Mothers’ Shit
Not all Saturday mornings are the same.
Early this morning while spirit and soul bounce around the inside of my sleeping body, mother decides that it is time. The silence has gone on for too long, she had not foreseen me being this placid despite the vitriol in her glances; it irks her. And so, at around 6:30 A.M, she slithers noiselessly across the corridor upstairs, the dull hum of the refrigerator rippling the quiet, and down the pink marble staircase to the kitchen. She does not turn on the lights or open the windows or doors, no, the dish she is to prepare supersedes her need to see or breathe properly.
After forcing her limbs out of her serpentine form, she rises from the floor with the aid of her still-wobbly feet, and then, like a glitch in a video game, the rest of her body falls into place. She takes out the biggest non-stick pot from the cupboard where other kitchenware resides, the one that has never been able to close all the way since we moved into this house, and places it on the floor, gently, like she is trying not to break the silence.
The pot is onion-purple and somewhat glistening even in the little light and choking heat that still envelops the space in the kitchen.
Most of our cockroaches have just gone to bed, and unlike the refrigerator upstairs, the deep freezer here does not hum, it is of a better-behaved make, sound cannot be.
Mother undoes the wrapa around her body and sets herself on the opened pot at the center of the still-dark and hot kitchen as if it is a toilet bowl.
She sits there, her pupils bouncing haphazardly off the borders of her eyes like she is in REM sleep, and takes a dump that fills the pot just below its halfway mark. She rises with an eerie quickness once she is done, as if the pot has suddenly sprouted hot spikes, and ties her wrapa around her body; perhaps, she has forgotten about cleaning up afterward. In no time, the electric cooker is desecrated, prodded alive to warm up semi-solid feces and teaspoons of turmeric and cinnamon.
The lights are still off and the windows are still shut.
“Mummy, good morning.”
“Yes, good morning. Let’s go to your room, I want to talk to you about something important,” she says. And so, we slither to where I have just emerged from.
“Please ehn, your brother is returning home for his mid-term break, take out this nose ring, abi septum nonsense, I don’t want you giving him the wrong ideas,” her “wrong” enswathed in supercilious self-righteousness; she had started.
“I-“
She cuts me off and I am not surprised.
“No, I’m not done yet. When I finish, ehen, then, you can say your own.
Now listen, I don’t see why someone who is educated, someone that is not illiterate, will put a ring in his nose and call it fashion, it does not make you anymore handsome or anything; so why? I’m not asking so that you can tell me-o, we’re past that, you already know that back and forth with you drains me, so please, please-o, just remove it, or do whatever it is that you have to do so that your brother does not see it. Am I clear?”
It is morning but I am already knackered; this mother of mine, a leech.
“Can I talk now?” I ask. She gestures positively.
“I appreciate you trying to tell me what you feel is best for me, but in all honesty, this septum piercing is the least out of all the things I have planned out for my body, I literally haven’t started.” I sit now because my soul is exhausted and this has made my body tired.
“And Chinua has seen it, I discussed my other plans with him and Ugo, before he resumed school. They’re okay with the piercings and tattoos I plan on getting, my brothers know who I am, that I am a creative and expressive ball of light,” I flip my septum ring now.
“But if that’s what you want, for me to flip the ring so you can pretend like it’s not there, I can do that. After all, I still live under your roof and still spend the allowance daddy puts in my account every month. No problem.”
I breathe out, saying my words of affirmation in my mind, I am a creative and expressive being of love and light. All is well. Mother looks bored now.
“All this talk of tattoos. Hmm! I’ve asked you before, are you willing to risk your eternal salvation just for temporary pleasure?”
She doesn’t know it yet, but she is starting to pull the big pot in the kitchen with her tail that has found its way down the stairs.
“And please, don’t tell me that the people the Bible speaks about concerning tattoos were pagans, what is wrong is wrong! Ask anybody you respect at church, Osinachi, tattoos are wrong!”
Wrong, what is wrong? I smile, not because I want to, but because I do not know when it sneaks up on me.
“So all the lies and God knows what else you’ve done in this lifetime, are different from tattoos how?” I play her stunted game.
“You think there’s small sin and big sin? That the angels will say if you have tattoos you’re going to hell, go to the left, and if you’ve stolen any amount of money under ₦10,000, go to the right, you are pardoned, that my tattoos are really what will impede my salvation? You know, it’s crazy, you make us go with you to church every Sunday, yet you still choose to know so little, why?”
I knew I was getting reckless, but I’d learned from experience, to be on fire for everything I stand for.
“Osinachi, first of all, don’t ever talk to me like that again, never take that tone with me, ever! I am not your wife, I am your mother,” she says, wagging a rather stern finger.
“Secondly, are you God’s assistant? What do you know? What do you think you can know? I can only talk, God sees my heart, it is now up to you people to listen.
Please, I’ve said my bit, flip your nose ring so your brother does not see it. And if you like, turn yourself into canvas eh! Draw all over! Just not under my roof. I’ve said my own, the next one now will be for me to tell your father, because me, I am tired. He should come back to Lagos and see you boys for who you really are, cannot just be sending money and leaving me to die here with stress from grown men. He should even stop sending you people allowance sef.
All of you must learn, wrong is wrong.”
Wrong, there it was again. The pot that her tail has carried from downstairs has just plopped in front of us, a line between two dots.
This morning at 10:33 A.M, mother served me shit, her shit.
FIN.
