Loss convinces you there is no way back. Recovery, when you dare imagine it, feels like it should arrive all at once. This Wasn’t the Plan knows better — and shows you what the long, unglamorous work of rebuilding actually looks like.
By Nkosinathi Mashobane
Some books are read and then quietly set aside, filed away without ceremony, unremarkable. And then there are books that refuse to leave you alone — books that embed themselves in the corners of your thoughts, resurfacing days later in the most unexpected moments — in the middle of a mundane task, in the quiet before sleep — as if they have taken up residence in you and made themselves at home.
This Wasn’t the Plan by Nthabeleng Mokitimi-Dlamini chooses the latter, and does so without hesitation.
Her account of estrangement, single motherhood, and recovery uses restraint to its advantage. It resists spectacle. There are no dramatic flourishes or attempts to inflate pain. Instead, the book settles into something quieter—making it more convincing.
At its centre is a familiar rupture: the end of a marriage and the sudden, disorienting shift that follows. Mokitimi-Dlamini is less interested in this event than in its aftermath: the slow, private work of carrying on—raising children, keeping routines, and managing emotional debris.
She writes about heartbreak as a process rather than a moment. Not an explosion, but an erosion. A gradual unravelling that leaves one navigating a life outwardly intact but altered in ways difficult to name. It is a measured approach that allows the material to breathe.
The book is most compelling when it explores the internal shifts after loss. Bitterness, for instance, is not depicted as obvious anger, but as something quieter and more insidious—an emotional posture masking as self-preservation. The distinction is subtle, but important, and is handled with care.
Equally effective is the section Mokitimi-Dlamini terms “the shutdown”—a state of emotional suspension that many will recognise, even if they have never named it as such. Here, the writing sharpens. The sense of dislocation, of functioning without fully inhabiting one’s life, is rendered with clarity and without exaggeration.
What follows is not redemption in the conventional sense. The book does not pivot towards triumph or neat resolution. Instead, it traces a quieter return—one built through routine, discipline and small acts of re-engagement: cooking a meal, reordering a home, and re-entering the rhythms of parenting. These are not framed as breakthroughs, and that is precisely their strength. They are treated as what they are: necessary, unspectacular, and quietly transformative.
The prose remains accessible throughout, avoiding both sentimentality and abstraction. It is reflective without becoming indulgent, direct without being blunt. There is an awareness of the reader, but not an overreliance on them for validation.
Among the book’s more distinctive choices is the inclusion of personal letters to other women navigating similar circumstances. Where this device can easily become prescriptive, here it does not. Mokitimi-Dlamini grounds each letter in specificity rather than general encouragement, so they read less as instruction and more as recognition — one woman’s clear-eyed account offered to another, without agenda.
Faith is woven into the narrative with a degree of consistency that will resonate with some readers more than others. However, it is presented less as doctrine and more as a framework—a way of making sense of disruption. Crucially, it does not overwhelm the text.
By the final pages, the book does not offer closure so much as recalibration. There is no definitive resolution, no attempt to impose meaning where it may still be forming. What emerges instead is a quieter steadiness—a sense that life, though altered, remains workable.
This Wasn’t the Plan does not attempt to redefine the account of personal upheaval. Its strength lies elsewhere—in its refusal to overstate, in its attention to the ordinary work of rebuilding, and in its understanding that for many readers, recognition carries more weight than reassurance.
Pick it up for the same reasons Mokitimi-Dlamini writes — not for resolution, but for the steadier, more useful thing: clarity about what carrying on actually looks like.