Shine, my child; I have your back

The room was filled with an eerie silence when a young man said: “I fail to understand the excitement of parents over something as measly as Grade 1. Matric; that’s what will get me excited.”

If murder was not a criminal offence, the women in that room would have crossed a line…

These are big moments for us. These are milestones we will continue to celebrate.

We remain mothers through good and bad.

And the bad sometimes gets to us… Some fear their children may not have the quality of life they have become accustomed and continue to sleep right next to their abusers.

We cry ourselves to sleep, but we wake up each day ready to face the world all over again – for our children.

Grandparents have been forced out of retirement by the absence of active father figures. They raised men, changed their nappies – and now they are changing their grandchildren’s nappies as they have had to become father figures.

Parental responsibilities have become an optional extra nowadays. The norms and standards of our generation have given rise to a number of fatherless children.

A few days ago, an acquaintance of ours announced that in nine months’ time he would be welcoming the arrival of a baby with his girlfriend. While most of us congratulated him, one person asked how could he be excited by the news that he would soon be paying maintenance.

Is that what parenting has come down to for men? Sending a little brown envelope to your child or pressing a few keys on the keyboard and authorising a money transfer into an overworked and exhausted mother’s account?

We stay mothers, believing our children will go further than the matric because we invested in this milestone. Mothers fear teenage pregnancies that may derail the completion of studies.

Yes, our fears are plenty but our determination far greater: we are mothers, we are parents who dare to dream and believe!

When we celebrate our children’s milestones, we remember the struggles we had to overcome – this, for us, is huge.

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