She earned her nickname from the gritty and resourceful lead character in The Shawshank Redemption, and when the crunch came and her family were under threat, she didn’t hesitate to put her own bold plan into action
When I look back at the tough situations I’ve experienced, there is one strong thread that runs through them all. Grit and determination.
When I share my story, I always get the “wow, you’re really brave” and “you’re amazing for surviving that and thriving”. I don’t always feel brave or amazing, but one thing I know for sure is that I am determined. And I know exactly where I get it from.
My family structure is definitely a matriarchy. If it were not for the women who shaped me and showed me how to overcome difficulties the way they did, I wouldn’t be half as resilient as I’ve been.
Granny taught her daughters and granddaughters many valuable lessons, but the best and most enduring lesson, for me, anyway, comes from Shanks, my favourite 70-year-old.
Like most people of her gender, generation and socio-economic background, Shanks had a hard life. Left school before she reached high school, as she had to work to help the family keep the lights on. Pregnant at 18 and marrying the father of that child, because of societal and religious pressure.
Two years later, she was 20, with two children under two and a husband who used her as a punching bag. It was a horrible situation, and she was trapped in it.
When she turned 21, she made a decision that would later earn her her nickname. Shanks is my favourite aunt. Her nickname comes from The Shawshank Redemption. Just like the lead character, Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, my aunt showed tremendous grit and determination to get herself out of her situation.
When she realised the cards were stacked against her, instead of giving up and slowly dying, she set a plan in motion that is so epic, it’s still the favourite memory at most of our family gatherings.
At the age of 23, Shanks moved into her own council rental house with her two kids, minus her loser husband. Because on her 21st birthday, she made a life-changing decision. She no longer wanted to be with a part-time husband who terrified and physically abused her and the kids.
She was going to do whatever it took to leave him, without him killing her, as he said he would if she ever tried to leave him.
She had a day job and freelanced some evenings for extra money. Her epic plan was to save all the night shift money and slowly move out of her house, without her brutal husband noticing.
It took her two years to save up enough and get everything she needed from her marital home. She took cups, plates, cutlery, clothes, linen and even small décor items out of the house, one by one, and stashed them at her neighbour’s house. If her husband noticed, she would blame breakages or people borrowing items without returning them.
On the morning of her final day in her marital home, she was a ball of nerves. She knew that if her husband caught wind of her plan, she would be as good as dead. When her husband looked for her purse in her cupboard and noticed that most of her clothes were missing, she was sure her time was up.
To this day she says she doesn’t know how and where her answer came from, but she remembers a calmness washing over her and her reply was another gem: Oh they’re in the wash, she said.
She was sure she was bust at that moment and he was going to lock her in and beat her to death for trying to leave him. But mercifully, he was preoccupied with a strike at work and she could breathe a sigh of relief.
When the bakkie came to pick up her bags and suitcases from her neighbour’s house, she was drinking tea with her husband and looking out the lounge window, listening to his commentary about how it looks like the neighbour is leaving her husband, as her and the kids were packing bags and suitcases on a bakkie!
Little did he know that he was watching the final stages of his wife’s plan in action. It was the last time she would be in that house.
Thanks to her working and saving her night shift money, she was able to qualify for a two-bedroom council rental. Although she had precious little, sweet Shanks didn’t give a hoot about people laughing at her swopping a home where she had a nice bedroom with a matching headboard, cupboards, pedestal and bed stands, for sleeping on a double mattress with her four-year-old and two-year-old.
My queen used the same determination to build up that council house into something similar to what she had before, minus the brutal husband. The baby she had at 19 is married and a granny herself. She lives in England, so Shanks travels between summers.
She says she never wants to experience winter again, so her life is basically one long summer vacay spread over two hemispheres.
I’m happy to have been through Granny and Shanks’s school of life lessons. These wise old birds taught me everything I know about being a human and especially a woman. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve channelled my inner Granny or Shanks when I faced difficult situations.
The third generation of the family jokes that we should get WWSD (What Would Shanks Do) bracelets to remind us of the epic line of women we come from, and how nothing should and could defeat us.
Shanks was also instrumental in starting our family’s come-back-home fund, to allow abused women to be in a position to leave their partners. She was adamant that no other woman in our family would ever be in the situation she was in.
I think this is probably for the best as I don’t think our family will be lucky enough to have another Shanks. She did the hard work and laid the foundation of our “mad money” fund. Here’s to Shanks and all women. May we all have her determination to save ourselves and others like us.
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