My Note To Those Called Mother and Father.

In response to the excerpt from my ongoing book, I got several messages of “this is a lesson to mothers, and to both parents in general.”

Here is my note:

I love my mother, although I wrote in chapter two that I blame Mother, it was intentional that I did not attach a personal pronoun to the word “Mother” so that it would be clearly different from the phrase “My Mother’’. Perhaps if I had posted Chapter One, the entire story would have been better understood. I understand the language of hating the game, not the player. The game is life, the player is you and I. Besides, the love you have for family is unconditional. It is laced with acceptance and mercy and truth and empathy and compassion. We are after all builders, even though sometimes we forget and we tear things down.

My mother, growing up was an orphan who was adopted by her elder sister at a very young age. Her sister, who had that time already had children of her own, for whatever reason thought that the best way to groom a child is to make that child earn her living by herself. My mother had to hawk to pay for her upkeep in her sister’s home.

 According to her, she was hungry most days and she wore tatters. She would not let her go to school, so she stayed an illiterate. 

I can imagine my mother’s eyes, big and wondering why her fate was cruel. Imagine her knowing hunger for so long that it became a welcome friend that couldn’t cause her any harm again. (My Mum in her mid-years used appetite stimulants to help herself to eat and even at that, her eating was still minimal)

I can imagine her eyes scanning the new clothes her sister’s and neighbour’s children get to wear on regular days and saying: someday I would be free to wear this too; I would be free to make my own money that would not be pried out of my hands; I’d be able to buy my own clothes and shoes and all that I was prevented from enjoying in my childhood. I would work hard to revive my childhood, to satisfy my quest for more, for life; and nobody would be able to stop me. That was non-negotiable, after all, she had known hunger and lack and want before she ever knew us, how could we have been more real to her that her own experience? 

Maybe mother was not there in a holistic way but who helped her form her ‘not there’ principles? Who was there for her? Who was responsible for her? Who taught her not to be there? Who mothered her? Who fathered her? Who?

Someone said two boys watched their father drink, one was a drunkard, and the other never tasted alcohol. The drunkard when asked why he drank, pointed at his father. The sober other when asked pointed at his father. Here we have a single stimulant, but two different response. What we fail to see is that there is the advantage of chance, exposure, information, personality makeup, emphatic physiological effect on the two children and their natural perspective of life. A choleric might have hated the father’s abuse of wine, a melancholic child may drown himself in it and say “father already destroyed us, why should we even bother,” a phlegmatic may say, “mother’s been through hell, I choose to stay loyal to her,” and the sanguine may say, “father answers to no one, except the joy in the bottle, and I shall have a taste of this joy too, to know what it feels like.”

If parents, guardians, caregivers, play their part right, we would have fewer biographical accounts saying it was mothers fault or it was father’s fault. I am not writing to fault, I am writing to help us make a better choice by seeing that we can choose to do better than yesterday.

I am Imoleayo, and I pledge to be a better parent.