Acacia: Acacia

Chapter 7: A skein of lies

- 35 I ’m not sure why, but that Christmas I thought of my father more than I had ever before. He had never been a part of my life.And yet, somehow, he remained an integral part of it. His absence was his presence. His not being there was always with me, defining me in an intangible and nebulous, but very real way. In retrospect, I think it was Marcus and Rebekah’s wedding that nudged thoughts of my father to the surface. It is a strange and rather disconcerting point in your life when friends the same age as you start to marry and have their own families. I remember thinking as I sat in the synagogue next toTaylor, hopelessly trying not to giggle at him in a yarmulke, that I was nowhere near “old enough” to get married.And yet I was. Or at least, I could be. Interesting that it had never come up withTony in the same way.With him, I had just known that I couldn’t marry him in particular. I had never really given much thought to the institution of marriage as a whole and what it would be like for me to be a wife . My first conscious thought, at Marcus and Rebekah’s wedding, that I was a grown woman with the potential of being a wife and a mother terrified me.And, lo and behold, my fears took the form of the absentee man in my life. I suspect that my father fell in love with my mother largely because she was African. Just a theory, of course. It’s not like I knew the man.And I was not brazen enough to broach the subject, which I knew had broken Mum’s heart. - 36 My father was only partly right about her. Partly. She was in fact born and raised under African skies by the proudest of Zimbabweans. But she was not the kind ofAfrican he knew – or expected her to be. Raised by parents devoted to global health care and education, even before becoming a pre-med student at Syracuse, my Caucasian-American father had travelled to disadvantaged communities, particularly in East Africa, working alongside his father and mother in rural clinics and schools. He understood the ways of sun-scorched lands, burdened with hunger and disease. His family had gone to Africa to heal and to teach. He found that inAfrica he had learned. Instead of changingAfrica,Africa had changed him. It was his ache for Africa, and for its people who were so much a part of his childhood, that made him ache for Mum.When he met her, in the dreary winter of their junior year at Syracuse, she became hisAfrica. His sunshine amidst the snow. He imagined her embodying everything he loved of that distant land he missed, and he was captivated. He assumed he knew her, understood her, because he was familiar with the beaten paths of the savanna. But Africa, like all other places, has many faces. He knew only one of its faces.And that face was not my mother’s. From the snippets I gathered of my parents’ relationship, they had been partners. Equally inspiring confidence and strength in each other. One to be a doctor and the other a lawyer. Challenging each other to success and renown. But it was a lie.They could not be equals and reside under the same roof, let alone share the same bed. Mum’s brilliance intimidated my father and he ended up despising her for the very reasons he had been attracted to her. When they were courting, he had dizzily admired that she was a successful African woman who was going to take the world of corporate law by storm. But in his mind and experience, to be an African wife meant to toil in the shadow of your husband. Devoting your every breath to making it easy, comfortable, for him to shine his light. My father had learned many lessons in the rural plains of Africa, but - 37 he missed perhaps its most profound teaching. The silent yet eloquent instruction of the woman who can balance the world on her head, with a baby strapped to her back, and three other infants tugging at her hems. Everyday she masters the acrobatics of life, of womanhood, a blaze of glory burning inside her that nobody sees.A blinding light...