Chapter 5 – A mother’s destruction

My mom didn’t just fall apart after my brother’s suicide – she shattered. Quietly at first, in ways only I could see. Then loudly, in ways no one could ignore. The drinking started as a coping mechanism, then became a daily ritual. Cocaine followed, not as a thrill, but as a crutch to survive the days she didn’t want to be alive for. What came after 2006 was a long, painful blur: alcohol, drugs, paranoia, aggression, suicide threats, boyfriends who hurt her, rehabs, overdoses, and me trying to steady a sinking ship.

She burned through her inheritance from Ossi as though it were on fire. I’d sit with her at the kitchen table – me, seventeen going on seventy – trying to explain budgets, savings, “future planning.” And in those moments, strangely, we were almost friends. The rest of the time? We were fighting. Shouting. Her words slicing through me with a precision only a parent can manage. I kept trying to get her into rehab, but she refused every time. Without her consent, I was stuck watching someone I loved drown while being told not to jump in after them.

All I ever wanted, for as long as I can remember, was a normal family. The kind where people curled up on couches together and laughed loudly, even at silly things. I used to watch my friends with their parents, warm, affectionate, easy, and feel an ache so deep it lived in my bones. From the outside, we looked perfect. Big house, holidays, horses, beautiful things. On the inside, though, there were storms no one else heard. And for reasons that made sense only to a child, I believed it was my responsibility to keep everyone together.

For most of my life I struggled to create a family environment that was relaxed, carefree, and with laughter. And most of the time failed miserably. Now that I’m older I realise that every family has their problems and fights. From the outside it’s easy to think that things are perfect for others.

I tried so hard to create peace at home. Laughter. Lightness. Some days I came close. Most days I didn’t. I didn’t realise back then that every family has its cracks. I thought ours were the only ones.

Nicholas was eight when he started calling me from the main house in the mornings.

“I can’t wake Mom up,” he’d whisper.

Every time, my heart would drop, and I’d make that walk from the cottage to the house with him, him scared, me pretending not to be. We never knew what waited behind that bedroom door. After a few times, I learned that if I shook her gently and tapped her cheek, just enough to pull her back into the world, she would wake for a moment. It was usually the sleeping pills. “Just the pills,” I’d tell myself, as though that made it less frightening.

Then one day, out of some deep instinct for survival, or maybe she was simply tired, she checked herself into Kenilworth Clinic for a month. And just like that, I became Nicholas’s full-time caretaker, stepping into another role I wasn’t ready for but didn’t think twice about taking on.

Looking back, I can still feel the weight of those days. The exhaustion. The fear. The small flickers of hope.

But even in that darkness, something in me refused to break. Something in me kept believing that there had to be more to life than this. That the story couldn’t end here. And maybe that stubborn belief, tiny as it was, was what saved me.

Then, a miracle arrived. Completely out of the blue, I got a call from a friend whose father owned racehorses. They were retiring one of them, a beautiful bay gelding, and wanted to know if I’d like him.

Would I like him?
I practically levitated off the couch.
It felt like the universe had finally thrown me a lifeline after watching me doggy-paddle through the mud for far too long.

His name was Bow River. And he was everything I had ever dreamed of, right down to the star on his forehead and the soft, wise eyes that looked straight into me, like he already knew my heart. I had spent years wishing for a horse and had even written it down as an intention… and here he was. Manifested, delivered, and completely perfect.

I spent every evening and weekend with him. Grooming, riding, training, breathing him in. Horses have this way of absorbing your pain without asking questions, and Bow River did that for me. He became my quiet sanctuary when the rest of my world felt too loud.

Then, in June 2007, my boyfriend of four years broke up with me.
Just months after we’d been planning to buy a flat together.

I found out he had been infatuated with one of his students but didn’t want to hurt me while I was grieving Ryan and Ossi and now needing to care for my mother and Nick. And as much as I know now that he was trying to be kind, at the time it felt like betrayal layered on top of loss layered on top of the fragile little life I was trying to rebuild. I completely unravelled. I begged him to stay, begged him to love me, because in my mind he was the one person who knew me – really knew me. If he didn’t love me, then who on earth would?

For months, I did nothing but work and cry.
Bow River, my sweet miracle, started to stand at the gate waiting for a girl who didn’t have the strength to show up. In the end, with tears and guilt and a breaking heart, I found him a new home. To this day, letting him go remains one of my greatest regrets. I wish I had known then that the heartbreak would pass, but the regret of losing him wouldn’t.

I felt inconsolable, until one morning my friends dragged me to breakfast in town. I went reluctantly. We ended up meeting a group of guys who did a weekly “Coffee Club,” and honestly, they were some of the most gorgeous and funny men I had ever seen in real life. For the first time in months, I felt… alive? Interested? Flat-out shallow? All three.

Before long they were all at my house watching Death Race. Not exactly the movie you’d imagine for a healing moment, but somehow that day cracked something open in me. I laughed. I flirted. I felt like a teenager again, just for a few hours, free from responsibility, grief, and the weight I had been carrying for years.

That little spark gave me hope again – not in love, but in life.
I tried to get Bow River back. No luck. The universe giveth and the universe… has a twisted sense of humour.

Looking back, it breaks my heart that silly boys revived my spirit when I already had a horse who loved me unconditionally. But that’s the thing about heartbreak: it blinds you. It steals your wisdom, your instinct, your common sense. If I could tell that younger version of me anything, it would be this:
Heartbreak is a terrible waste of time. Grieve, learn, grow, and then get up and look for the blessings. They’re always there, even when you can’t see them yet.

During that same time, I was helping found a new company with three partners, one of them my current boss. We called it United Tribes of Africa, and I became the Operations Director. We created personalised wine labels for gifts, corporate events, celebrations – anything worth raising a glass to. I absolutely loved it. Loved the creativity, the people, the energy. It felt like a part of my life was finally moving forward.

With a small bit of savings, I traded in my car and bought a Toyota RunX with lower mileage. My old Golf didn’t have a working fuel gauge, the water pump was broken, and I had mastered the art of guessing how long I had until an engine meltdown. A skill that might be useful in a post-apocalyptic movie, not so much on the roads of South Africa.

The RunX was glossy, reliable, and black.
I named her The Black Panther.
My loyal ride-or-die for the next few years.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt proud of myself.
For building something new, something mine, something filled with possibility.

Naively believing that things with my mom were finally settling, and honestly just starving for a taste of my own life, I moved into a flat in Gardens with a girlfriend in 2008. It felt like stepping into a different universe. Those six months were very possibly the happiest of my entire life. Living in town was all about the moment. About being young. About laughing loudly and not apologising for it.

I partied and laughed more in those six months than in the previous twenty-something years combined. Weekends were a blur of beaches, Coffee Club gatherings, and time with the kind of friends who made life feel soft and simple. I didn’t realise how heavy my life had been until I felt what it was like to breathe again.

And then, in March 2009, I met the man of my dreams. Just like that. Poof. A real-life prince charming. I felt like the nightmare chapter of my life was finally over.

Around that time, I went to see our family GP and while chatting, I mentioned my new boyfriend. I told him, with complete sincerity, that my new boyfriend felt like my reward for everything horrible that had happened.

Dr Andre Hough turned to me with an expression I will never forget and said,
“No, Andi. YOU are the reward for everything horrible that has happened.”

Those words embedded themselves in me like a seed waiting for the right moment to grow. In my darkest hours, when I’ve felt worthless or invisible or flattened by life, I still hear those words. They remind me to get up, even when I don’t believe I can. They remind me there is meaning to all this, even if I haven’t fully uncovered it yet.

And as I sit here editing this on 5 March 2025, I’m struck by a memory: as a little girl, I had this unshakeable belief that I was here to do something special. I still don’t know what that is.
But the relentless inner voice telling me to write… that’s never left. Not once in thirty years. Maybe this, these pages, these stories, is what I was meant to give to the world. Maybe someone, somewhere, will read this at the exact moment they need courage to keep going.

But life has a habit of testing your hope the moment you start believing in it.

When I moved back home in April 2009, the shock felt physical. My mom’s drug use had escalated into something unrecognisable. Her paranoia was unbearable, I couldn’t even sit in the same room with her. After eight weeks of trying, I packed my bags and moved straight into my new boyfriend’s house. It felt like fleeing a burning building.

At the same time, the company I helped build, United Tribes of Africa, was being liquidated. I was losing my job, and because I’d signed surety on the office lease, I was now responsible for thousands of rands in debt. Everything that had been beautiful and light for those six months in town was suddenly gone.

Had I dreamt it?
Was joy just something life lent me temporarily, with interest?

Every time something good happened, it felt like life knocked me flat again. But even then, even in the middle of the collapse, some tiny part of me believed what I remind myself often now:
When one door closes, another opens. Maybe not immediately, but it will.

I found a job in Client Services for Rocketseed, a global email branding company. The people were wonderful, but there wasn’t much work for me. I spent most days staring at the clock, twiddling my thumbs, slowly unravelling into an existential crisis. How had I ended up working in computers of all things, when the truest part of me belonged in stables?

So, naturally, I turned to Google, because all major life decisions begin with a Google search, and looked for work at the SPCA or the Cart Horse Protection Association.

And there it was.
An advert for an Assistant Fundraiser at CHPA.
A job… with horses. Real horses. Breath, muscle, heart, home.

I practically threw my CV through the screen, attached to a pleading cover letter declaring (somewhat dramatically) that working with horses was my lifelong dream.

The General Manager called and offered me the job immediately.

I resigned from Rocketseed the next day.

And for the first time in months, maybe even years… I felt aligned.
Like life was nudging me back onto the path I was always meant to walk.

I started at Cart Horse Protection Association in February 2010, and from the very beginning it felt like the universe had finally stopped playing practical jokes on me and handed me my actual purpose. I loved it. Not in the “oh-cute-I-love-my-job” way people post about on LinkedIn. I mean the obsessive, all-consuming, borderline-unnerving type of love normally reserved for teenage crushes and new puppies.

There was no separation between work and home life because… well… there was no home life. It was horses, horses, horses. I built their website, launched their Facebook page, opened a Twitter account (back when people still tweeted and didn’t just spiral publicly), and poured myself into the organisation like I was trying to refill the parts of me that had been emptied for years.

And yet, somehow, despite having finally found something pure and grounding, I went back to Rocketseed.

It sounds insane now. Truly. If I could go back in time, I would sit my 2010-self down, take her by the shoulders, and say, “Honey, stop it. No one is going to Mozambique anyway.”

But at the time, it felt logical. My boyfriend had mentioned that his friends were planning a trip the next year, and because my Cart Horse salary wasn’t exactly on speaking terms with “international travel,” guilt ate me alive. I felt responsible for his financial limitations—as if my passion was an inconvenience to everyone else’s convenience.

So when Rocketseed offered me my old job back with a big salary bump, I convinced myself I could do both: return to Rocketseed, then use my “twiddling-thumbs” time to keep doing Cart Horse’s social media as a volunteer. Win-win, right?

Shockingly, this actually worked. For a while.

For two years, I lived a double life—corporate by day, horse-obsessed vigilante by night. Think Batman, but with more coffee and fewer cool gadgets.

But life has a way of slipping in a plot twist exactly when you start feeling steady.

In August 2010, my mother overdosed – 20 grams in four days.

Just writing that now makes my chest tighten. Back then, I didn’t even have time to feel it fully. I just went into automatic crisis mode, the same way I always did – like a soldier who had forgotten what peacetime felt like.

My boyfriend and I started discussing the possibility of putting my mother into rehab and taking Nicholas in for a month. It wasn’t even shocking anymore; it was just another level on the same exhausting game. I was breaking inside, trying to keep my “cool new girlfriend” face on while simultaneously feeling utterly drowned by the responsibility of my family.

When we met, I had told him I had “family issues.” Cute understatement. Now he was seeing the full behind-the-scenes footage – unedited, unhinged, and definitely not what he signed up for.

And then one night, after too many tears and too many years of being strong, something inside me snapped. A quiet breaking. A tired breaking. A heartbreaking breaking.

I had been writing letters to my mother for weeks – some angry, some terrified, some full of love I didn’t know what to do with. I never gave them to her. I was always too scared. Scared she’d spiral. Scared she’d kill herself. Scared the words would break her enough to finish what life had started.

But this time, I wrote one that changed everything.

A letter that felt like all four years of pain had finally found one place to land.

A letter that came from the deepest, rawest part of me—the part that still desperately wanted her mother.

The truth is, by early 2009 I was running on the emotional equivalent of cheap petrol and half-worn tyres. I kept telling myself that if I just tried harder, if I said the right thing, caught the right moment, begged with the right tone, I could pull my mother back from the edge. Like she was a kite in a storm and I just had to hold the string tighter.

But you can only hold on for so long before the string starts cutting your hands.

Her drug use was no longer something I could dance around. It wasn’t a bad week or a dark period, it had grown into a living thing, a monster with teeth. Some days she spoke to me like I was still her daughter. Other days she looked at me like I was a threat. A problem. A burden.

Nicholas, sweet little Nicholas, was caught in the middle of the madness. He didn’t have the language for trauma yet, but he felt it, in the mornings she didn’t wake up, in the quiet fear behind his questions, in the way he would look at me with that silent pleading children do when they need stability and have nowhere else to put their fear.

Inside me, something was fraying. I was twenty-four and felt a hundred. I was trying to keep my job together, my relationship together, my brother together, myself together. And somewhere in that chaos, I convinced myself that if I just found the right words, I could fix everything.

This is the burden children of addicts carry: the belief that if we love hard enough, if we perform well enough, if we anticipate every disaster, we can keep the whole house from burning down. But children were never meant to hold fire hoses.

So I did what I had always done when I didn’t know what else to do – I wrote a letter.

But this one was different.
This one came from the part of me that had finally stopped pretending.

And looking back, this letter… this desperate, furious, heartbroken letter… was the moment everything in me shifted.

THE LETTER

Hi Mom

Well I have written you so many letters over the last few weeks; I don’t even know what to say anymore. My life seems to revolve around either being incredibly angry or me being so distraught I can’t even function, with a few normal moods thrown into the mix. I write letters in anger and then by the time I see you my mood has changed and I am too scared to give you the letters out of fear that you will kill yourself. Well I am tired of being scared, I am tired of being angry and I am tired of being sad. I am tired of feeling guilty, confused and everything else I have felt over the last 4 years. You have chosen this path – not anyone else – YOU did. You chose to choose cocaine over Nicholas. You chose to choose cocaine over me. And you CHOSE to choose cocaine over life. I still cannot believe you even went down this road after everything we experienced with Ryan’s heroin addiction.

You will never know what it’s like to have your mother hurl abuse at you, day after day, to tell you that you’re a worthless little bitch and she would rather use drugs than have a daughter. You will never know what it’s like to feel like your mother doesn’t love you. You will never know what it’s like to watch your mother destroy herself in front of your eyes and there is absolutely nothing you can do. You will never know what it’s like to feel your heart break when you see the pain in your younger brother’s eyes. You will never know what it’s like to be scared of the future and what might happen. You will never know what it’s like to have to fight to hold on to your hope that your mother gets better and loves you again. You will never know what it’s like to cry yourself to sleep because your children might never know your mother. You will never know what it’s like to save even the nastiest of sms’s because it might be the last time you hear from your mother. You will never know the guilt that eats you alive, that even though you are so hurt and angry and emotionally broken and drained, you can’t shut out your mother because you are scared she will die and this might be the last few months you have left. You have no idea what it’s like to visit your mother in a rehab and love her so much you want to hug her and say everything will be fine, but hate her so much at the same time that you physically can’t. You will never know what it’s like to wake up crying wishing your mother was still here. Because you are gone mom, you disappeared when you started cocaine. I jokingly said to my friends a few weeks ago that I must be the only person on earth who feels like they have lost a father and a mother, and yet still have both.

I have never claimed to be perfect and I have a lot of faults – which you are always so eager to mention and bring up. Well you know what, this is not about me, and this is about YOU. You are the one who has fucked up, you are the one who needs help, and you are the one who is throwing away a good life. You have everything you need in life, you still have your parents, you still have your brother and sister, you have a house – paid off, you have a car – paid off, and you even have extra money in the bank. You are smart, you are beautiful, and you are funny. And the world is still your oyster… I am sinking deep into a depression and I’m really struggling to cope right now. I can’t carry on without my mother.. I need you back. I can’t continuously be stressed out over you, whether you’re going to try, whether you’re going to give up, and how bad do things really need to get before you hit your own rock bottom?? I can’t be scared every day that it might be the last day I have the chance to see you. Things turn around in life – in 2 weeks your entire life could change. It’s just going to take some work… Everything is up to you, if I could do this for you I would – but I can’t. That kills me more than anything else… knowing that I have to sit back and do nothing, but there is nothing else I can do or say to help you unless you help yourself first.

Nicholas does not have a father, how can you do this to him? How can you look in his eyes and see the pain and then go and take more cocaine? I just don’t understand mom. I know you wish I was dead and Ryan was alive, that’s fine, I don’t care. I always knew anyway. But if you’re not going to do it for me then please, do it for Nicholas. And do it for Ryan. Please please please… I am begging you, Nicholas needs his mother.

You need to do this for him. You need to work and you need to feel pain and heartache and you need to do whatever you can to just say no mom, say no to the temptations, say no the bad ideas. I can’t be Nick’s mother no matter how much I need to be…. and as much as I hate you right now, I love you mom, you are my mother and I need you. I love you with all my heart and my heart couldn’t bear it if I could never spend Christmas with you again, if you weren’t there to help me organise my wedding and you weren’t there to help me raise my children. You might think I’m a know-it-all, too self-righteous and stubborn, grownup & bossy. But I’m not….. Everything I do and say is to help you. And inside I’m still a little girl who needs her mother…

Please don’t do this to us… Please try… Please PLEASE. Please Mom. We need you.

I didn’t give her the letter.

Not that day.
Not the day after.

I folded it and tucked it into a drawer like it was something radioactive – powerful enough to save us or burn the whole house down. I didn’t trust myself to hand it to her. I didn’t trust her to receive it. More than anything, I didn’t trust the universe not to take her away the moment I finally said the truth out loud.

But writing it…
Writing it broke something open in me.

Until that moment, I still believed I just needed to try harder. That being the “good daughter” — the stable one, the responsible one, the one who cleaned up the mess — meant I could somehow keep us all afloat.

Children of addicts often inherit the illusion of control. We think we can rescue, shape, persuade, or protect. But addiction is a storm, and children were never meant to be the roof.

This letter – this heartbreak pressed into paragraphs – was the first time I admitted that her life was not mine to save.

It was also the moment a quiet, stubborn truth rose up inside me:

I was allowed to survive this, even if she didn’t.

Writing that letter didn’t fix her. But it changed me.
And from this breaking point, the next chapter of my life began, one I never saw coming, full of choices I didn’t feel ready for, and strength I had no idea I possessed.

Because sometimes the turning point isn’t the day things fall apart.
Sometimes it’s the day you finally tell the truth.

And this was mine.

That letter became a mirror. A terrifying, painful, sacred mirror that forced me to look at what I had been carrying, dragging, and bleeding for years.

It was the moment my story shifted, not because she changed, but because I finally acknowledged the truth I had been outrunning.

I could love her with everything I had, and still not save her.

I could break myself open for her, and she still might not choose life.

And I could keep holding on… or I could begin the quiet, trembling act of letting go of the version of her I kept hoping would come back.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

“Children of addicted parents often carry a sense of “false responsibility” – a belief that if they just say the right thing, try harder, or love deeper, they can fix the unfixable. This is not hope; it is survival masquerading as duty.

Writing letters – even unsent ones – is a form of emotional detox. A way for the body to release what the nervous system has held for too long. A way to grieve someone who is still alive.

The moment we recognise that love cannot override addiction is usually the moment we begin our own recovery.“

She was released, and I tried not to hope. Not to expect anything. I told myself I would just pretend things were going to be fine, like a well-trained adult who had mastered the art of delusion.

I even wrote in my diary:

Diary – 16 November 2010
“The nightmare with my mom finally seems over! Transfer went through on her new house in Claremont and she’s keeping busy with renovations.”

Ah yes. The golden era of blissful denial. The “maybe this time it’s different” chapter of my life. Spoiler: it was not.

She relapsed again, and the verbal and emotional abuse reached heights even I didn’t know existed. I felt like a rubber band stretched too far since 2003 – one good tug away from snapping and taking out an entire village with me.

Her boyfriend was still physically abusing her. She would send me photos of her bruised face, her arms, her legs – begging for help. I’d drive over, sit with her, coax her, plead with her to go to the police station, only for her to freeze at the last second. I went alone more than once, begging for help, but the police were unmoved.

“No affidavit, no case.”
Imagine a daughter trying to file a domestic abuse charge on behalf of her own mother who refuses to save herself. It was emotional whiplash on steroids.

Meanwhile, her money was evaporating. Every time I saw a new bank statement, my stomach fell through the floor. This inheritance – Ossi’s gift, her lifeline – was slipping through her fingers faster than I could say, “Please stop buying cocaine.”

One day, after putting my beloved Shadow down , one of the saddest days of my life, I drove her home and something in me cracked. Completely. Exhausted, grieving, and overwhelmed, I warned her that if she didn’t get her life together, I would take her to court for Nicholas’s education. It wasn’t a threat – it was desperation, grief, and fear blending together in a way I’d never felt before.

I was broken. Guilty for not spending more time with Shadow before he died. Terrified for my brother. So emotionally gutted that I told my boyfriend he should leave me.
That he deserved someone with significantly less chaos.

I was convinced he would eventually do what an ex of mine had done – look at the full picture of my life, see the baggage, the trauma, the complicated family web, and simply walk away.

But he didn’t.

He reassured me. He stayed. We talked about building a life together – dogs, a family, a home that felt stable instead of explosive.

We bought a house in Pinelands and moved in at the end of May 2011. And for a moment – a brief, flickering moment – it felt like I was living inside a dream I’d once sketched as a child. A home. A real home. My own. A safe place.

But the dream had sharp edges.

I was still battling rage, resentment, and exhaustion. I thought, rather naively, that after everything I had already survived, surely nothing else could overwhelm me. But my stress levels were through the roof. It felt like any tiny inconvenience could tip me straight into fight-or-flight… and if I’m honest, I always chose “fight.”
Everything inside me had become armour.

The increasing stress at Rocketseed didn’t help. Corporate life ground me down more by the day. Being in client services is a special kind of torture – especially when your job is basically fixing other people’s last-minute catastrophes because they can’t manage a calendar. With a smile.

I loved work done properly. They loved chaos. A match made in hell.

I got promoted – yay? – which only meant more stress, more performance pressure, and less of me left over for my own life. We eventually agreed I should resign and start working from home, selling olive oil from his parents’ farm. I felt relief for the first time in months.

We even went to Mauritius with his family, and for one magical week, I felt rested. Calm. Like the weight of the world had finally climbed off my chest and gone to go annoy someone else for a while.

But relief never lasted long in my life.

My mom and her boyfriend were constantly breaking up, making up, breaking up. Every week she’d ask me to help her kick him out; a week later, he’d be back like a boomerang.

I felt like nothing I did was enough to protect her or Nicholas.

And the worst part? I was trying to save someone who wasn’t even trying to save herself.

There were nights I lay awake imagining beating her boyfriend up, or hiring someone to do it. I’d get halfway through the fantasy before panicking about spending the next 20 years in Pollsmoor trying to explain that it was, technically, a crime committed out of love.

Nicholas refused to leave her. He was terrified she’d kill herself if he wasn’t there. He felt responsible for her, the same way I had felt responsible at his age – and that terrified me. I worried he would blame me if she died.

I didn’t know the right thing to do. Not even a little.

Giving her money meant funding her addiction. Not giving her money meant Nicholas sometimes had nothing to eat after school. I would shop for groceries and stock the kitchen because it was the only way I could keep him safe.

I was living in a permanent maze, with no map, no signs, and no exits.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

“Parentification occurs when a child assumes adult emotional responsibilities for a parent. It is one of the deepest, most invisible forms of childhood trauma, because it often feels like love – even while it destroys the child’s sense of safety and identity.

Children in homes with addiction often internalise the belief that survival depends on controlling chaos. This leads to hypervigilance, anger, and chronic stress – because the nervous system never learns to rest.

When siblings share trauma, they often divide the roles: the saviour, the protector, the emotional caretaker. Both you and Nicholas were carrying roles no child should ever hold.

It is not weakness to break under prolonged trauma; it is biology. The body cannot live in emergency mode forever.“