My Other Parents

Once a mum always a mum.

YouTube once used a parenting video to push one of its products. I had goosebumps when I saw the girl putting a baby in a crib.

I don’t know. It looked so sterile, so alone. I thought about my parents, grandparents on both sides, aunts, uncles and cousins who contributed to this end product, called Nonqaba. I particularly remember Phumzile, my cousin who taught me how to pack for college, tennis, chess and minerals, as in gold and diamonds. Her favourite earrings and necklaces were made from a stone called tiger eye.

That was a YouTube video so obviously, you can’t include everything. I guess it’s images like that, that make me back track to how I was brought up, or raised as Americans call it. My vocabulary expanded when I first landed in the U.S. for college. One of the words was co-parenting, where parents are long distance parents because of divorce or relationships gone sour.

That doesn’t apply to me because the culture afforded me many mothers and fathers. Dad taught me carpentry and painting, mama budgeting, malume (uncle) and grandpa taught us the written word because of daily and Sunday newspapers.

That YouTube video also reminded me of what one of Kardashians said one day. I don’t know which one but her daughter is Stormi. She said she had postpartum depression for three months after her second child, and survived it because of Google. I did not understand it because their reality show is about family. She could have asked her sisters, which means the reality show is not real.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.