If you thought you wouldn’t miss your grown-up daughter when she left for the mandatory NYSC service, you were wrong. Laide was a computer geek who didn’t care if everyone had a proper meal at night or if her other sister called the shots like she was the eldest child. She only hit away at her computer and spent more time on the internet than with the people in the house. At other times, she muttered away in prayer, eyes wide open at the ceiling when you wanted to have a mother-daughter moment with her.
A child who opened the womb should lead the other children that came after her in everything, and for a house with many girls, ile olobinrin, a daughter shouldn’t avoid the kitchen. Laide wasn’t the kind you should cross your arms for, watching blankly as she reunited with a few friends at the motor park where she would take off to 6 states far away from home. She hadn’t been that far from you and for that duration.
“Ekaaro ma,” one of Laide’s friends greeted you, her knees almost touching the ground. She was slim, and your daughter had enveloped her in a hug. Your tired face broke into a smile, and you asked her how she was doing. During the journey to the park, your daughter had been forlorn in the car, and you tried to chat away the foggy mood. It was not the same atmosphere as when you picked her up from shopping for the things she had to take travelling.
As you listened to her animated chatter, you took glances at her. The air from the road under construction whipped her face through the window. She sat ass wide with dusty glasses on her face. And you were stunned at her confidence concerning the next year of her life. She was no longer the little girl you knew.
“God told me that…” That was the source of her direction since seven years ago. Laide didn’t stress you to make decisions for her. It didn’t make you feel less like a mother. Nonetheless, you wished it were “My mother told me that…” that wasn’t so far from her tongue. If things went on like this with the ‘God’ she had become so close to, he could ask her to remove her two kidneys, and she would do it without giving it any thought. She sang songs like “I’ve been offered to a deity, now I am a sacrifice…” She surely looked like a burnt offering personally supervised by her God. The pimple scars on her face would take some time and hard work to heal from the rigorous stress under the sun and in the rain from the NYSC camp.
Was it not two decades ago that she was a baby who looked into your eyes as she sucked the only thing, she thought life was about from your now old breasts. A beautiful baby with lungs that screamed for your attention day and night, whether you were in the toilet relieving yourself, trying to fix a meal for yourself and your husband, or just trying to get a few hours of sleep. Now womanly, her grandma thought she should start having kids. You could only watch as she was almost butchered in the living room where her uncles and auntie sat. In a few seconds, she was sweating in the airy sitting room. The number of eyes piercing her soul choked up the air she breathed.
“Laide, who are you dating? Who is your fiancée?” The eighty-year-old woman who had pasted three new baby names on the wall of her room asked her first granddaughter. It was Christmas day. It was not a crime to see your extended family one out of the 365 days of the year, even if it involved cooking for more than half the time you spent with them. Laide’s eyes darted in bewilderment before she burst into nervous giggling. “I don’t understand,” she had said.
“Which boy are you talking to? Is no boy talking to you, or do we have to go and wash your head in a river?” Laide’s grandma asked again. The entire episode seems foggy to you now, but in replying to the intrusive questions, your daughter poured the whole situation on you. She wasn’t going to be the center of questioning alone. She answered in what could be the popular slang that men are scum, even though what she meant was that boys are scum.
“My mummy said that boys are not good.”
The answer let Laide catch her breath, but it sparked an ever-ongoing debate in the household of mostly boys now turned men.
“Is your daddy not good?” Her only paternal auntie asked, a slight look of contempt that she couldn’t direct at you on her face. The only person who could answer that question was the granddaughter that had forcibly vomited an understanding that had lodged in her head since her teenage years. But they wouldn’t want to listen to the intent of the forced answer, the situation that led to it, or her present state of mind. They had grabbed on to the reply like hungry lions even after devouring plates of jollof rice and amala, gbegiri, and ewedu with the Christmas cherry on top–fried turkey.
“Daddy temi da n’temi,” My own daddy is good, Laide had replied without thinking. That put some ease into your mind. You got back home angry, not at your daughter, but with her. It was the first time you saw things from the same lens and with such strong emotions. You had talked through the journey back home, unpacking all the emotional blows dealt you. Were your husband not away on a trip, he would have found a way to avoid the situation.
The chasm between a mother and a daughter is said to grow wider as both grow older. One loathed the other for exhibiting the same positive and negative characteristics as she. In the several episodes of morning arguments you and Laide have had in the past, the generational gap between you two did not usually meet in the middle. However, the arguments have developed new mindsets in you. And now, you’re headstrong about making sure your daughters can fend for themselves before getting them hitched to worthy men.
It was easier said than done for a woman to get married and try not to have babies before going back to school. If the womb watchers didn’t do their unpaid job, several nights of passion between a young couple in love could result in what would be called a gift from God.
Laide didn’t want to go through the mother-struggling-to-further-her-education phase in her life. If it were avoidable, why go through it? The unseen biological clock would still be on her side if she focused on her education first. It only took a few more years, not eternity. The culture where the family decides the trajectory of a member’s life should end with you.
Laide, just before you updated your husband on the whole situation on a long call, opened up about the talks she had with her God and how she trusted him with the next phase of her life. She reminded you, in the most vulnerable conversation with you ever, of how years ago, you had called her to a quiet place. You told her not to ever go to a dark place with a boy. You had told her that boys were not good. She was eleven, Nigerian, and had no business dating a cute boy while she hit puberty. You do not remember, but she does and had declared how influential your words were to her in the presence of your in-laws.
You would miss your opinionated daughter who challenged the culture and egged you to do so. Laide would always be your daughter anyway, even when she turned forty and already has those children she doesn’t want to have now. You would be the mother eagle, tucking her and her children under your wings. You hope you have fewer arguments then, but team up to do things even while embracing the positive side of culture.
Then, you walk away from the park without waving her goodbye. You’d be waiting for her return, while watching over your other daughters, hoping her strong will had not been broken by the influx of ideologies and mindsets out there.
—
Read – Whispers in the Dark – A Short Story by Victor Chisamanga, Malawi
Olabode Oluwabukola Ruth is a recent Botany graduate from the University of Ibadan. An undercover tech-sis, she sees life through blue lenses, staring at a computer screen; doing some blogging on heartychristianstories.com, writing, reading, researching or watching movies. Nigerian to the core, she is currently serving as a Youth Corp member in a Nigerian state neither of her parents have stepped into. She enjoys being identified as being from other tribes except hers—Yoruba. She has some literature pieces published in Writers Space Africa, libretto.ng etc
