Having been away from home now for 8 months my excitement
kept me awake the week before my parents and sister arrived here at Cadorna station, and when they arrived it
felt like have never been away from them. So on that excited state we parted
from Milan central station for a trip starting in Tuscany, making a turn in the
Alps and ending in Milan.
Going on holiday together as a family is not something new
to me. This is one of the important things my father worked into our years
since I’ve been a child. It was not necessarily anything luxurious yet these
childhood travels through South African landscaped lies embedded in my mind as
joyful childhood memories. However I
have not travelled with my parents in years, and I’ve never travelled with them
as a grown-up. With my new perspective of travel and perhaps this part of growing older it made me look at my parents in a different
way, it was sometimes frustrating but mostly quite entertaining, and somehow illuminating in who I am.
My mother is a lady. I have never heard her utter a crude
word in my life, never heard her shout and she always drinks her tea from a
pot. When we have guests things are
served properly and when it is a special occasion the good silver is taken
out. She is also very shy and sometimes
it seems has this thing where she needs the confirmation of others to make a
choice, but at the same time she has very strict ideas of what is wrong and
right, even though she would never impose it on someone. My mother has been
brought up to be completely proper. She was raised in the height of Afrikaner
nationalism in Pretoria, in the times when children must be seen and not heard,
where women got bad reputations for “promiscuity” and where most things they
saw were under the conservative censorship of the then government**. On top of that they were raised in kind of high society Pretoria of those
days, my grandmother have always been the perfect host and was featured
sometimes in the society pages for the dresses she wore to functions. This
makes my mother often care too much of what other people think.
The problem is this, my uncle always said to me that in my
case the apple falls very far from the tree; I am not shy, much more flexible
on my ideas and I am definitely not as conservative. Yet the older I get, the
more I am aware of my complete resemblance to my mother, I talk like her, I
look like her, I tend to express anger like her and I have inherited al lot of
the same insecurities. This was a scary thought for me at first, yet once I
observed the situation more closely I realised that it’s also from her which I’ve
gotten that thing which has allowed me to have a life full of amazing friendships. It is from her that I
learnt to be soft, to be loyal, paying attention to my friends, baking cookies
for everyone for no reason, to keep the peace, be diplomatic and that clean
sheets and a well made bed is the best thing in the world, and that little
things count. These qualities are which made
her a wonderful mother. She always made sure I had tissues on me, a habit I
still have now and I am lucky for, one always need those at some point. It is she who made me tea every afternoon
after school, who put flowers on my bedside table when I came to visit from
university and who listened to me moan for hours about the same topic on
boyfriends that broke my heart. She
always has time for people and it is something that I have inherited that I
hope I will never lose.
