Day 102

Workers at a railroad crossing in South Africa.

Up to the age of about 13 or 14, growing up in apartheid South Africa, just as I had no inkling of a vast multitude of black people living just a few miles away from us, I also had little knowledge of sexual matters of any form , even though I was an incredibly well-read child.  After all, sanctions had largely cut us off from the rest of the world, we had no television, and we saw about 2 movies a year, the most memorable up until then having been Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music! 

So we really had a long and happy childhood, climbing trees, learning embroidery and sewing, riding bikes all over our suburb, devouring books, walking (together or alone), playing cricket with our cousins, playing day-long imaginary games, painting and drawing, hanging out as a great laughing gang of neighbourhood children, discovering our strengths and our fears, our abilities and our loves.  And our mothers had no idea where we were or what we were up to most of the time, as long as we came home for meals! 

Such a far remove from my children's lives, both in South Africa and here in America.  We were the paranoid mothers, the ones whose children might be kidnapped at any time by one or other evil faction in South Africa.  When Jess was 9, she had to walk home alone from school one day, a distance of about a km, and when she got home she told me that she had devised a scheme for each section of her journey home, in case of attack.  "If someone attacked me on Somerset Street, I would run back to school.  If someone attacked me near Heunis (Building contractors), I would run into the offices, if someone attacked me up Glanville street, I would run to the house on the corner (where an old lady lived), and if someone attacked me in Cross Street, I would run home as fast as I could!"  I was amazed that she would perceive such danger, (we had tried to save them from much of what was happening) and saddened that my little daughter had planned her way home to such a degree of fear.

And all these thoughts have come about about from listening today to the children I am teaching who are aged 11 and up, and every one of them is a completely different child from the children with whom I grew up.  These youngsters were born with a tv remote in one hand and a computer mouse in the other.  They are ferried from one violin lesson to the next soccer practice.  They know which college they will be attending and what they are expected to become.  They are constantly adapting to and accommodating the ever-changing technology which is shifting the very bedrock of our lives in new ways every few months.  They have all watched simulated sex in movies, and simulated violence of a kind I could not even begin to imagine at the same age.  Sometimes it seems as though they have lost their innocence almost before they even had it.

My portrait today is a quick quick drawing, because I am so tired tonight, of that wonderful childhood in Cape Town, and yes, I know I was a privileged white child, but I didn't choose to be that, it was just my life at the time, and it was lovely to me then, in that very innocence of which I have written.