Lent day 30: Fairy Godmothers

 

My greatest barometer that measures the worth of a human being is based on how children instinctively respond to them. To me children are fresher from heaven and know which adults still have a bit of heaven in them.

Two-year-olds are pretty spot on in this measurement process. They’re like raw purveyors of humanity – they’ll call you out on everything, unashamedly let all their emotions hang loose, they’ll throw a tantrum like no ones watching and they’ll gravitate towards safe people that they’ve only met five minutes ago with zero skaam.

Our friends Tanya and Izolda Visser are baby magnets. Last night around the braai fire, while Tanya braaied every different cut of meat known to man in the presence of three men, our little two year old Finn (who had only met her that afternoon) kept calling her name. She would crouch down in front of him and then he would forget what he wanted to tell her and just gaze lovingly at her. Now some context about Finn – being the youngest of 7 grandchildren and the closest to being a gangster – this oke makes you work for his love. I live on a knife edge of affection and rejection with him, it’s a painful relationship where I do all the hard work and it just depends what mood he’s in as to whether my love will be reciprocated.

But not with Tanya. She got the green light immediately. Later on in the evening Eva was describing her plans for the following day. Her plan verbatim was, ‘To find a unicorn’. To which Izolda immediately chimed in, ‘I’ll help you!’ And she said it like she 100% believed it was possible but was just going to require some elbow grease. So today Izolda has got a long day of searching ahead of her.

Tanya and Izolda have been in our lives for a long time. Tanya first, and we she fell in love with the lovely Izolda she too became a part of our lives. Stephen was Tanya’s copy editor for ‘The Gardener’ magazine for 10 years. They rode the roller-coaster of Covid together, which, for the print media industry was a severe ride that resulted in many carts being thrown off the rails into oblivion, and they survived through sheer grit and the fact that a lot of people suddenly found time to garden. Small miracles.

I got Covid during the double whammy of lockdown and the rioting that hit KZN. When no one could find even a roll of toilet paper Tanya and Izolda found a way to deliver packets and packets of fresh food and provisions to us. I don’t even know how they found a way to get to us given the security issues of that time, or where they found all their booty, or why they chose to share it with us when everyone else was clutching their long life milk in Gollum fashion, but I’ll never forget standing weakly in my nightie in our garden while they lobbed Oros over the Kearsney fence to Stephen, tears rolling down my face.

When I was pregnant with Eva the January edition of ‘The Gardener’ had already been written and completed in November and in her editor’s letter Tanya welcomed Stephen and Emily’s little girl into the world – despite the fact that we did not know the sex of our baby yet. But Tanya just knew Eva was coming. Because she knows things like that.

Last night I thought about these two woman who have become family to us and I am so grateful that they were born now, even if the world is still pretty darn sketchy. In the past these powerful, independent, wise, loving, eccentric woman would have had the hardest of times. These woman who know the natural world of plants, and biomes, and herbs, and healing would have been shunned. These woman whom children naturally gravitate towards would have been seen as threats because people wouldn’t have understood why children trusted them in the first place. These woman would have been cursed because they chose to love each other.

My heart breaks to think about the number of woman in the history of humanity who didn’t get the happily ever after that Tanya and Izolda got – these custodians of the natural world, these healers, gardeners, artists, authors, food growers and makers, these mavericks, these leaders, these custodians, these woman who are some of the deepest reflections of mother nature – what did we do to them? We were afraid of their power so we silenced them in some of the most brutal acts against humanity, ever.

With tides turning again in the world and the old sexist, racist patriarchal voice of a man who looks like a cheese curl suddenly being the one heard most clearly (where are all the other voices?) I am afraid for everyone who doesn’t fit within the hegemonic idea of ‘normal’.

Across the world our maternal healers shake their heads and return to their gardens and their writing and their healing. The likes of Tanya and Izolda must be protected at all costs in a world where matriarchal power is suddenly a threat again. Where the ‘other’ is suddenly finding definition again. Our fairly godmothers must be protected at all costs because if we don’t the world will turn the date back a few hundred centuries and for the sake of humanity we cannot allow that to happen again.