the cat. Why? Certainly not because he cares for it. He shouted at our other neighbours for trying to feed it once. He wants to know where it is because it's his. He wants to know where it is for the same reason he doesn't want his kid to be taken away - becuase he has power and control over it.

He disgusts me.

The kid's grandparents have arranged to fly out from the Ukraine to some and get him. I'm not sure what the legal process is, but I can't wait until that child is out of the sphere of his influence.