In South Africa, the average post-rehabilitation life expectancy for someone who survives a traumatic spinal cord injury is 2 years. That means that, in this country, if you break your neck, and live with a severe disability as a result, chances are you will die within 2 years of your injury. The injury itself won’t… Read More What we owe each other, or a note to Premier Helen Zille
There’s a striking moment about 20 minutes into Jennifer Brea‘s affecting film about her own and countless others’ struggle with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME, more commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome). She is bedridden and filming herself as she reflects on what it means to inhabit this new, limiting body, and the limited life it affords… Read More Their Bodies, Their Selves
In the end, we – or I – caved. My son was measuring big, huge, large, especially his head. There was no way I was even going to try to push him out. Yes, I carry that shame. And I still feel the need to justify it. But his head was huge, look at him,… Read More A Birth Story
I’m a middle class black person who is married to a white person and who happens to live in a hopelessly unintegrated city (Cape Town). It should therefore not surprise you to learn, reader, that I am often The Only Black Person in the Room. It doesn’t often surprise me much, having lived… Read More Obliterated Places
Somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that there will be absolutely no zen-ning this out. All of the wisdom, all of the stuff I’m reading, all the message boards I’m on, all the conversations with our doctors – I mean every thing – tells us to just relax. Rome wasn’t built in… Read More Myth Busting the Baby Dreaming
“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love” Leonard Cohen I’ve been trying to figure out when to write about this. After all the treatments and poking and prodding is done, and the losses have been endured, and we have what we want –… Read More Pre-baby Body
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Joan Didion “Writers are always selling someone out.” Joan Didion David Sedaris published the most beautiful essay on the death of his youngest sister, Tiffany, and how her… Read More Our writing, our selves: Meditations on the ethics of writing
This is my ‘normal’ You get used to the staring. When my husband and I first started dating, the staring bothered me. Wherever we went, people would gape at us, openly unashamedly, wearing all of their (offensive) questions on their faces. At first, I would fly into impotent rages and rant on and on… Read More The New Normal, or what a family looks like
By some strange coincidence, in the 6 months preceding my aunt’s death I had worked my way through three seminal ‘grief narratives’. I have half-joked to friends that I was sort of ‘studying up’, without knowing it, in preparation for what was to come. There really is no preparing for it, though. The best… Read More The Grief Book Club
One of the weirder things about grief is that all of the cliches – the ones you’ve seen play out on TV shows or movies, the ones you’ve read about it in books by more sophisticated authors who write in ways that mask the pallid clicheness – are true. It all comes to life… Read More On Grief
Rumbi Writes 
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