I am the spitting image of my mother. She gave me her big eyes, which sent me a hundred signals per second. When I was a child, her eyes were the traffic lights in public situations. They told me when to stop, pause, or go ahead with whatever action I intended. We had a telepathic connection, my mother and I. One day, I imitated her eye language in the mirror, and they spoke. That day, I understood how she gave them to me.

Eyes were not the only things my mother gave me. My nose ridge follows hers into the deep valley that partitions our upper lip. It is shaped into perfect kissable lips – but my mother has never kissed me. I would often stare at them with admiration as she smiled, hissed, or pouted. When she had red lipstick on, they looked like they were on fire—melting fire.

I remember sneaking into her room to apply the lipstick. My lips looked so good that I got lost in my reflection in the mirror till she found me. She beat the living daylight out of me. I didn’t understand why she would punish me with such bitterness for trying to look like her. My mother says I am not like her. She says I am stubborn like my father. Whenever I complained about her hitting me, she said my father taught me to talk back at her. She said I wanted to boss her around, something other children dared not to do to their mothers. So, I swallowed my thoughts and chorused like a tape recorder playing on a loop, “Yes ma.”

Everything my mother says is correct. She is never wrong. As I grew older, I tried to avoid my mother’s wrath through acceptance. Before I could realize it was gone, my love for her wandered far away. My acceptance became an avoidance of her presence altogether. Even when we lived in the same house, I was distant.

These days, we have begun to get closer in a way that makes me want to flee. The subject of marriage has turned her into a goddess of wrath. It didn’t matter if I was doing well in my career or business; if I didn’t have a king, I could not become a queen. I must leave the kitchen her husband got for her and find my own. But I cannot leave my father’s house because I am unmarried. Single women without anyone to watch over them must not rent houses. I must not cook the food a certain way because that’s how single women cook. I do not know how to clean. I use too much soap. I do not use the right lid to cover the pot. There is a speck of dust left on the floor after I said I swept it. I do not smile at strange men who come into our house without knocking.

My anger would boil over like ewedu cooked with potash. Its foam rose from my throat but would never leave my mouth. It dared not. If it did, my mother would be the most unfortunate of all mothers. One whose daughter has gone wayward because she wasn’t well trained. One who will now see her daughter go to hell because Satan has taken over her life through her daughter.

I had gone out into the world and learnt that everybody makes mistakes. I have seen my mother make many, many mistakes. Mistakes she always had excuses for. Sometimes, she didn’t bother to explain. Why would she? Who would a mother explain her mistakes to? Who is above her?

One day, my mother was transferring oil into a bottle. I advised her to use a funnel. She refused. She said she could do it without the funnel. She is not a child. I watched as she poured it with careless expertise. Halfway, she lost her balance, and the oil slurped onto the body of the bottle and the floor. The bottle fell over too, creating a mess. She raised her eyes at me. Those big stabbing eyes that told me what to do when I was a child. I stared back. I had those eyes too. “Ehen? Didn’t I warn you?” I started. “If I was the one that made this kind of mistake, the whole world will hear that I am wasting food. You will say I don’t know how it feels to work for money. Can you see yourself?” I hissed, swiping her face with my own big eyes and looking away. Two seconds passed, and my mother froze, unblinking. My body moved into action. I picked up the bottle and began to wipe the oil, trying to save as much as possible. I had not said a word. Those words formed in my head and stayed in my throat. They did not come out.

But my mother was different when she took me to her friends’ gatherings. She was a proud peacock, and I was her feather. She would tell her friends about how my business was booming. How I was well-behaved and took care of the home. “My baby girl is not like all those children who didn’t face their studies in school. Children nowadays have grown up to be something else and it shows.” She would brag.
She would call me “Baby Girl.” Me.

“And you’re going to get an award for your poem next month, aren’t you?” she would place her hand with concern in her voice, care in her eyes and teeth in her smile. I would show some teeth too, but I could not smile. I would look at all her friends, their necks stretched out, to hear my response so they could gossip later. I would then read my mother’s eyes. That is where the answer lies. Our telepathy would turn on like a light bulb, and I would reply, “Yes ma.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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