Zephany (E): Two mothers. One daughter. An astonishing true story.

By Joanne Jowell

The kidnapping of baby Zephany Nurse from the cot beside her mother's hospital bed made headline news. Desperate pleas from her parents to return her safely went unanswered. There was no trace of the baby. For seventeen years, on her birthday, the Nurses lit candles and hoped and prayed. Living not far away from the Nurses, 17-year-old Miché Solomon had just started Matric. She had a boyfriend. She had devoted parents. She was thinking about the upcoming school dance and the dress her mother was going to make for her. She had no idea that a new girl at her school, who bore an uncanny resemblance to her, and a DNA test would shake her world to its foundations. Miché is now 22. This is her story - for the first time in her own words. Told with astonishing maturity, honesty and compassion, it is also a story of what it means to love and be loved, and of claiming your identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9780624086413

Joanne Jowell

With an academic background in English and Psychology, Joanne Jowell began writing professionally at age 28. Her first book, Managing the Quarterlife Crisis: Facing life’s choices in your 20s and 30s, was published in 2003. She lives in Cape Town with her husband, three children and wire-haired dachshunds. I am Here is her seventh book.  

Book preview

Joanne Jowell

Zephany

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 Hidden One.

This story is replete with double meanings and duplicate functions. There are at least two of everything, whether in nuance or role: mothers, fathers, families, protagonist identities. It’s very confusing. For seventeen years, the heart-breaking case was delineated around three main parts: distraught mother Celeste Nurse, devastated father Morné Nurse, abducted baby Zephany Nurse. Minor characters emerged from time to time – police investigators, false leads, shadowy nurse-figures – but the playbook line-up was pretty clear and limited. Then out came The Truth, and the story, once a three-tiered twig, quickly grew a tangle of roots and branches. It was no longer feasible to simply classify the one side of the family as ‘biological’ because how, then, to refer to the other side? Adoptive? Artificial? Pseudo?

This was made all the more baffling by the fact that ‘baby’ Zephany, while no longer a baby, was not yet of legal adult age (18) and could therefore not be identified by anything other than the name by which she had always been known: Zephany Nurse. And if Zephany could not be identified, then neither could her kidnapper with whom she had been living all this time and whose family name she shared. Identifying Lavona and Michael Solomon would point the needle directly at Miché Solomon, their only daughter and the unwitting kid at the heart of a kidnapping.

The media developed its own strategy to help keep lines from crossing. They built a neat wall down the middle of the story and grouped the characters into two camps: real and steal. Real-mom Celeste Nurse and real-dad Morné Nurse; steal-mom (Lavona Solomon) aka the kidnapper, and steal-dad (Michael Solomon) aka the kidnapper’s husband, though exactly who had done the stealing and who else knew about it was still to be determined over the course of a criminal trial. Throughout, the main character had only one name: Zephany.

Journeying down the twisted pathways of this story, I’ve relied heavily on the real/steal categorisation. But I just couldn’t seem to get it right. In every interview or conversation about the story, I’d find the characters caught up in a frenzied two-step, crossing this way and that through my mind and on my page. Real and steal would merge and separate without warning, like the wax in a lava lamp, changing density and viscosity depending on just how much heat was being applied. I wondered if it was the terminology that was confusing me, and I tried to replace real with ‘biological’ and steal with ‘who raised her’: Celeste, the biological mom vs Lavona, the mom who raised her. All that did was side-track me with the definition of ‘mom’ and the question around what classifies one. Are mothers born or made? Are they the start-line or the finish? A default position or an earned one? Are they the point of origin, the journey or the destination? Never mind a two-step, this was a full-blown jitterbug!

I kept going back to the protagonist of the story, assuming that, as confusing as this must be for me, it must be infinitely more so for her. But as I made my way through the story’s many tentacles, I came to understand that my confusion about who’s who is not a mirror of Zephany’s own confusion. It’s a foil. To Zephany Nurse, no, to Miché Solomon, her steal-mom IS her real-mom. For the attachment she feels to her, the mom who raised her may as well be the mom who gave birth to her. Furthermore, Miché Solomon has no problem with being Miché Solomon, so how can she be found if she was never lost?

For close on two decades, Zephany Nurse captured our hearts and minds. Celeste and Morné’s tireless efforts to find her ensured that, though her annual birthday candle went unlit for seventeen years, the singular ring of her newborn name never entirely disappeared from public consciousness. Zephany – wafting like the gentle breeze of the west wind along a trail run cold. Until the day that zephyr turned tornado.

We think we know her – this mythical creature risen like a phoenix, emerging unscathed from a kidnapped past. There she was! Hidden in plain sight for all these years. Though we are yet to hear her voice or see her face, though our image of her is still that of a day-old babe in arms, though we call her mom Celeste and her dad Morné and her sister Cassidy and her Zephany, we think we know her.

For close on two decades, we have been fed the story of Zephany Nurse from every perspective other than that of Zephany Nurse. But Zephany is a figment – a newborn-shaped hole seared into memory by trauma. Miché Solomon – now there’s the blood and guts; there’s the beating heart of the story.

But we haven’t yet heard that story. Isn’t it about time we did?

Chapter 1

With the particular dramatic irony due to true-life stories, my first interview with Miché Solomon kicks off with a child’s cry. ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommyyyyyyyyy,’ bawls her two-year-old daughter Sofia as she is carried off in the opposite direction from the subject of her attachment. Her crying reverberates in the near-empty corridors of the mid-week shopping mall, just outside the Blue Route Mugg & Bean where Miché and I have arranged to meet.

Miché tosses her head and keeps walking towards the restaurant entrance. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, more to herself than to me. ‘She’s with my daddy. She’ll be okay.’

‘Do you want to go and settle her?’ I ask, happy to wait though the cries are definitely subsiding.

‘No, if she’s with my daddy, it’s fine. As long as it’s him. She’ll be happy soon.’

I hadn’t had much time to greet her father – just a quick handshake over Miché’s brief introduction to ‘my daddy, Michael’. He gave me a soft smile and a gentle nod before taking over the helm of Sofia’s pram and steering her away, leaving me and Miché to talk in the relative privacy of the restaurant’s only couch.

Miché lowers herself slowly into a leather cushion beaten with age and overuse. It sinks deeper than expected and she giggles as she tries to stop herself from wallowing. I’ve only just discovered that she is pregnant again, and quite far along, so her mobility isn’t quite what you’d expect of a 21 year old.

Not that I know what to expect. This is only the second time that I am meeting Miché, the first being an official introduction by our publisher, which was more about Miché vetting me as her biographer than about me gauging her as my subject. I’m as virginal to this territory as the rest of us, having known of her only as Zephany Nurse, the kidnapped baby now found, and living a stone’s throw from her biological family. But you can’t interview a figment. I’m here today to interview Miché Solomon, the real McCoy.

Miché orders a hot chocolate, which comes piled with whipped cream. She eats the top of the white spirals with a long spoon and stirs in the rest. She excuses herself for not being as made up as usual – ‘pregnancy and being a mom isn’t great for my weight or my looks’ – but it’s easy to see how a blow-wave to her honeyed mane, a slick of ruby to her delicate lips, and a pair of glossy stilettos to offset her curvaceous figure would earn her the J.Lo comparisons which she laughingly indulges.

Frankly, I’m happier to see a Miché without a façade. We’re finally getting to hear the other side of the Zephany Nurse story. We want bare-faced rather than airbrushed, in-the-flesh rather than in-the-news.

MICHÉ:

I look like my father’s family, like Michael’s family. They are all tall and some are quite fair-skinned, so I’ve grown up with the idea that I look like his side of the family.

As a little girl, I had a very strong bond with my daddy. I still do. I was more adventurous with him; we’d go to the beach, or jogging, or for drives, because my mom would be home in the kitchen or doing household stuff. I could speak to him honestly, and more to him than anyone else about certain things.

I see him now with my daughter and it’s just like it was for me. He’ll take her to the beach, or if I am busy with something, he takes her for a drive or an ice-cream. If I reprimand her and tell her, ‘Don’t do that stuff, that’s being a naughty girl,’ then he is the one to comfort her – all the time, as if it’s his own baby. She’ll probably end up calling him Daddy.

I really was a daddy’s girl. I still am. It frightens me if my dad should die or if he can’t help himself anymore – who am I going to depend on emotioinally? I’m grateful to have him as a father, really I am.

My dad is an apprentice electrician, and he was working that day when Lavona said she gave birth to me at Retreat Hospital. It was a normal birth, so she didn’t have to stay long in hospital. I once asked my mom why there aren’t any hospital pictures of me in my baby album. She said, ‘Nobody was there to take pictures.’ I know my dad was working but I did find it strange that nobody even went with her when she went into labour. You’d want support at a time like that. I felt sad for her.

So my dad came home from work and there I was.

At the time, we were living in Sea Winds. We stayed there until I was about three or four and then we moved to Hillview. We moved because my mom had a miscarriage. She was pregnant after having me. I remember coming home from crèche one day and she was just on the bed, crying and crying. I questioned my dad when I was a bit older: ‘Daddy, why was Mommy crying that day?’ He told me that she had lost her baby.

My mom said she needed a new environment, and that’s when we moved to Hillview.

I remember going to school for the first time. It’s actually one of my saddest memories. When it came time for my mommy to let me go by the door, I didn’t want her to leave. I was crying so loud, like, ‘I don’t know these people, I don’t know these children – you need to sit with me in class.’ I remember I cried the whole entire day that she had to fetch me early.

Back in those days, my daddy used to drink. But when I was thirteen years old, I got very sick with meningitis. I was in hospital, having a lumbar puncture, and that was the turning point for my dad. He couldn’t handle seeing me like that and he made a religious vow: if God would make me better, my dad would stop his drinking and stop going around with his friends. And he did. He hasn’t had a drink since – and I’m now 21 years old.

Growing up, we often had family gatherings and they would always be at our house because that’s just how my mom was: she would always bring everyone together. She is the eldest and she felt strongly that family must be together, stick together, spend time together.

I grew up very selfish. My aunty and them would always say that nobody was ever allowed to push me around or speak badly to me because my mom would always back me up. I grew up with the selfishness of an only child, even though my brother Gerald was there.

Gerald is actually my cousin, but I call him my brother because he grew up in our home. He’s my mom’s sister’s son and my mother raised him – he’s 31 years old now. He was with my mom before she and Michael even met. So my mom took him in when he was about a year or two because his mom couldn’t afford to raise him, and I think the dad wanted to give him up for adoption. When the social worker came to see them, my mom said: ‘Give him here, I’ll raise him, and I’ll support him.’ When she met my dad, he just came to know that this is Lavona’s son. So Gerald would call my mom ‘Mommy’ and he would call his own mom by her name.

Although my brother lived with us and was always there, he is ten years older than me so we didn’t really have a friendship. I know he used to take me places and he will always tell people, ‘Don’t mess with my sister,’ but it was never a bonding relationship. Gerald had his own room, he had girlfriends. He was extremely close with my mom.

So I always felt like an only child because I was basically treated as one.

My earliest memory is of going camping – I have a picture of me and my dad sitting on a rock at Soetwaters camp site. We used to go every year until a certain age, I can’t remember what age. It was my immediate family and my cousins, my brother’s friends – we’d all go in summer time. It was so nice. My dad and his friends would make potjie. I loved to swim and stay for hours in the water. My older cousin had to swim with me and she would literally be shivering, but I would always tell her: ‘You’re not getting out, you’re going to stay in with me till I get tired.’ She’d be shaking from cold, but she would never leave me alone in the water.

I don’t mind the cold. My dad and I used to go to St James beach and we’d swim even when it was raining. It was so much fun. I could spend hours in the sea. I always wondered what was out there, past the horizon. I’m a very curious person. I used to like a good mystery … that was until my life turned out to be a whole mystery of its own, strange and full of secrets.

Gerald moved out of home when he was about 23, at the same time that we moved to another house, in Gladiola Road. I was thirteen and I went to high school that time. I had always had my cousins around – obviously not knowing that they’re not my cousins – and that’s who I’d go out with. When I got to high school, I started making new friends who were older and even in Matric. I didn’t hang out with the cousins as much anymore because it was all about friends at school. I started wearing short dresses and heels. My mom is a seamstress and she’d make me dresses. Sewing is where she got her income, like she would do children’s tracksuits for school and sport. She sewed at home – we had a section where her working area was – and she made all sorts of things: pyjamas, onesies for the children, dresses. Here – I think I have a picture of one of the dresses she sewed for me when I was about sixteen or seventeen.

* * *

Miché turns her phone to show me a picture which could just as well have fallen from a modelling catalogue. Admittedly, it’s more about the bod than the dress, though the dress looks catalogue worthy too. The only fitting response is a wolf-whistle, but since I’ve never mastered that, I settle for an emphatic, ‘Yowzers!’

Miché laughs. ‘That’s when I still had a body! Hopefully I’ll get it back some day.’

MICHÉ:

You can see that the dresses were all short, hey? She didn’t mind making them like that, she just wanted me to be responsible. My daddy and my brother would say, ‘Why are you wearing that?! Where are you going? It’s cold outside, put on a jean or something!’ but my mom would let me wear what I wanted, just always telling me to be responsible.

My mom isn’t the angry type. Like if I was late for stuff, or lazy, she’d never shout and say, ‘Get up, get moving.’ But at the same time, she didn’t let me get away with it and she would know how to make me feel guilty. She’d be more like: ‘Do you want to stay at home forever? Do you want to go work at Checkers? You can go work at Checkers if you see yourself there. You can live here for the rest of your life and travel with a bus to Checkers. It’s your choice.’

I always used to be smart about how I did things because I didn’t need to go behind my parents’ back. They were upfront and made sure I understood the consequences; then they’d leave the choices to me.

That’s still the type of relationship I have with my dad. He’ll say, ‘You know what’s right and wrong, you need to do what’s best for you,’ not like, ‘You keep making stupid mistakes, and you’re silly for doing this.’ I appreciate it because that’s how I’ve learned to grow up. I don’t feel I have to hide things because my daddy’s going to skel. I don’t feel pressured because of fear of what my mommy’s going to do. Just afraid of disappointment.

I was a cheeky child, but I never wanted to disappoint her.

Even in high school she used to tell me and my brother, ‘You