An unexpected touch of love

I have been unmotivated to post anything on my blog for the past two weeks. Meanwhile, I have had lengthy conversations with my friends and colleagues about love. I started to feel that perhaps I was overdoing this. Maybe I am overcompensating for the time I should have thought and talked about love beyond the intellectual comprehension of love from reading Mills and Boon or blurting out the words 'I love you' when I did not understand what I was talking about or what love meant.

In any case, yesterday, I experienced something beautiful because I was at it again, talking about love. That provided some motivation to post something.

I was at the Champs Bar in Grahamstown with a friend, Vuyo. He took me out and around as part of my farewell because I am concluding my postdoctoral fellowship with Rhodes University. So as we were out having a few drinks, I met two ladies and started a casual chat. We then talked about how apartheid damaged love relations for black people through the disruption of family life and contributed to the phenomenon of absent fathers.

As we talked, one of the ladies opened up about her relationship with her father. Her story was that her father had completed his degree course at Rhodes University and became a teacher. However, when she was about ten years old, tragedy struck. Her father developed a psychiatric illness that caused him to exhibit violent behaviour. He became regarded as a danger to society, so he could not stay at home. I did not get the details about whether he was institutionalised. However, he sometimes came home, and when he did so, he would go for her. While his illness caused him to be violent to all others, his behaviour toward her was completely different. He was tender, caring and protective of her. But as soon as someone realised he was there with her, they would chase him away to protect her from him.

She appeared emotional when she said something like, "I knew my dad remembered me." She believed he remembered that she was his daughter and that was why he was never violent toward her.

I was touched listening to her story. Then, spontaneously, I said something like, "I believe your dad LOVED you". She appeared somewhat taken aback. I repeated that statement that her dad loved her, which is why he behaved like that.

I did not expect it, but she became overwhelmed and shed tears. Now it was my turn to be taken aback. Then what she said to me was even more unexpected because she said something like, "Thank you, you are the first person to think of my situation differently, that my dad loved me." And she thanked me more than once during our continuing conversation.

All this time, she had lived with this conflict within herself. She knew that her dad loved her, but no one validated this because, to everyone else, her dad was a violent man and a menace to society, a person not capable of love. So she could never admit to herself that her dad loved her. When I affirmed that her story sounded to me like her dad loved her, it validated what she had already known but had not had the courage to admit in the face of all the voices that labelled her father a bad person.

So, I was thinking about the experience this morning and told myself that it is because I am crazy about love that I unexpectedly touched someone. I believe that if we are crazy about love, we touch people, and sometimes in ways we would not expect.