Love is a language that ignites the spark of memory.
I recently stumbled upon some magical writing by the Afrikaans writer, Carina Stander.
She was greeting her elderly parents who died within days of each other because of COVID complications.
Her farewell message paid a tender tribute to their devoted love for each other, their kids, and eventually their grandkids.
Their love sounded like such an affectionate love story, it made me catch my breath, and I had a little sob in my car while waiting on my turn to see my therapist.
And I suppose because I know my love story with my husband will most probably not reach the elderly stage because of his rare disease, it hit every raw nerve.
Her take on her parents’ and family’s love story was an exquisite piece of writing. You could feel the enduring love between this man and woman. Teen me would’ve loved to grow up in their house.
Their love felt consistent, generous, tolerant, and accepting.
As I stepped into my therapist’s room, I was ‘deep in my feelings’ as the millennials like to say.
With this lovely piece of writing still gently floating about in my head, I used it as my ‘what-made-you-smile-this-week’ ice breaker.
Without skipping a beat, I related the Afrikaans story to her. In Afrikaans.
Up until then, our therapy language was English. And on that day, we switched to Afrikaans.
My therapist consults in English and Afrikaans, and she was amazed to hear me speak Afrikaans so fluently.
She was intrigued, so I told her the story of how my mother changed my mother tongue the year I turned 5.
I was born into an Afrikaans family, and raised Afrikaans until the age of 5, when my middle sister was born – and then things slowly changed.
My sister and I were born in two of the most volatile years in South African history.
I was born in May 1976, with riots, teargas, and rubber bullets flying overhead during my first weeks. and my sister was born in 1981 with bombs exploding left and right.
It is against this volatile backdrop that my mother decided to switch our home language to English.
She unfortunately died in 1985, before I started wondering about the ‘why’ of her decision.
What I do know is that she worked for a Jewish jeweller and later cleaned fancy hotels, so there might have been some influence there to speak the international language of business.
But I will never know her motivation.
Growing up on the Cape Flats, the English vs Afrikaans rivalry was quite pronounced, sometimes downright ‘rof en ombeskof’. And I was always caught in the middle.
Not good enough for the English kids as I was in an Afrikaans class and used by the Afrikaans kids if they wanted to declare their love to an English crush or threaten an English foe.
Now, 40 years later, I find myself yearning to speak Afrikaans again. I try to speak it as much as I can with my Afrikaans friends and colleagues.
My son and husband speak limited Afrikaans with heavy English accents, so I’m quite starved of Afrikaans conversation at home.
But some of my best friends are Afrikaans, and I chat away to them on WhatsApp.
Once I started speaking Afrikaans regularly, I also noticed a strange, magical turn of events in my dreams.
I know this will sound far out, but my mom has started visiting my dreams. I’m 45 this year, and since my mom died when I was just 9, I was not able to dream about her.
I remember trying so hard to see her in my dreams or to go looking for her.
I was aware of her presence in some dreams, but she was always in another room or obscured by a wall or object so I just could not see her.
But she has been appearing in my dreams way more regularly now and guess what? We speak Afrikaans, like our earliest conversations I remember before my sister was born.
It has been such a treat to speak my first mother tongue with my beautiful ‘mammie’ and even my beloved ‘ouma’ in my dreams.
I’ve always referred to my granny as ‘ouma’ whenever I wrote about her, and my editors always changed it to granny, which just doesn’t feel like her. She wasn’t a granny, she was ‘ouma’, a formidable lioness.
It’s actually bittersweet (and more therapy fodder) how my mom changing our mother tongue and her subsequent death shortly after, meant that I could not dream about her for 36 years.
And that an Afrikaans obituary I stumbled upon touched me so deeply that I now dream in Afrikaans. And the best of all? Me falling in love with my mother tongue again, made my ‘mammie’ visit me in my dreams again.
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