Author: Rumbi Goredema Görgens

Rumbi is a Zimbabwean-born South African-based feminist author. Her writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Vela Magazine, and on FeministsSA.com and MyFirstTimeSA.com. She has worked with various South African civil society organisations, including Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust. In her spare time, Rumbi enjoys blogging, watching mind-numbing reality TV, and, occasionally, tweeting.

Reading the Score

At the end of the day, an isolating experience like IVF needs to be witnessed. Even when it goes well. You need people who see you to see that experience. It can be a hard ask when the outcome of the experience is a loved and cherished child. How do you talk about the regret and trauma without somehow tainting your motherhood experience by association? I don’t have an answer, but I am almost certain that not talking about it isn’t it. So it’s important to hear these stories. To witness. … Read More Reading the Score

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An Ode to this Body

PMDD is agony. It is made even more agonising by the lack of real scientific curiosity about it. All of the strategies I have found to cope have been developed by women who got tired of waiting for someone to save them, and who realised that maybe noone ever will. So they delved into the unknown depths of their bodies and their psyches and stitched together wisdom from allopathy, homeopathy and everything in-between. It’s not a science but it is enough. The only catch is that fellow PMDD warriors have to be willing to stay in our bodies. Especially when it is the least comfortable place in which to live. We have to stay, quiet and restive, listening to the responses to all the efforts we put into feeling some relief.

A strange blessing slipped in with the curse of medical misogyny. For now, it will have to do.… Read More An Ode to this Body

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The Choice

I’ll be honest: since I became a mom myself, I have found that Mother’s Day is not my fave. It stands as an annual reminder of how little has changed for mothers, and how they are still expected to hold up half the sky without support, taking comfort only in flowers and cards and burnt toast. Don’t get me wrong – I love being a mom. My children are the loves of my various lives. But I am acutely aware of all of the ways in which motherhood comes eas(ier) to me because of my privilege. And, in spite of that, it is still enormously difficult.… Read More The Choice

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Mother-Friendly

Maybe it’s the spirit of tough love tacitly encouraged by the BFHI. Maybe it’s the health system still recovering from the damage wrought by COVID-19. In this story, I saw a little bit of my own lonely, isolated moments of motherhood reflected. A combination of a system that assumes there is a singular way to teach mothers to feed their children, and a society that expects so much of mothers and asks that we bear the burden of tasks in private, in silence. … Read More Mother-Friendly

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On Working Without Guarantees and the Necessary Grief of Change Work

As esoteric as this all seems, it is much easier than a world in which we are tallying workshops held, and numbers of attendees, and spend on office stationery. It brings to bear the truth that those of us committed to development work know: this is heart work. We are in it because we are or want desperately to be helpers. Our hearts are in it. It makes sense that there will be heartache and grief involved. By facing this, and being honest with ourselves and one another, we perhaps give ourselves a real shot at being part of radical change.… Read More On Working Without Guarantees and the Necessary Grief of Change Work

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