Hold The Line

 Author: Kim Stephens
Publisher: Tracey McDonald
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
​Like many, I learnt a lot over the pandemic period. About vaccination queues and denialists, about politics-in-the-time-of-panic, relationships, life, love and everything else, including the beastly virus itself. But mostly about myself. I was not alone. In her book Hold The Line, Kim Stephens appears to have been similarly educated. Identified on the back cover thus: 'After three children, two 

divorces, a gradual sexual awakening, Kim found herself at 40 something virtually unemployed, with all the time in the world to write, sip gin and study a general response to one of the world’s most draconian lockdowns’. I don’t know where she got the gin in those dark, dry days, but Kim sure knows how to write. Her book is a chuckle, a weep, utterly relatable and an education in itself, on so many levels.
So what is it all about – and how did it begin? Well, first part – it’s a series of facebook posts written between April 2020 and April 2022 and interspersed with what are called ‘observations’ or reflections on, for eg: Truth, Cele, Marriage, Body Issues, Running etc etc. Second part – it began, sort of, in January 2016 with a facebook post that went viral called Dear Mr President, I think it’s time you go for a run. It suggested that if CR hit the streets he might see the country for exactly what it is. The piece was republished, to much acclaim, in Brent Lindeque’s Good Things Guy as Brent himself reveals in his foreword.
It was her own running that triggered the Dear Mr President post, and in the dedicated chapter she says declares that ‘it changed every element of me.’ Like some people put the kettle on in moments of stress, Kim ran.
In a subsequent irresistible fb post, dated May 2020, she puts South Africans into 10 categories and in another chapter, South Africa and Power, she says ‘I love this country with all my heart but sometimes it’s an unfathomable shit show.’ So you see where she’s at in terms of social commentary.
But she gets more personal. In a chapter called Can we skip to the good part, she says ‘My very available parents have been with me for so many life traumas, celebrations and realisations…but… I wish I had been able to anchor my truth sooner. I’ve been through many journeys of therapy…and in my most recent I was diagnosed as having ADHD.’ She describes her first teenage pregnancy and goes on to describe how she met a beautiful, strong warm-hearted woman with a six-year old daughter’ and eventually found ‘absolute peace in my gayness’. These are open and honest reflections.
Towards the end of the book she shares some of her life learnings, earned the hard way, not least coping with pregnancy just prior to writing matric. Also, ‘You can be straight as Bok de Blerk on national braai day, and still be chilled about gay people having the right to get married.’
Finally she thanks everyone who has supported and loved her through it all. But the lesson I learned from Kim’s writing is that as a parent you must accept the fact that you can open doors for your kids, but they will choose which ones they want to go through, and how. But also that whatever kindness, hardness, wisdom, truth or lie you put in is most often what will come out – and it seems to me that while that Kim may well have had a lot of privilege in her life (which she owns to several times), she has also had a great deal of love, care and role models that have given her the freedom to share and to be.
Very finally, this book may represent a moment in time in our country, and in one woman’s life, but it has some enduring insight.  
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