This story involves aspects of addiction and self-harm.
Listen with care. Hey, how are you? And if you say you're fine, I'm gonna
assume you mean, like the acronym. Freaked out, insecure,
neurotic and emotional. So,
have you heard the term life quake? Well, in this podcast,
we talk about life quakes, those unpredictable seismic shifts that,
in time, lead to profound personal growth and empowerment.
Here you can expect heartfelt stories that reveal both the joy and the
discomfort of unexpected change. And I think you're gonna like it
here. My name is Shawn,
and this is something shifted. Today's story belongs to SJ.
The shift for me was having to come face to face with my biggest fear.
On my own. Two small kids facing a future as a
single parent. That was my fear. Doing it alone. That's next.
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This is a story about love. Although it's not a traditional love
story, it's about love, addiction, the fear of not being loved, the kind
of love that can keep you alive. It's about a mother's love,
about facing your greatest fear and learning to love yourself
through it all. I always think of healing as peeling
the onion, and it was time to go to another layer of the onion. I had to.
That's when I realized, stop worrying about I'm traumatizing my kids.
I'm traumatizing my kids and peel them. Can I swear?
Peel the fucking onion. If you're an avid radio listener,
you might recognize Sue's voice from a Cape Town talk radio station.
And based on her accent alone, you'd be correct to assume that she
grew up in the UK, but her accent doesn't reveal the affair her
biological parents had in the 1980s under apartheid's Immorality Act.
In her first book, Killing Caroline, S.J. reveals
the shocking lie created to cover up her birth parents forbidden
relationship and the hurried adoption of their illegitimate
baby named Caroline at birth. She was renamed Sarah Jane after
being abandoned by her birth parents and then adopted by a British couple.
SJ was only seven weeks old, and this history means her family
tree has many branches. Jeepers. Okay. Oh, gosh. So biological mother.
Biological father. Don't know. Biological mother. Do know.
Biological father. And my siblings from him.
I have a half sibling from my biological mother who I don't
speak to. I have adopted an adoptive mother.
My adoptive father has died. My adoptive mum lives in the UK.
Um, I had an adoptive brother. He also died. Where do we get to now?
My current setup is that I am a mom of two children.
So depending on how you look at it, SJ is either one of two,
one of 5 or 1 of eight children. And maybe all this complicated
Branching is why S.J. decided that if she ever had kids herself,
she would do anything to protect them, and also why she did not,
under any circumstance, want to be a single parent.
Let's be clear there are many people who are fantastic single parents who
even seek it out as a life path. But SJ only wanted to parent
with a dedicated partner, and part of that reasoning about
parenting in partnership comes from Suga's original Kwek and not being
raised by her biological parents. And that has had the most profound
impact on me than any other thing in my life that that relinquishment.
It has set up who I am. And why I became.
Why I am the why the way I it's my why.
Largely not that I'm in bondage by that.
I don't feel held hostage these days by that, but it's set in
motion an awful lot of things. Feelings of being less than.
Feelings of not being good enough. My own addictions that spurred
from that. My relationship with my adoptive
mother. So many things. Because it's such a pre-verbal
trauma. There's no, um. You don't exist before trauma
has come into your life. You're seven weeks old.
This is the fundamental fracture, that irreversible quake in life.
SJ has endured many things that would make most of us cower in a corner.
But the one thing that she feared the most.
Being a single parent happened in 2023.
I made the decision when my son was about four months old that I
told my partner, you have to leave. I told you this was a story
about a mother's love. And that part of the story will
become clear. But it's also a story about the kind
of love that keeps us alive, love that wrecks us, and love addiction.
So to appreciate the depth of JJ's decision to become a single parent,
to hold her story in our hearts with empathy.
We need to journey back to 2007, when SJ was 26 years old and in a
rehab clinic. Um, I was in treatment. I was in rehab for various
addictions and behavioral things, behavioral addictions.
And I had I was in a different treatment center,
and I'd started self-harming again in this treatment center.
And that we can't hold you in this space.
We are here for people who've got addictions we can't be dealing with.
You need to go somewhere else for a bit and ended up in a clinic,
um, at but kind of with clinic. And, um, one day there I was,
and I used to have my arms, like, bandage from, from elbow to wrist.
And I was walking down the hallway, and the most attractive man that I'd
ever seen in my whole life walked down the hallway towards me and
literally took my breath away and sparked some sort of hope or joy
or something in me that I hadn't felt for a really long time, like I
was on suicide watch at the time. I was trying to take myself out
every day. It was a really bleak time, and down
the hallway walked this person, and this person is now the father
of my two beautiful children. Nearly 20 something years later.
If you've ever watched a series or a movie where a character is battling
addiction and is in treatment, you'll have seen a health care
professional give that patient very strict instructions to not
develop a romantic relationship, especially not with someone who
is also battling addiction. He was in Kenilworth Clinic for a
heroin detox. He was a heroin addict. You know, they say in these
treatment facilities, you know, no fraternizing. For obvious reasons.
Um, you know, and if you start getting a little bit too close
to somebody, they come in. The nurses used to say,
whatever you're doing, keep doing it. They'd say to him, keep talking
to her. Keep talking to her. Keep talking to her.
We're going to call this man Inva. This is not his real name.
Enver would sit with S.J. every day, holding her hand, talking to her and
giving her a reason to stay alive. That day. He literally saved my life.
At that point, at the age of, what, 2627, when all I was
trying to do at that point was find ways to avoid the nurse.
Escape from the asylum and try and kill myself and that meeting.
At such a profound time of my life that's in there, that's embedded
in my limbic system somewhere. Then there was me and him.
And our relationship has been a very, very complex one.
But suffice to say, we've stayed around each other long
enough to conceive two children. If you've journeyed with addiction
yourself or with someone you love, you'll understand this.
The complexity, the messiness, the realness of a love that
saves and a love that hurts. If you've not lived with or near
addiction, we need you to suspend judgment here and to let
go of any assumptions that you might have about addiction.
Addiction is something that starts as a very useful mechanism
to prevent pain, you know, or might talks about a normal
reaction to an abnormal situation. It is an absolutely direct response
to trauma, whatever that trauma might look like. I know people don't.
People when people say trauma, but nothing ever happened to me.
Trauma can be a pattern of behavior. It can be a dysfunction.
It can be an event. It can be a number of things.
It can be an abandonment, whatever it might be. But it is.
The addiction begins as a as a protection mechanism to protect
oneself from that which we want. We want to do that.
We want we want for that to happen. But then because we are not,
then as addicts, given the adequate tools to deal with the thing in a
safe way, that becomes our safe way until it's no longer serving
us in that way until that. That looks as if it's the problem.
It's never the problem. It's the unresolved trauma for
for all of us. People can get very hooked on.
Why don't you just stop? Um. Because it's a disease of the mind,
and it's a disease of the body. It's a it's a physical thing.
And then it's also a, you know, the the mind is such a powerful thing.
Ever since she started treatment, S.J. has been committed to healing.
And part of healing is learning to understand the mechanisms
that she'd been using to build a life around that original
fracture of abandonment. As much I've been clean and sober for
18 years, but my biggest addiction is codependence the love addiction
stuff, the attachment essentially, which all kind of probably harps
back to. I'm not probably. I know it does to being adopted
at seven weeks old and all of that kind of stuff.
SG has been committed to her healing journey and working on her sobriety
since she left the rehab clinic, and Enver continued to be a very
important person in her life. And in 2019,
they decided to start a family. When the 12 week scan came around,
the couple found out they were having a baby girl.
It was also in that time that SG found out Enver had relapsed and
was using heroin again. And then I didn't see him again
until the day before I gave birth. So I went through an entire pregnancy
essentially completely alone. It was horrendous and to the
point where I'd called my brother in Jo'burg and said,
I'm going to give birth on my own. Can you come? And he said, yeah.
And he came down from Jo'burg, and we were at our mews and berg, and
my arm and my ankles are so swollen. And I was and I was giving birth
on the Wednesday. It was Tuesday evening and I said,
I've got to go and put my feet in the water.
And I had sent a message to to Envers mom, who had also completely
ignored me throughout my pregnancy, his entire family. It was awful.
And I sent a message and I said, tell your son his daughter's
being born tomorrow. I hadn't heard a word from
anybody for months, and I wasn't expecting anything to happen.
And my phone rang and it was him. And I hadn't heard his voice for
six months. And he said, hi, babe. And I said, I'm giving you a 48
hour pass to come and watch your daughter being born for her sake,
so that when she's older, I can say your father bore witness
to your entry into the world. And so the next morning I got up at,
you know, 6:30 in the morning, and I went to the house, his
parents house, to go and fetch him. And he looked like you would probably
imagine a heroin addict who'd been on the street for six months,
looked ill fitting clothes, very, very thin. He looked shocking.
And we got in the car and we were driving to the hospital to
go and have a baby. And as we were, as I was driving,
he said, we need to stop. You need to stop here.
And about 50 minutes later, he came back on, came back into
the car without his shirt on, and he had literally sold the shirt
off his back for heroin to use before because he wouldn't make it through.
He wouldn't make it through the birth without having use XJS.
Vision of parenthood was coming apart at the seams.
She was alone, without any family in Cape Town
with a baby and a partner in active addiction while the world was in
the grips of a global pandemic. We had managed to claw back through
the universe's grace, uh, a 12 step programs, an awful lot of therapy.
We'd managed to start piecing together some semblance of of a life.
We'd got to a point where he'd got clean and life started to look
like things could be really good. At this point,
Enver was two years sober, and that's still considered early recovery.
SJ desperately wanted another baby, so they decided to add to their
family of three. Their son was born in December
of 2022, and although Enver was technically still sober, SJ had
started noticing some warning signs. But I was noticing that the things
that are required for somebody to do to stay clean and not just physically
clean, but emotionally sober, which for people in recovery is
very often 12 step meetings. It's a connection to we talk about
a higher power. It's connection. You know, it's Johann Hari says
the opposite of of addiction isn't sobriety, it's connection.
And I started to notice that he wasn't doing those things.
And the fear that welled up in me of I can't be a single mom again.
But because SJ had continued to do the inner work in her journey,
she knew full well that the fear came from her own fractures and wounds.
My core is to hang on is not. Don't be abandoned, don't be
abandoned, don't be abandoned. So I'll hang on to things that I
should be letting go of. And so there was.
Yeah, there was the fear of, I can't do this on my own.
Uh, I don't want to do this on my own.
And it was like this monster that was just growing and growing and
growing and growing. Um. And the fear was so multi-layered.
It was. I alone am not enough for my kids,
it was. I'm not going to be able to
protect them from the trauma that I experienced as a child,
that now, as a parent, I'm trying. I will do anything to protect
them from being traumatized. And yet, this is the one thing
that I don't know if I can do. This is the part of the story about a
mother's love, the kind of love that gives you courage to step into fear.
And then when my son was about four months old, I thought,
if things carry on this way, he's going to relapse and I
can't have my kids around that. I was still dealing with the trauma
of of of his using, relapsing, getting clean, relapsing,
getting clean of when our daughter was born and the first couple of
years of her life, I was still processing that in therapy, like what
that was and how crazy that was. And now it had happened again.
And I had not one, but two small children.
And I was the main breadwinner. My biggest fear had just happened.
And yet I was the one that had told him to go. I'd facilitated that.
So that was the quake. The worst thing in the world that
could happen to me as I exist is happening, which is that I am a
single parent and it's all on me. SJ did the hardest thing and
faced her biggest fear. And the wheels, they came off
completely. I don't have family here. And the loneliness and aloneness
of it was breathtaking. I was postpartum.
I was trying to feed a child. You know, I had a kid on the boob.
I had one who was just a little bit over three, whose dad had
disappeared. The idol of her life. So this man who used to tuck her
into bed at night, wake her up in the morning, bath her,
do her hair. Her God had disappeared. And I was trying to deal with that.
His abandonment of us and every abandonment issue in me just
going up, up, up. The truly hard part about this
is that in so many ways, we've lost the essence of the village
that helps raise a child that step in when the parents need help.
Nobody jumps up and down and says, let's come and help everyone just go.
She just has to get on with it. She'll she'll cope because
that's what we do. Except that very often we're not
coping. Not only was S.j not coping. She was also doing a job that
required for her to switch the microphone on and pretend that
she was doing well for the sake of the listeners.
That morning we came breakfast. You know, and do this whole thing
and the mask was exhausting. If you press that button,
the red light goes on and all the luck that you're going through it,
it might as well not be happening. I would come off air and be drained
and also feel like a fraud, because so much of my personality
and so much of what I want to bring to my radio show is authenticity.
But nobody knew what was going on. And how broken I was.
I was just broken. I just used to cry myself to
sleep and into my pillow because I didn't want to wake the kids.
I got sick one day. I was at work. I was on air.
By the time the show started at seven, by the time 10:00,
dripping sweat barely drive home and. And the nanny who was looking
after my kid. God bless the nanny. I mean, she needs a shout out because
she put up with a whole load of shit. She was leaving and I had no one,
and I literally put on Facebook, which I am not.
You know, it's not my thing. I'm here with two kids and I'm
ill and I need help. Strangers turned up to my house.
A friend of mine in Durban called people they had in Milnerton who
came through to the southern suburbs and helped me look after
my kids because I was bedridden. It makes sense why doing
parenting alone was the scariest thing I could imagine.
Remember what she said earlier? That the opposite of addiction is
not sobriety. It's connection. And as a recovering addict,
SJ knew she was choosing to sever connections.
She was signing up to be alone when she told Enver to leave.
And the thing that feeds that loneliness is shame.
An awful lot of people had walked the journey with Enver and I.
And they'd been present for an awful lot of the relapses.
And that he's clean again. And the relapses.
And I felt embarrassed. I thought people would be like, well,
you had a second baby with him. Particularly people who didn't
understand addiction. I felt ashamed. Because most of us do not really
understand addiction. We tend to approach it with
rationality and rules, but it doesn't work like that.
Addiction is such a is such a curious beast.
We talk about it in the rooms as being cunning, baffling and powerful,
in that one assumes if your partner and the father of your children is an
active heroin user, of course you're not going to allow them to have
contact with you and your children. The relapse happens in the mind long
before somebody picks up the drug, whatever that might be.
And we talk about the idea of a dry drunk, somebody not working a program
of recovery, um, but still abstaining from the addictive behavior,
the substance, but not doing the work that allows you to.
You know, addiction is a manifestation of a thing.
It's not the thing. The substance is not the thing.
And you know it again all the time that somebody is not
actively engaged in the behavior. And that switch hasn't gone off
in the brain. I always say, even if, even if
they're not working a program, and I'm saying they but I should
speak for myself as a recovering addict as well.
There's all this, you've still got to do this.
And something in the game, you still you've still there's still hope.
Once the once the addictive behavior that first hit the first.
Whatever it is, all bets are off then.
So even though SJ knew this about addiction, it still felt personal,
like a punch to the gut. I used to go into therapy and just
say, but why? But why? But why? How does he do what I was trying to
get rather than looking at myself? And I think this is where the growth
factor then came for a long time, rather than looking at myself
and what compelled me to stay in a situation in that way.
By this point I was probably 13, 14, or 15 years sober myself.
Most of my friends are recovering addicts.
I know the stuff, but when it's that close to home,
it's almost like you can't. I was trying to make sense of it.
I needed to make sense of it in a way that wasn't just. But you know why?
Because it's addiction. There's nothing else outside of that.
There's nothing. This isn't you. He's not doing this because it's you.
He's not doing it. It's his own journey that he's on.
You know this. But I couldn't. I could intellectualize it,
but I couldn't feel that because it feels so personal.
When somebody is in in addiction, their behavior towards you.
You're so incredulous that somebody can feel that way and
behave that way. You feel as if it must be personal,
and it isn't. You can't. You can jump up and down.
You can swear and shout at them. You can be loving to them.
If somebody's not ready to get well from addiction.
There's nothing you can do. You know I am powerless over
another person in their addiction. And what it forced me to do was
really start doing the work on myself.
It takes enormous courage to choose the path that you fear the most.
Trying to heal when you are going through your own quake.
Your own emotional emotional upheaval. Emotional catastrophe.
Trying to heal for the sake of two little people who are
looking to you for everything. Is one of the hardest things.
And I'm someone you know. I've always been committed to my
recovery. I've always been committed to
emotional growth. Always. So I would I would say to my
therapist every week, my therapist is brilliant.
Thank God for her. Um, I would. Say I'm messing up my kids.
And she would say, SJ, you are committed to doing the work.
You keep showing up, you keep showing up.
And at that time it fell on deaf ears.
I felt like she was just it was lip service.
And I'm paying you to say that. I realize now that she wasn't.
SJ made it through long, lonely nights, many cold Cape Town winters.
Many of the things that she feared the most.
And through it all, the fear of abandonment. Love, addiction.
Love that breaks. Love that heals. SJ has learned to love herself
through the journey. First of all, you can't stop
your kids feeling pain. That's going to happen.
Someone's going to break their heart. Um, this is going to happen.
And the people that are causing the pain might even be you at some point.
What you can do, though, is continue to heal so that when
they come to you and say, this thing you did hurt me,
rather than come from a point of defensiveness and say, well,
I can hold them in that and engage with them in that which is
a gift I was never given, ever. The bond that I have with my kids
now also is just extraordinary. It allows me to keep doing the
healing work, whatever is coming up for me at any given moment.
And that all feeds into being able to just keep doing it a day at a time.
My kids will be okay. I think that's my biggest thing.
Recovery is possible. Recovery is entirely possible.
And I know that because I experience it for myself.
And I know that because I surround myself every day by
hundreds and hundreds of people, probably thousands in my lifetime,
who a day at a time. I live in clean and sober lives.
It is possible. I've seen people come from the
streets. To being happy, present fathers
of their beautiful children. The quake was the biggest gift
that could have ever happened. Today, S.J. lives with her two
beautiful children in the southern suburbs of Cape Town
and has authored two books, Killing Caroline and Mad Bad Love.
Thank you so much for listening to this season of Something Shifted.
We make the show as a labor of love, and because we believe stories
about possibility is just what the world needs to hear.
We'd really love it if you would share something shifted with
others and be part of the shift for someone else too.
And if you really love the show, go ahead and leave it a five star
review and follow something shifted on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
Don't forget to use my code shift 50 at checkout when you place your first
order on you, and you'll get 50% off. All of the links to all of the
things that I've mentioned are in the show notes.
A big thank you to my wife and Executive Producer, Rwanda for
additional writing, and of course, to you for believing in possibility.
We'll be back with more stories later this year.
My name is Shawn, and this is something shifted by.