The City I Had Only Ever Driven Through on the Way to Somewhere Else

The job I nearly said no to

I was managing a clothing store in a small town for most of my thirties, a steady job in a quiet place, raising my daughter on my own after her father and I went our separate ways when she was four. It was a good enough life, if a small one, and I had more or less stopped expecting it to get bigger. So when the company offered me a regional management role, a real step up, more money, more responsibility, a chance to finally get ahead, I should have been thrilled. Instead I felt something close to panic, because the role was based in Johannesburg, and Johannesburg was the one place in the country I had been raised, my whole life, to be afraid of.

I had only ever driven through it, honestly. On the way to somewhere else, windows up, doors locked, following the directions my mother's voice in my head gave me, which were essentially do not stop and do not look at anyone. Everyone I knew had a story, or a story of a story, and the city in my imagination was a single flat sheet of danger. The idea of not just visiting it but living in it, with my eleven-year-old daughter, with no family nearby, no safety net, was almost enough to make me turn the promotion down. I came very close. What stopped me was my daughter herself, who, when I told her about it in a careful voice expecting her to be frightened too, got excited. She wanted the city. She saw an adventure where I saw a threat, and I did not want my fear to become her ceiling.

What I actually needed, underneath the fear

So I said yes, and then I had to confront the practical problem that my fear had been hiding behind, which was where on earth we were going to live. I started the search the way I imagine a lot of people from small towns start it, which is with a map of a city I did not understand and a long list of requirements driven mostly by anxiety.

When I sat down and was honest with myself about what we truly needed, the list was actually quite clear. It had to be safe, properly safe, the kind of safe where I could let my daughter come home from school and be in the flat alone for an hour before I got back from work without my stomach being in a knot. It had to be somewhere she could get to a decent school without a long and complicated journey, because I would be working long retail hours and could not always drive her. It needed to be near enough to transport that I was not spending my whole new salary and half my life sitting in traffic. And it had to be something I could actually afford on my own, because there was no second income and no one to fall back on. A single mother's budget has no slack in it, and I knew that one bad financial decision in an expensive city could undo everything the promotion was supposed to give us.

That was a lot of boxes to tick, and my early searches were discouraging, because I kept finding places that ticked one or two and failed the rest. Safe but unaffordable. Affordable but somewhere my every instinct told me not to take a child. Nice but an hour from anything.

Learning the city I was afraid of

The thing that slowly changed, as I spent evening after evening researching, was my picture of the city itself. The flat sheet of danger in my head began, grudgingly, to develop features. I learned that Johannesburg was not one thing, that it had areas and characters and whole communities of ordinary people living ordinary, unremarkable, safe lives, raising children, going to work, exactly like me. The fear I had inherited was not based on the real city. It was based on a cartoon of it that had been handed down to me, and the only way to replace the cartoon with the truth was to do the patient work of actually learning the place.

I started looking seriously at proper apartments to rent in Johannesburg, the kind managed by people who clearly took the safety and dignity of their tenants seriously, with real security and maintained buildings, rather than whatever came up cheapest on a classified site. That distinction turned out to matter enormously. There is a world of difference between renting from someone who sees you as a rand sign and renting somewhere that is actually run as a community, where the building is looked after and the people managing it answer the phone. The more I looked at well-run flats to rent in the parts of the city that suited my work and my daughter's schooling, the more my panic started to turn into something that felt almost like competence.

The viewing that changed my mind

I took a day of leave and drove up to see a few places in person, which my mother thought was madness and I thought was the only responsible thing to do, because you cannot judge safety from a photograph. I had my list, and I had my fear, and I had my daughter in the passenger seat because she had refused, absolutely refused, to be left behind for this.

The flat we ended up choosing was not the fanciest I saw. But it did something none of the others had done, which was make both of us relax. The building was secure in a way I could see and feel, not just be told about. There were other families. There were children. There was a woman about my age in the lift who said hello and asked if we were moving in and told us, unprompted, that it was a good building, that she had raised two kids there. My daughter liked the window in what would be her room. I liked that the school we had our eye on was a manageable trip away and that I could see exactly how she would get there and back. Standing in that empty flat, with the afternoon light coming in and my daughter already deciding where her bed would go, I felt the old inherited fear loosen its grip on me for the first time.

The life we actually built

We have been in the city for a good while now, and I need to tell you honestly that almost nothing I was afraid of came true. The flat became a home faster than I expected. My daughter walks taller here. She has friends from more different kinds of families than our old town could have offered in a lifetime, and she moves through the city with an ease I am still slightly in awe of, because she never inherited the fear I did, and watching her not have it has slowly cured me of some of mine. My job went well. The promotion did exactly what a promotion is supposed to do, and because I had not ruined it by overspending on somewhere to live, the extra money actually improved our lives instead of disappearing into rent and petrol.

When friends from the old town ask me about it, usually in the same frightened voice I once used, I tell them that the hardest part was not the city. The city was fine. The hardest part was unlearning a fear that had been handed to me, and the thing that let me do it was taking the search for somewhere to live seriously, treating it as the most important decision of the whole move rather than an afterthought. Finding good apartments to rent, run properly, in the right part of the right city, was not just about having a roof. It was the thing that let a frightened small-town woman say yes to a bigger life, and let her daughter grow up without the ceiling her mother almost built for her. I had driven through this city my whole life on the way to somewhere else. It turned out to be the place we were actually going.