In the heart of *Mogajane*, a quiet village brushed with dry winds and rustling tin roofs, lived *Kevin*, a 17-year-old boy often described as "the mistake that never left." His name echoed not with pride, but with frustration in the small two-room house he shared with five others.
Kevin's mother, *Mam'Lerato*, was a woman hardened by life. Raising three children - Kevin and his younger twin sisters - while also housing her unemployed younger brother and sister, left her emotionally drained. Every day, she woke up before the sun, battled with overcrowded taxis to work as a cleaner in a nearby town, and came home too tired to speak, let alone listen.
To her, Kevin was her biggest failure. "Why can't you be like other boys?" she'd mutter. "You're always dreaming… but dreams don't pay rent."
Kevin had grown numb to the sting of her words. The first time she called him "stupid" was when he was only ten, struggling to read in Setswana. The word stuck like a shadow. At school, his teachers overlooked him. At home, his mother avoided him. Only the twins, aged 10, seemed to look at him like a real brother.
But Kevin wasn't foolish. He saw everything. The broken kettle that was never replaced. The nights his mother went to bed without eating. The soft cries behind her closed bedroom door. He knew pain - even if it never made her love him louder.
Still, he forgave her daily. He knew single motherhood was a mountain she climbed with cracked feet and no rope. She was surviving. But *he was living*, and he refused to be defined by her exhaustion.
Each night, under Mogajane's clear skies, Kevin would lie on the cold cement floor and scribble into his school exercise book. Short stories, poems, motivational notes - anything that could breathe life into his dreams. "One day," he wrote, "I'll build a house bigger than pain."
And even though she didn't believe in him, *Kevin believed enough for both of them*.