My Son Got Into University Four Hundred Kilometres Away

The letter that changed the kitchen

The morning the acceptance came, I was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand, stirring pap for breakfast, and my son Tebogo came running down the passage in his socks, sliding the last two metres the way he used to when he was seven. He pushed the phone into my face so close I could not read a single word. I had to take it from him and hold it at arm's length, and even then my eyes were doing something strange, the letters swimming, because I already knew from his face what it said. He was in. First in our whole family. First cousin, first nephew, first grandchild, the first Maleka to be offered a place at a real university in a real city, and that city was four hundred kilometres away from our kitchen in Polokwane.

I put the spoon down. The pap caught a little on the bottom of the pot and I did not even care, and if you know me you know that is not a small thing. I hugged him and he let me, which for a nineteen year old boy is also not a small thing. And then, standing there in the steam, with his heart going like a taxi engine, my own heart did something I did not expect. It dropped. Because the very first thought that arrived, before pride, before phoning his grandmother, before anything, was this. Where is my child going to sleep.

A boy who had never boiled an egg

I want to be honest about the child I was sending. Tebogo is clever. He can take a whole argument apart and put it back together in a way that leaves you blinking. He reads things I do not understand and then explains them to me while I peel potatoes. But this same boy had never, not once in nineteen years, boiled an egg. I am not exaggerating for a nice story. He did not know that you salt the water. He did not know that the egg goes in before it is truly boiling or it cracks and leaks those little white feathers. He thought bread went stale because of the fridge, not the other way around. I had done everything for him, every plate, every washed shirt, because I thought that was love, and now I was seeing that maybe I had loved him into helplessness.

So the fear was not only about crime, although of course it was about crime too, this is South Africa and I am his mother and I watch the news. The fear was smaller and more daily than that. Who would notice if he did not eat. Who would hear him if he was sick at two in the morning. Who would tell him, gently, that you cannot leave a pot on the plate and walk away to answer your phone. These are the things that filled my head while everyone else was congratulating us.

The nights I spent on the phone

My sister in Johannesburg told me not to panic. Easy for her, her children were still small and still hers. But she also did the thing sisters do, which is that she started sending me links late at night, and I started sending them back, and soon my phone was a mess of half open pages about places for students to stay. I did not even know this was a whole world. In my day you found a room with a family from church, or you knew somebody who knew somebody, and that was the arrangement. Now there were buildings made only for young people at university, and I sat up in bed reading about them until the screen went dark from my own stillness.

Somewhere in all of that, a cousin of my late husband, a man I only see at funerals, phoned me out of nowhere. He had heard the news through the family telephone that needs no airtime. His own daughter had gone through this two years before, and he talked to me for an hour. He was the one who first said the words Student Accommodation to me as if they were an ordinary thing a mother should already know about, and I wrote it down on the back of an electricity slip because that was the closest paper. That slip lived in my handbag for a month. I looked at it at traffic lights.

What I actually needed to know

People kept talking to me about the course, the degree, the future, the career. And those things matter, I am not a foolish woman. But my questions were embarrassingly small next to all that big talk. Is there a wall around it. Is there a gate that actually closes and a person who actually watches it, not a chair where a guard is supposed to sit. If the power goes, and it will go, does the water still come out warm enough that my son does not stand shivering and decide to skip washing. Is it near enough to the campus that he is not walking a long dark road at night with a laptop bag that says please rob me.

I made a list, an honest mother's list, and it had nothing on it about interior decoration. Distance to the lecture halls. Distance to a shop where he could buy bread and airtime. A stove he could not blow up. Other young people around so he was not lonely, but not so much noise that he would never open a book. Somewhere on my search I read the words Student Apartments and I sat with that, imagining a small space that was only his, a door he locked himself, and I felt two things at once, which were relief and grief, because a locked door of his own is exactly what growing up is and exactly what I was not ready for.

The trip to see for myself

In the end I did what my mother would have done. I got in the car. I was not going to send my only son to a place I had only seen on a telephone. We drove the four hundred kilometres with a cooler box of food between his feet and the radio too loud so we did not have to talk about the size of the thing we were doing. I cried once, quietly, at a petrol station outside Mokopane while he was inside buying a cooldrink, and I fixed my face before he came back. That is a skill they do not teach you and nobody warns you about, the fixing of the face.

We looked at more than one place. Some I crossed off before I had finished walking through the door, because a mother knows in her stomach. But I stood in the courtyard of one of them, watching students walk past with their bags and their laughing, ordinary young people getting on with their ordinary young lives, and something in me let go just a little. This was simply how families all over the country were sending their children now. Finding good, safe Student Accommodation in South Africa was not some strange thing only rich people did. It was the same worry, multiplied by thousands of mothers, each one with her own version of my electricity slip in her handbag.

Leaving him

I taught him to boil an egg the week before he left. We stood at the stove together and I made him do it three times, and he laughed at me and I pretended to laugh too. I wrote instructions on the inside of a cupboard, how long for rice, how you know the chicken is done, the number for his aunt, the number for me twice in case he lost the first one. On the day, I unpacked his few boxes into that small room, made his bed with sheets from home so it would smell like us for a night or two, and then there was nothing left to arrange and no more reason to stay.

I drove back the four hundred kilometres alone. The cooler box was empty on the seat where he had been. And I thought, the whole way home, that being a mother is teaching a child everything, right down to an egg, so that one day he can stand in a kitchen you will never cook in and feed himself, and be safe, and be fine, and not need you. It is the cruellest good thing I have ever done. He phoned me that first night to say the egg came out perfect. I sat in my quiet kitchen in Polokwane and I was so proud I could hardly breathe.