I watched two children fight on my street today. At night. In the thin blur of light that passed through to the veranda where they gathered, I saw the toggle begin slowly and build up to a crescendo; words flew, and then the slaps followed. A mother rushed in to separate the fighting children. She was scolding someone, then another, probably asking her child first why she would behave so uncouth and then to the other child, “Who gave you the audacity to lay a hand on my child!” I remembered my mother at that moment. How she built a cage of a house and locked us in it. How wicked she was to not let growing children explore the freedom of the outside, of neighbours. Then I wonder, if my mother was less strict with us, would she have found us in similar situations growing up? Bloodied noses, black eyes, a child’s lifeless body on the street because she was not good enough as a parent to raise five children. I understand my mother better at this moment. I appreciate her too.

I asked my mother to tell me a little about when I was younger. She said I talked a lot, always with a quick retort, a gossip, or a report. She said I started talking early, a pride on her part, her child will grow to be a great teacher just like her. People who talked early had that gift. But I was a fragile child; I almost died in a fire accident and had way too many of those convulsions, she was always scared. Above all, she said I loved to pray. I could go on for hours and hours at it. I am not sure about the things I said when I prayed, but I remember they made her happy. It pleased me to hear her tell everyone that her daughter was a prayer warrior.

Have I stopped looking for ways to please my mother? Did it even matter to her that I played much of life by rules because I wanted to please her? I wonder now if she’s ever felt that burden, the weight of a daughter to be everything her mother has ever wanted. Maybe she has. Maybe it is why she wears this cloak of strength, for every time she had to rise to expectations and be everything her mother must have taught her a woman must be. I am not the praying, talkative, eloquent daughter my mother was once proud of, so maybe I have failed her.

Do you know that the worst pain next to being burnt alive, is from childbirth? I read it somewhere. It’s ironic. For a child to be brought into this world, it must tear through the vaginal opening of their mother, leaving a gaping wound where the placenta was once buried, a hole for a whole. It is all I can think of as I stand next to this labouring woman in the hospital. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t my job. To look transfixed as a woman thrashed and tore at her sanity to push what would soon be her bundle of joy. Somewhere, in the corner, someone is saying to me, “And yet she’ll go again after this horrible experience.” It’s the first question I ask my mum when I call her. And then I ask some more. “Did you tear down there during every birth? Did they have to stitch you up every time? Did you ever have complications?” She said I weighed the most of her children, prolonged labour. She tore every time and had to get stitches. “Ama, children are blessings.” I relate to her a little more, like it’s my body that just pushed that 4kg baby in the labour room. I tell her she is the strongest woman I know.

I told Eunice that Judas betrayed Jesus. She said it was Peter. I can’t really remember. It’s been a while since I went to church. My mother would give me a scolding if she found out. But I never really liked it growing up, even when I loved to pray. We could only go on Sundays, never fully participating like everyone else. Every other child was in the choir, the prayer group, or the band. I felt so out of place and judged. The teacher said that “only Sunday” churchgoers weren’t true children of God. So, every Sunday, he would tell us, “Tell your mother to bring you all to church more often. On Mondays and Wednesdays, we learn so much and you can join a group you like.” I realise now that what I should have told my church teacher was that my mother was trying her best. She was raising five children, having to drive us to school and back, prepare dinner and breakfast and lunch, and attend to our school assignments and our desires and her job. Instead, in that moment in the past, I remember not liking my mother very much. She did not take us to church like other mothers did.

I am more like my mother these days. Not in the fairness of her skin or the sharpness of her tongue, but in the way she loves. My mother will love you with her fists slightly closed, never enough to keep you full. Hers is a love that comes with a longing, a yearning for something more that she just can’t give. She wasn’t always like this. Once, she was a woman who loved, who hated to hate, who cared freely, deeply, and intently. But my mother had to raise children in this country. You know it, don’t you, the playing field we are dealt. If you do not learn early that your mother cannot protect you from everything, you will drown in this sea of overcrowded ambitions. I catch her sometimes, in boldened soliloquy, in prayers to her God to make her heart warmer and her efforts fruitful. I want to love better than my mother ever did. I’m sure she would want that for me too.

Do not ask me why I can’t keep any friends. Have I not mentioned that I am learning that I am a lot like my mother? My mother doesn’t keep friends. She says it’s too hard to rebuild on trust that is broken. That one aunty that used to take us for ice cream broke her trust. The other one whose house we spent most of our weekends in must have done the same. The fair aunt, the one I always loved visiting for the full plates of snacks and cold drinks must have done so too. Friends are never a constant for my mother. Do not ask me why I do not have friends, my reason is nothing as profound as broken trust or faded love. I simply am just like my mother in many ways.

The first big fight I had with my mother was over my brother. Well, no it wasn’t. I remember now that there were many before that. Many where I couldn’t run away, or choose not to talk for months. Many where I couldn’t choose myself because I was stuck at home. I cannot get through to my mother sometimes, our thoughts and ideas on life separated by decades of uncommon experiences. What is it about talking to a parent and never feeling heard? I called my mother many days later to reconcile. It was stupid to start something I couldn’t finish anyway. She bought me shoes some days later, details of the ugly fight far in the past, I wonder if they ever even lingered, ever settled like an unpalatable meal as it did me. I am learning to be kinder to my mother now. Who knows, maybe in the future, I’ll also have a daughter who talks only nonsense and chooses not to talk over sorting out differences.

It is my brothers’ birthday today, twin boys I like to refer to as “my best boys” because they are all I know. My mother keeps a catalogue of every special moment we shared as a family. It’s a pile of pictures that remind me of memories. When I was younger, I would go through each picture and try to relive each moment. Desperate to remember, eager not to lose already fading memories, I would ask my mother to retell stories I have heard millions of times. There was one of Chinonso eating. He was a child with a big appetite. One day, he embarrassed my mother when she took him to a friend’s. The food that was served must have been spectacular because halfway through, he boldly announced that he must finish his food! I like to see the men my mother has raised outside of myself, through stolen glances and quiet observations. How proud this mother of five must be. Years of toiling and challenges amounting to everything she’s ever prayed for. I should add it to my notes too, to get a camera and a printer and record life’s most beautiful moments in infallible pictures.

On the bus home today, I eavesdropped on a mother’s conversation with her child. Is it really eavesdropping if she was talking loud enough for everyone to hear? She was telling her daughter “not to collect anything from that woman.” I wondered who that woman was. A neighbour? A kiosk owner down the street who the child was familiar with in the open, saying greetings and sitting at her bench waiting because no one was home to let her in, but behind doors and a phone call, was told not to accept anything from her? I wondered if this mother explained her reasoning. Valid as they might seem to this mother, they were not communicated to her child. I pictured how confused a child must feel to have to interact with someone who was both friend and foe. I wished my mother had explained her logic too. If she had communicated her feelings on why she didn’t quite trust the neighbours but couldn’t be openly hostile without basis, maybe I would be a better judge of character, honing the skilful art of calculated smiles and actions.

Diabetes killed my mother’s father. Then it killed her mother. It was the first time I had seen my mother wail in agony. I wished at that moment that I could cradle all the parts of her that were so familiar into my body, and wrap her and protect her from this unfamiliarity that I was witnessing. My mother was breaking into fragments at the experience of a loss I could not fathom because there is no world where I do not have my mother. In the days that follow, I try to call her every day. A sorry attempt at cradling and wrapping because it was over a damn phone. I ask how she is doing. Sometimes, the silence drags on for a while, she’ll kiss her teeth and tell me the things she could remember when things were good. My mother wrote a poem for her mother. I never fancied my mother a poet. She called her mother strong, agwu nwanyi, then I saw the pattern.

The desire to force on mothers a strength of supernatural means because they were the closest things we had to God here. The burden they must carry to never crack despite the weight, because they were women, African women, strong women who had to do things like fight for women’s rights and the freedom of women to go to school, to work, to vote all while cradling children on their backs and bosom. But even strong women could break. I knew that now. Every year I write of my mother on her birthday. I say, “I’ve never seen a stronger woman in my life.” And I mean it. This year I’ll add, “You’re allowed to be weak too, with desires and dreams and simplicities like ice cream even though you aren’t allowed to have any.”

Maybe it is ageing, or being so far away from her, but I see my mother in a softer lens these days. The vulnerability of a woman who grew up too quickly and wasn’t quite allowed the joy of being a child, too busy mothering eight siblings and then five children. There’s no manual to being a mother or a woman, to pleasing your child’s every need. But I have glimpses of my mother that I am learning from every day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Reneé Thompson on Unsplash