I wrote this exactly 3 years ago, when my son was 5 months old, and I’d been back at work for less than a month. The seasons have turned many times since that difficult and wonderful one. I left the workplace, then returned on flexible, part-time terms, then returned again, full-time. My son is building… Read More Motherhood and Grief
I am vaguely acquainted with the work of Harris Wittels, a comedic genius who died of a heroin overdose in 2015. I dabbled in a bit of Parks and Recreation, and I’ve heard (of the) term ‘humblebrag‘, which he coined. Some of my favorite off-colour and silly jokes from TV shows and general pop culture… Read More Horrible, Wonderful Things: Notes on Bereavement
Our national fixation with the hero(ine), the big (wo)man around whom a narrative of resilience and hope can be built is never more obsessive than when it is regarding former president Nelson Mandela. He has always been more myth than man. When he disappeared from public sight in 1964, and the apartheid state proceeded with… Read More Let’s Cancel Mandela Day
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
Some of my favourite stories contain an uncontested truth we hold about motherhood: Mothers are at their best when they are well and whole. Broken mothers, mothers whose pathologies loom large in their lives and, by extension, the lives of their families, are bad news. They lead to fractured adolescence (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants),… Read More Motherhood and Madness
As Day Zero – the day when the taps in Cape Town will run dry – approaches at certain speed, I find myself increasingly worried and confused. Worried for obvious reasons. Confused and confounded by the clamour and chaos of our collective responses to this crisis. Cape Town is hardly the first city in the… Read More Troubled Water
There’s a clip from an episode of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show, Master of None, that I like to use when I’m teaching. It depicts his character at a party with friends and co-workers. A random guy approaches one of the party, a black woman, and tries to buy her drink. She politely declines. Afterwards, while she’s walking… Read More Master of Some
When I was 8-years-old, I had a friend named Jade. Jade lived next door and was an only child to adoring, attentive parents. I was a year or so older than her and we went to different schools, but we bonded over our shared admiration for her impressive suite of Barbies. Her parents weren’t crazy… Read More Heavy Hangs the Head
I come from a long line of women who get shit done. My mother’s mother, Emma, was a force unto herself. After her husband became blind, she went to work as nurse, so that she could support him and her four girls. She learnt to drive, becoming the first woman in her small town to… Read More On leaning in to the moment
Motherhood is hard. Make no mistake; this is a truth universally acknowledged amongst mothers of all stripes. Regardless of the philosophies of motherhood to which you subscribe, or the mama-circles in which you move, no other mother will question the enormity of the task to which you have committed. As feminist author Jessica Valenti puts… Read More Crazy Like a Mother
Rumbi Writes 
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