Preparing for 40...

I don’t really know what preparation means in the broader scheme that is life anymore. Wherever I look I see hard things, experience tough situations, engage overworked and exhausted people or try to make sense of what I now see as the terribly apparent death-scapes of our lives.

The kids have been sick again…it seems everyone is. And I’ve been doing lots of different things, much of these things and opportunities fun and joyful and expansive. I still live in Johannesburg but am often happy to live in the fantasy of what life might look like somewhere else, and while I’ll miss our very special community here, I worry, increasingly more, that perhaps even they are so exhausted and unable to find the time to spend quality time. I’m ready to relinquish control and hope - maybe we all see more of each other in a few years, on holidays or however…

but today is more about me - a reflection on the good and the not so good and the difficulties of making decisions and dealing with the ramifications and then problem solving some more without losing heart and hope.

Today I went to Charlotte Maxeke Hospital in Parktown - I had had a couple of very good and useful conversations with a dentist there who I was pleasantly surprised was warm and kind when I said I had to stop treatment privately but really needed something fixed. He said to stop by. Today was the day I’d set aside for this trip but I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready with enough armour for my middle class dilemmas and my soft life feelings… I spent 2 hours in a waiting room berating myself and wondering why the people who teamed the space were treated so, well, as though they were not human. Zombie video games came to mind as I cringed a little - people with bumps, scratches, injuries, blood - lots of it… small children with eye liner and fathers turned away by bored security guards. It made me wonder about how I speak to people - I make assumptions about their humanity, about their right to be in the world, their right to take up space, when actually they can’t even fathom what on earth I am speaking about. Doctors, nurses, administrative staff at the hospital barked at these people… and at me… I recoil: ‘ja baas, nee baas’ style…’ and had a flashback of the sweet first year student who was in my office yesterday. As I listened to her, first apologising for asking about her essay, then apologising for not understanding, I was reminded of something a former elite school principal had once said to me. But it struck me then, as it struck me today - she was apologising for believing she deserved more. He (the principal_ had said that one of the downfalls of ‘fancy’ private school education was that often these kids were shocked by the real world out there when they got to university, their middle class, hyper privileged bubbles having cushioned them for so long, immediately crushed and eliminated - there’s that gaming imagery again. She was, ironically, asking that her entitlement be overlooked and she made physical gestures suggesting such. She was polite and sweet - just like me today. But the people there seemed to smell the privilege and I, a little like my sweet student, had nowhere to hide so, I wept. I sat next to the puke stained chair because when I tried to sit in another row the admin ladies insisted I move. Not only could they smell the privilege - they had questions they couldn’t voice - why are you here?

I then thought to move to the opposite row, where the dried blood stained floor seemed more appealing but the stench of the man who was in blood stained hospital wear - for an injury that was bleeding from his legs (I don’t want to know) - was so overwhelming I eventually decided to just stand. I stood and cried and people watched the weird girl in the corner of the room. I can’t tell you exactly why I cried - I was mortified I couldn’t stop - but my mother came up strongly. I could see her face from when I frequented Groote Schuur for 6 months of chemotherapy. She would often say some quite hectic things, like ‘don’t go to the toilet here…’ *Very hard when you have all those liquid bags being put into you. One of my greatest traumas is the red wee from one of the bags..* Or she’d say, ‘keep your mouth closed’. This was pre-COVID times and her logic was that you don’t want germs getting in your mouth. Today, I watched the hospital staff all in masks and berated myself for not having worn one myself. I realised today that she was concerned that poverty or precarity alongside ill health - as is so blatant in public health facilities - is difficult to navigate and nobody really wants that. If nothing else, please don’t have to die in a public hospital, she has said throughout our lives. It’s not comfortable, it’s not pretty, it’s not easy. Doctors and nurses looked upon these people, me included, with a hardness - very far from care and, a little like mothers behave sometimes, know that they’re doing the best they can but are so overwhelmed and strung out, that there’s just no room it seems for bedside manner, let alone dignified engagements, respectful talk and the like. I heard the person in the payment office try to convey an amount to someone who did not understand him about 3 times in my short stint in the 3x5 room. I also had these glimpses of having attended a very beautiful, elite school’s concert last week and thought about how I might as well have been on another planet that night versus this moment.

I stood there, clutching my laptop bag like an idiot, crying and observing the chain around an inmate’s ankles, and waited obediently for my turn.

I waited and waited. I knew I had to wait.

When I finally got to the dentist’s chair nobody was able to help me. The nice man who is now in my whatsapps was in meetings and couldn’t assist. He had said not to see orthodontists but at the first site of my issue the dentists called an orthodontist and I felt my heart pummel in my chest…

I don’t know what I expect from writing down this story and sharing it with you today… this is not a mother story but I felt it somehow important because what got me crying was walking down a long corridor and observing, well, hearing all the crying new borns who had been discharged this morning. They - big blankets, no visible little person and their mothers - slow moving women holding their backs - were obvious to me, like like little beacons of familiar. But the sounds and these women were deeply triggering. Was it a bad idea to have come while on my period??There were no cars at the end of the long corridor, at the exit, waiting for them, I thought to myself. There was no security guard waiting to inspect the car seat fit for the car before leaving the ward. Nope. Only the same pale guy in the wheelchair with a bleeding ankle or foot or something dripping blood who was there when I arrived and who was still there 2 hours later when I left… welcome to the world, bÉbÉ!

The overwhelming message - this is life too and there’s beauty and joy in it but it’s miles from the middle class comforts and daily experiences I and my children somehow think are normal… my mother knows this dual world experience and her fear of a return to it, well, ever, is enough to keep her well in check to be measured enough to sustain the things she has, the life she has and to abstain from certain commodities, objects, trips, even feelings - never too much, never too little and a bit of sacrifice in the mix. I don’t know if I’ll ever get this right. Or should I even?

I wanted to get the little knobs off my teeth because I’m 3 months from turning 40 and I’m starting to ready myself. And this experience is showing me that there’s so so much to come and much of it will be nothing like i imagined… much of it is completely and utterly unpreparable… (I know that’s not a word). And I am both grateful and deeply saddened by what this life is and how it can be so many different things to so many different people.

But the kids are ok.