![]() ![]() I didn’t want her to see the dejection in my eyes. We won’t stand in your way if this is going to make you happy.’ I said with my eyes meeting the floor we covered in carpet. I thought I would be my daughter’s anchor in that moment like my mother had been in mine. They are always changing, and yet always staying the same. That’s the thing with people, milestones and events. Have I made Gerda happy, and what about my children, are they happy? Are they successful? Have my children fulfilled all their childhood goals? People change from one generation to the next. It would be twenty years until we got our daughter back. With my silence I had passed down three life sentences. ![]() Only in retrospect when I look back at the events of the past decade and how they had shaped all three of our children’s futures did I see how selfish and arrogant I had been. She had given me everything of herself that she could as a wife, but I had not been completely open with her. Women who would stroke my ego given the chance. Indentured slave girls only there to make me tea, be my secretary, flirt with. Had not treated her like I had treated all the women in my life. I sometimes wish that I had listened more, praised her cooking skills (even though she burnt the pots more times than I could keep track of), and given more attention to my wife. Already he has two milk teeth which has everyone in a frenzy in the household. Baby Ethan is sleeping soundly between his parents on their double bed. Gerda’s own mother and father passed away when Abigail was still a baby. The house is quiet, haunted by ghosts from the past. She’s fifteen going on sixteen.’īack and forth my flashbacks go. But if I say that to her it will break her heart. I read her motivation application letter. Ambrose, tell me, what do you think I should do? We? Us? She’ll never be accepted. ‘Where will she stay? Where will she sleep? What will she eat every day for breakfast, lunch, and supper? Is she sleeping now I wonder? She just sits glued in front of that television all hours of the day and night. All three of our children had been conceived in love. I couldn’t make out her face but I knew it was shining full of love for me, and for our daughter. Her face pale in the moonlight, with aquiline features that her daughter Abigail had inherited from her but not her tennis legs or her mother’s love for that game. Gerda had more intuition, knowledge and insight into how females thought and bonded and suddenly at midnight she bloomed. I’ll kill myself if I don’t go to film school. I thought back to Abigail’s last words of the conversation the three of us had, mother, father, with their rebellious, fiercely intelligent, highly temperamental daughter. She wore a perplexed look on her face, chewing her bottom lip in pensive mode. ‘So she wants to run away to London now.’ Gerda sighed. ![]() Somehow, somewhere when she was fifteen years old she had written away to the London Film School. And we didn’t, couldn’t just let her throw her life away like that. She was brought up with norms and values. There were times when she stayed with her aunt in Johannesburg and we would be under the false impression that now everything would be all right again in her world. We had to do a lot of talking, and listening, and having more conversations behind a closed bedroom door at night to try and convince her to stay in school. She already knew that everything she was being taught came out of a textbook that supported the cause of a colonial master. A monumental waste of her time, she said. She hated every minute and every second of it. What could I say? How could I comfort her? She hated school. My darling, darling daughter was a manic depressive just like me. And there was a part of me that felt like a failure. Gerda had been prepared for an eventuality of this magnitude. The psychiatrist who studied in Vienna had wild hair like Einstein.
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