BY WENDY SPENCER
My phone beeped as I was buying milk in Sainsbury’s. Mom’s icon flashed on my screen and I smiled. We had said goodbye only a couple of days ago on her front step in Cape Town, and she wished me the best holiday and celebration of Robert’s graduation. I opened the message while in the queue to pay, fumbling with the unfamiliar currency. Mom, at 84, was not tech-savvy and used her phone like an anger-management calculator, hitting each letter she wanted to type with determination and force. This message was different, though: it was a picture of Snoopy, ears flapping wildly and feet showing movement with a series of black lines. Beneath it was the text: Dance like no one is looking. I laughed out loud – this was so unlike my mother, I assumed she had pressed the wrong button while scrolling on her phone.
‘All right love?’ the cashier asked without looking at me.
Dance like no one is looking.
All my life, I had been looking over my shoulder, wondering how the world perceived me. For a long time, I held a mirror in front of my face in the hope that people would see themselves reflected in me, rather than who I actually was. I hid a lot. I conformed. I was anything but outrageous. The thought of putting myself out there in the world terrified me. So, no tipsy tabletop dancing for me; no colourful non-conformist behaviour. What if someone was looking?
But writing was my salve. What I couldn’t say out loud, I could admit to a piece of paper. Writing was my teenage best friend. I created characters and stories in my head before going to sleep at night, and if I still remembered them in the morning, I deemed them worthy of writing down. I learnt that words would wait for me to be ready. They held my hand during my child-caring years. I quietly confided all my angst to them.
Ann once told me to write my Truth. It was a simple seismic shift for me. Words need to be grounded in my very being for them to ring true. Writing these days is a bit like splatting my soul on a page, with ink smudging messily. Words dance on the page, pirouetting round and round, their swirling movement propelling me forward. I can abandon myself to words, dance in them like no one is looking.
I can write like no one is looking.
Two days after my mysterious message from Mom, she died. I couldn’t bear to look at her final text for a while. Raw, numbing grief travelled home with me on the aeroplane as I came home to my new motherless state.
I no longer think that text from Mom was anything other than her final gift to me. I am dancing, Mom.
And writing.
About the Author
Wendy Spencer lives in Cape Town. She has a degree in English and psychology from the University of Cape Town as well as a postgraduate diploma in library and information science. After working in libraries and in adult literacy, and being involved in the creation of community resource centres, she now manages an electronic instrumentation manufacturing company. She ventured into the world of blogging in 2017 to share her experiences of mothering her daughter, who has type 1 diabetes, at https://time4t1.blogspot.com. In 2021, she started another blog, https://comingback4seconds.blogspot.com, re-examining some Aha moments in her life, because she found she couldn’t stop writing. Her distractions include reading, making fused glass jewellery and stained glass panels, gardening, woodworking and talking to her tortoises.
