This book is, in its heart, my version of the story of Elsie Swartz, born Cohen, who lived from 1925 until 2011. Elsie was my mother. She was born in Johannesburg to immigrant Jewish parents, was considered clever at school, but never completed high school. She married my father, Alfred Swartz, in 1951, and they moved to what was then Rhodesia, shortly after they were married. My elder sister Jenny (born in 1952) and I (born in 1955) grew up in what was then Salisbury, before our family returned to South Africa in 1966. Jenny married and had two children (she is now a grandmother) and moved to Australia. I married (twice), have two children and live in Cape Town.

My father was physically disabled (not a word he himself would have used) from birth and died rather young, at the age of 62. He was an engineer, fond of sport, despite living with impairments and pain, and very happily married to my mother. Elsie, for her part, worked as a shorthand typist most of her life, until retirement, following her husband from cement factory to cement factory, wherever his job took him. She was deeply affected by the impact, on his life and hers, of his mother, my grandmother, and his aunt Leah (who preferred to be known as Lea), Granny's younger sister; both were demanding and difficult older women.

Ten years ago I published a book titled Able-Bodied, which dealt with my father's life and its impact on me. Although that book had elements of memoir, it was also a chance for me, as an academic who works in disability studies, to write and think about issues of disability rights and access in southern Africa. This book, similarly, is about my mother, but it is also about other things. Like my mother before me, I am interested in all sorts of things. I am interested in what care is and how we care for one another; I am interested in memory and how we remember; I am interested in identity and how we become (and create) who we are. At different times, I discuss all of these things in this book and I invite you, the reader, to take a bit of a circuitous journey with me.