CHAPTER 5: EMPIRICAL MATERIAL AND ANALYSIS
5.1. Establishing Belonging
5.1.4. Leaving Home: endings and continuity
participants were often unaware of the parental control their mothers had to relinquish in order for the participants to be accepted within the employers’ families. The clearest example of this in this study was Gugu’s description of meal times at the Schmidt’s’ home:
Gugu: The wonderful thing is if it is supper my mother liked to call me, “Come we will eat together” but Dr Schmidt he said, “No, just leave Gugu because she is our child and we must eat together at the supper”. If there was a party we were joining in.
Alice: Your mum would join in as well?
Gugu: No my mother she was working mostly.
Alice: When you had supper with the Schmidts where would your mum be? Would she also be at the table?
Gugu: No, no.
The quote above demonstrates how the nature of domestic work can intrude into the family life of domestic workers and their families but also how, in informal fostering relationships the employer has the power to override the parental authority of the domestic worker. Mange (1995) found that the power relations embedded in the domestic employer – employee relationship had the potential to limit the domestic worker’s ability to express her own needs and desires for her child. While the participants of this study did not explicitly express such sentiments, they did note that their inclusion into the employers’ family activities could force them to choose between spending time with the employers’ family, their mothers, or visiting their biological families. Their inclusion in certain activities or events highlighted the social mobility the relationship had afforded them but also how this was often contingent on excluding their mothers.
participants’ upward trajectory or stunted it. For Zama and James, leaving home to go to university was a positive experience, which provided them with a reflexive space to view their own lives and the connections they shared with the people in their lives. They continued to connect with their respective families and expand the hybridity of their social networks. The unconditional positive support that had been shown to them as children, both by their own mothers and their ‘informal foster families’ had allowed them to individuate successfully as adults and to face their futures with hope. Both James and Zama seemed excited by what their futures would hold as their success was assumed and their continued connection to both their biological and foster families felt guaranteed:
(I)n terms of the future, I mean, basically, they are just my family. They’ll be at my wedding; I’ll be at theirs. It’s just like your usual family with a lot less of the admin, just a lot of happy times. That’s one thing that I can say, it has probably been an advantage because. I have almost three separate families; I have only had happy times with each, or at least those times that I can remember. (James)
It feels like you know its sort of coming to a close because very soon I’m going be out there doing my own thing. And sort of now, like before, they still involved and stuff but after this, it’s going to be about a whole lot of thanking after this. Like once I get my degree, (…) parents have been there for me through a lot, but in the end I can really say the Smiths got me here. So it would be really thanking them and stuff. Wow! (Zama)
In contrast, when Gugu and Themba moved out of their ‘informal foster’ homes, they did not experience the positive and perpetuated trajectory of social mobility and support that James and Zama had. Instead, educational opportunities and support were terminated and financial support was largely suspended. Moving homes uprooted them from their foster families, their childhood homes, and their communities and placed them in a space that felt unfamiliar and foreign. Although they both remained in contact with their foster families they both lost the close connections and family structure they associated with their childhoods. The futures they had envisioned through their childhood experiences where abruptly disrupted by the reality of their ‘new’ lives as permanent residents of a township. They both described townships as dangerous and morally bankrupt spaces.
This experience truncated their personal aspirations and led to a sense of disconnection and inadequacy. They both felt profoundly abandoned, alien to their current communities, and that their personal potential for upward social mobility had regressed.
The two quotes below express the loss Gugu’s and then Themba’s felt in relation to these experiences. Gugu’s loss is focused on the loss of the life she had known before. Themba’s loss is focused on limitations he felt that moving to the township had had on his future. Themba displayed an acute awareness that his lack of tertiary education acts as a limitation to both his personal success and his ability to remain integrated in middle class society.
For me it was a nice life, you see, a very nice life. I remember the time Dr Schmidt he buy a house for my mother, then we move out to the location. I was [17 years old]. I was crying because I don’t know the life of the location. I was crying because I don’t know the life of the location, because it was nice there at town, I was crying because I am losing to live there and it is very nice. Like if there is sun on Sunday we are going to have a picnic, and now I go to location. Wow! I don’t know what life it is there and I am going there to start another life. It was difficult. Yoh! It was difficult. Like now it is difficult to think about that family and how we lived together. (Gugu)
After school I was told by Helen that I would have to move out and go back to the township. Yoh! There is nothing to describe it; it was one of the saddest days of my life.
I cried for weeks.. Daily thinking “why now?” (…) At one of the most important time of my life, she was kicking me out. She said she couldn’t afford to have me around anymore because Stephen and Kate were going to varsity. I didn’t go to varsity. I asked what’s wrong with me, but there is a part of me believes that I wouldn’t have been in this situation that I am in today if I had gone to varsity, I would have a better life than what I have now. But at the same time I don’t think I have done anything to change that, well I’m beginning to now I guess. I think I have always had someone to blame instead of myself, blaming my situation, blaming my poor parents, blaming Helen for not giving me more, but what more did she have to give me. The one thing that I still blame her for was, maybe, not helping me with the channels, even if she had helped getting me a student loan, because I didn’t know about those things. (Themba)
While each of the participants has remained in contact with their ‘white families’, the quality of this contact and who initiates it indicates the relative importance they or their ‘family’ members place on the continuity of the relationship. Zama and James have maintained close and constant contact with the employers and their children and place great importance on sharing their lives with them.
While Zama chose more traditional means of remaining in contact, such as spending time together and phoning one another, James, in addition to these, chose to cement and display his deep connection to his ‘white’ brother Ryan in the form of a shared tattoo.
Moving away from their mothers’ employers homes removed Gugu and Themba from their ‘white’
families’ social circles and activities. This move and the subsequent lack of contact appeared to confirm their incomplete inclusion within the employers’ families. Themba saw their lack of contact as evidence of the distance between himself and his ‘white’ family; he tried to rationalize their distance as characteristic of white people:
My foster family, I wish we were closer, but we are not as close as when we were living together, but I’ve noticed in the white culture that that is okay, like you don’t see your brother for five years, that’s normal. In black culture it doesn’t work like that. You see each other all the time, constant contact, keeping in touch all the time. (…) I know exactly what is going on I can tell you where so-and-so is now, you know what I mean? I can’t tell you what my white mom is doing, but I can tell you where my mom is now. I can tell you where my gran is now. I can tell you where my sister is now, that’s the
difference. Kate I see probably once a year, that is if I bump into her. Stephen I see once every three months also if I bump into him somewhere. (Themba)