Mother's Day

There is a song that I always sing with my girls as I cut their fingernails -- "Tommy Thumb, Tommy Thumb where are you..." and it goes through all the different fingers as you cut each nail "Here I am! Here I am! How do you do?". Songs like these are silly and on the whole largely unimportant, but they become habit, and overtime they shape a childhood, and even a culture. They become strangely significant to childhood and to childhood memories.

One challenge in adopting internationally is that a child is removed from his country of birth. He has to adopt not only a new family, but a new language and culture. His childhood memories will be Canadian, not what they would have been had he remained in South Africa. As a child grows, this can be difficult in developing a sense of identity and a sense of self.

We hope to become a trans-racial family. That is different than being a Canadian family with an adopted South African child. We plan to become a South African-Canadian family. That means all of us, not just our son, but Sara and Leah, and Marc and I, will all be South African-Canadian as well. That is why the gift that Marc and the girls gave me for Mother's Day is so important to me.

Marc and the kids gave me presents on a South African theme. First, they gave me a South African cookbook Recipes from the Hearth: At home with South African icons. It has the favourite recipes of famous South Africans. So...I now have Desmond Tutu's famous "Tutu Chicken" recipe as well as F.W. de Klerk's "Lakhano Domades (Stuffed Cabbage Leaves)". The book also has beautiful pictures and write-ups on each person. This way we can learn a little bit about South Africa. Food is significant in shaping a culture.


My family also gave me two South African CDs, both by a South African group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo -- they're pretty well known and have won many awards throughout the years. The first CD is self titled. It's pretty neat. What I especially like is that it also includes worship songs in Zulu and English.



The second CD is called "Gift of the Tortoise: A Musical Journey through Southern Africa". It is a children's CD and is narrated by Geina Mhlophe who is a famous South African story teller. I listened to this one on Mother’s day with Sara and Leah while Marc was at work. We read the lyrics of the songs and sang along. The songs are very simple; even Leah could sing some of them on the first time. It was quite an incredible moment for me. The girls were entranced with the music and the narration. We talked about each song and danced together during the action songs, and then danced to the slow ones too. We talked about our little baby and how we could sing to him these songs some day.

The gift, for me, and for our whole family, was more than a cool CD. It was a gift of knowledge and of relationship with South Africa, and actually with our South African baby. I will be able to sing our baby traditional South African children’s songs, in his first language and in his second.

The CD even has a “fingernail cutting song”:

Uthikithani, the teeniest of them all
Utembeseya, friend of the wedding ring
Umudeynana, tallest of them all
Umkombabantu, the one who likes to point
Uthupazana, the fat, fat thumb

I look forward to trimming the nails on my son’s beautiful black fingers and singing with him the traditional South African “Finger Dance”. (And I look forward to dancing with him too)

I end this entry with a Zulu blessing. One that I plan to sing while I rock my South African-Canadian boy to sleep:

Hambani kahle
Ukthula makube

Go well
Peace be with you.