Joanne Jowell - Zephany: Two mothers. One daughter. An astonishing true story

Joanne Jowell

Zephany

Tafelberg

MICH SOLOMON:

I want to dedicate this book to Lavona and Celeste.

Also to love. And hope.

And to people who want to forgive, but cant.

JOANNE JOWELL:

For Phoenix, always rising:

Youre no myth, but surely a legend.

With love and pride.

You think you know a person. Especially your own mother, right?

You know when shes angry or sad or broke or planning a sur prise party. Shes so bad at surprises, your mom. You might not know exactly what shes up to, but you know shes up to someth i ng.

Its sweet. She just cant hide her own excitement for you . Its not as if she has a tell-tale twitch or a secret spot for presents- in-waiting. Its just that, after all these years, you know her so darn well.

You think you know a person. Until you dont.

Zephany Nurse thought she knew her mother. Until her mother turned out not to be her mother.

In all fairness, Zephany Nurse didnt know she was Zephany Nurse either until the day she found out that her mother was not her mother, her father was not her father, and she who had always only known herself as one Mich Solomon was in fact a whole other person altogether.

Lets backtrack.

On 28 April 1997, baby Zephany Nurse was born to parents Celeste and Morn Nurse at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.

On 30 April 1997, baby Zephany disappeared from the hospital. An exhausted Celeste Nurse had taken a nap. She woke to find her baby gone, apparently stolen by a woman posing as a nurse whom Celeste recalled seeing standing near the babys cot just before she dozed off.

Five days after Zephanys birth, Celeste and Morn left the hospital without their daughter. Their search to find her lasted seventeen years.

Mich Solomon, born 30 April 1997, grew up in a happy home, the only biological child of Lavona and Michael Solomon of Retreat, Cape Town. An attractive teenage girl, she entered her Matric year at Zwaanswyk High School in 2015 amidst swirling rumours of a doppelgnger who had recently joined the schools Grade 8

class. Mich befriended young Cassidy Nurse who, she agreed, did look a lot like her and seemed to enjoy the company of the older girls.

Unaccustomed to especially positive or negative attention at school, Mich was mildly surprised to be called to the principals office on an ordinary school morning. But mild surprise turned to brutal bombshell when Mich learned, right there in that office on that not-so-ordinary day, that her life was one big lie. Lavona and Michael were not her real parents.

Mich Solomon was not her real name, and she would not be going home that night.

You think you know a person. Especially your own mother, right?

Until your mother turns out to be your kidnapper.

Its confusing enough to get your head around it all when youre you or me, on the outside looking in. Imagine the confusion for the young woman at the heart of it all.

Mich is not her birth name, though it is the one on her birth certificate.

Mich is not the name used by outsiders, though it is the one used by insiders who think they know her.

Mich is not the name that weve been using to identify her since the story broke, but it is the one by which she identifies herself, and the name that she has chosen to keep.

And it is the name she is revealing today, having hidden it for long enough.

As we speak, a ground-breaking court order is in the process of unravelling one which has protected the identity of Mich Solomon for the three years since she legally became an adult.

The lawyers and social workers who fought to secure her this protection, enacted so soon after her world came tumbling down, did more than shield her from the piercing eye of the media. They

gifted her with the space and privacy to manage a crisis which even the most experienced of psychoanalysts would be hard pressed to understand. Infancy, toddlerhood, adolescence, adulthood

none of these holds a candle to the psychosocial catastrophe for which Mich was presumably headed.

Its safe to say that we all encounter an identity crisis at some point in our lives, usually at a time of transition. How well we navigate it depends on our maturity, and on the coping mechanisms we have developed through our lives up to that point. Those strategies are the shining stars in the psychological firmament: grit, resilience, communication, self-esteem, mindfulness, affirmation, faith I could fill a page with all the buzzwords we dont even know we have (or lack) until the opportunity presents itself for us to practise them.

Hopefully, pubescent acne, bitchy girls and Grade 9 subject choices were a good dry run for Mich as far as crises go because heres the clincher for her particular identity impasse: she never saw it coming. When Mich Solomon met Zephany Nurse and discovered that they were the same person, well theres hardly a pipe big enough to smoke that one.

I dont mean to lecture you on modern psychology and the relevance of Eriksons theory on the stages of psychosocial development, but you wouldnt be reading this book if you werent stunned by what is, essentially, a feat of psychological wonder: how did Mich Solomon discover her true identity and survive with her wits intact? Can a seventeen-year-old girl, on the eve of matriculation and the cusp of adulthood, come through the psychological trauma of mistaken stolen altered betrayed misled identity, and keep it together? Of what tough stuff must she be made to ever trust another living soul? Surely she lost the plot, went off the rails, spun out? Wouldnt you, if you found out that your mother had lied about your identity your whole life long?

If the garden-variety identity crisis is about loss (of self-concept and who youve always understood yourself to be) and confusion (about who you really are), then Michs case is a forest. In one giant felling she lost her mother, her family, her lineage, her name. She lost the physical and the existential.

I learned something interesting about Erik Erikson the psychologist who coined the term identity crisis and outlined the eight stages of development from infancy through adolescence to late adulthood. Erik himself was raised by a man who turned out not to be his real father; like Mich, he lived a formative part of his life under unwitting false pretences. His mother fell pregnant out of wedlock and fled her home town, leaving Eriks biological father unnamed. She later married Eriks paediatrician, who adopted him and gave him his surname

Homburger. Erik only learned the truth in late childhood and remained scarred by the knowledge for the remainder of his life.

The development of identity consumed both his personal and

professional lives. His daughter would later remark that he only established his psychoanalytic identity when he created and assumed his own surname Erikson.

Aside from the obvious similarity with Michs story of discovering The Truth about her parentage, the Erikson story begs that seminal question to which any identity crisis sticks like chewed gum to the underside of a school desk: Whats in a name?

Zephany. Mich. The two names are not quite as different or as far apart as they sound.

Zephany has its roots in Hebrew and means The Lord has hidden.

Mich is the feminine form of Michael and means likeness of God.

But dig a little deeper, below the surface of the proper nouns, and youll find Mich in the form of a verb an action word meaning to sulk, to hide, to conceal.