Zephany. Joanne Jowell

      Tafelberg

      MICHÉ SOLOMON:

      I want to dedicate this book to Lavona and Celeste.

      Also to love. And hope.

      And to people who want to forgive, but can’t.

      JOANNE JOWELL:

      For Phoenix, always rising:

      You’re no myth, but surely a legend.

      With love and pride.

      Prologue

      You think you know a person. Especially your own mother, right? You know when she’s angry or sad or broke or planning a surprise party. She’s so bad at surprises, your mom. You might not know exactly what she’s up to, but you know she’s up to something. It’s sweet. She just can’t hide her own excitement for you. It’s not as if she has a tell-tale twitch or a secret spot for presents-in-waiting. It’s just that, after all these years, you know her so darn well.

      You think you know a person. Until you don’t.

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

      In all fairness, Zephany Nurse didn’t 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 Miché Solomon – was in fact a whole other person altogether.

      Let’s backtrack.

      On 28 April 1997, baby Zephany Nurse was born to parents Celeste and Morné 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 baby’s cot just before she dozed off.

      Five days after Zephany’s birth, Celeste and Morné left the hospital without their daughter. Their search to find her lasted seventeen years.

      Miché 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 doppelgänger who had recently joined the school’s Grade 8 class. Miché 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, Miché was mildly surprised to be called to the principal’s office on an ordinary school morning. But mild surprise turned to brutal bombshell when Miché 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. Miché 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.

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

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

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

      Miché is not the name that we’ve 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 Miché 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 Miché was presumably headed.

      It’s 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 don’t 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 Miché as far as crises go because here’s the clincher for her particular identity impasse: she never saw it coming. When Miché Solomon met Zephany Nurse and discovered that they were the same person, well … there’s hardly a pipe big enough to smoke that one.

      I don’t mean to lecture you on modern psychology and the relevance of Erikson’s theory on the stages of psychosocial development, but you wouldn’t be reading this book if you weren’t stunned by what is, essentially, a feat of psychological wonder: how did Miché 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? Wouldn’t 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 you’ve always understood yourself to be) and confusion (about who you really are), then Miché’s 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 Miché, 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 Erik’s biological father unnamed. She later married Erik’s 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 Miché’s 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: What’s in a name?

      Zephany. Miché. 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’.

      Miché is the feminine form of Michael and means ‘likeness of God’.

      But dig a little deeper, below the surface of the proper nouns, and you’ll find Miché in the form of a verb – an action word meaning ‘to sulk, to hide, to conceal’.

      Zephany, the Lord has hidden.

      Miché, to hide.

      Zephany. Miché. She Who Has Hidden. She Who Has Been Hidden.

      The