I was five years old when I woke up to a flooded house. Cloudy water poured in through the door and then through the open windows. Bearing pieces of wood, grass, and whatever else could float. And a lot of things floated. Things like our trash, which we usually left in a brown carton outside the door of the two-bedroom shared flat. It drifted alongside plates and utensils.
My three-year-old brother called frantically for my mother. His tiny voice pierced through the ferocious drumbeats of rain on the rooftop.
On the bed, trapped in that space between wonder and fear. I could not answer the questions that spiraled through my mind.
What was happening? What could I do? And as my brother clutched at my arm, I wondered where my mother was.
At that moment, the memories of her kissing my forehead and telling me to look after my brother before leaving earlier that morning were foggy. Did it happen or was it in a dream? I couldn’t tell.
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I didn’t understand the concept of drowning, but I knew something was wrong. When the water rose to the bed’s level, I knew things would eventually get worse. Fear expanded like a balloon behind my rib cage, spreading goose pimples all over my arms.
The rest of what happened is foggy, glazed over by layers of memories and years. But I can remember the sound, the furious sound of something approaching.
My brother and I livid with fear, clutched at ourselves. We shivered, and our minds melted with fear as we wondered what was in the water. What was coming?
Was it a whale, or a shark? Our inchoate minds brimmed with grim possibilities. Shaped by influences from movies and cartoons, comics and tales from our friends. Finally, we concluded that whatever was making such sounds in the water was coming for us.
Our mother burst in and saved us from an imminent death from a cardiac attack.
Her eyes glazed like those of the beasts we were expecting. She was barely recognizable in the water that had already risen to her waist. She looked like a stranger in that brown water that turned her blue Sunday’s best dress a dirty shade of brown. Her voice was hoarse from screaming our name.
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We flung ourselves at her, our arms looping around her neck, hers pressing us to her warm body.
For those priceless seconds, we all hugged; relived mother, and grateful children. Neither of us paid attention to the rising water and the floating objects. Our mother was there, our savior had come.
I didn’t know then what that morning meant to her; what part of herself she shed for our sakes. Only she did.
My mother waded through the water. Stumbling and mumbling to us. Telling us not to panic as she carried my brother and me on her shoulders.
The floods always returned, but she was never away again. And till we left that house, she ensured that we never woke up to floating plates and smelly water.
I was ten years old when my always-busy-never-around father died. I was in Junior Secondary School, class three.
I realized something was wrong when I heard my name on the school’s Public Address system. Some might call it intuition or paranoia. I just knew it.
I met my mother, dry-faced, seated at the principal’s office. The room that was stacked with dog-eared files and chintzy-looking trophies. The rectangular room smelled of coffee and paper. By the time we walked out of the principal’s office, I already knew that life would no longer be the same again.
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Before his death. My father spent most of his life away from us. As a staff of the Nigerian Postal Service, he always ensured that his visits were remarkable. Even the neighbors knew that his coming meant the going away of debts—the payments of their outstanding debts. Back then, I thought he hated debts more than he loved us.
He died after a truck flattened his car on the Lagos–Ibadan expressway on his trip back to his base in Benin.
For a year, our lives were perfect, untouched by the effect of his passing. He had paid our outstanding debts before he left and settled the school fees and house rent. Because he was never around, my brother and I didn’t miss his presence.
It was easy to believe that his death was another of his trips and that someday he would be back. Back with a loaf of bread, a box of books, and money to offset debts.
But the year that followed his death reminded us of how faulty our beliefs were. Our father did not come back, and the debts did not go away.
There was a new dispensation. A dispensation of incessant threats from the landlord, letters from the school, and fights from disgruntled creditors.
My mother had jumped into the saddle. Playing the role of provider, one she hadn’t played before. She began selling all the gifts our father bought her; trinkets she never wore because she never went out. Yards of brightly colored Hollandaise Ankara’s that my father brought from his trips.
“Soon I will get new ones,” she often said, halting our protest. Our furniture and television followed.
The rest of my tweens till my early teens continued about the same way. They were filled with a series of odd jobs that barely paid enough.
She had a stint as a clerk in a local government that owed for months. She spent the evening with us at her thrift store, where she sold fairly used clothes. She got other jobs later including working as a marketer for a new generational bank and even as a personal assistant to a commissioner’s wife. We never had much, but like a raft, these jobs kept us afloat.
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I am in my late teens and on my way to becoming a published author. My brother is an upcoming Data Analyst. Our mother recently died of a stroke. She was fifty-two.
A part of me was relieved that she was finally free from this world of ceaseless toil. Released from this world that kept on demanding from her. Another part of me was shattered, ground into dust. This happened when I found her diary; a brown leather-bound book whose pages were soft with age.
In the words crossed by blue ink, I learned the lessons of motherhood from my mother; a woman of few words.
On its pages filled with lots of next years and when they graduate, I discovered the truth about that rainy morning. How she missed an entrance exam to further her education on the day she came back to rescue us.
As I flipped from page to page, I stumbled tearfully through my mother’s dreams. Dreams deferred first because of her husband and always because of us.
It might not be the best way to live. But it was how my mother lived. It was her definition of motherhood; that continual denying of herself so that her children could be all that we wanted to be.
Obaditan Oluwakorede (OBA.T.K) is an independent writer whose childhood memories consist of sitting beside his father’s beaten box, devouring almost every book in the African Writers Series. In those nascent moments, he discovered the power of stories to grip and groom. But it wasn’t until his twenties, after meeting his mentor, that he discovered how to wield and weave stories. His writing is vivid and vibrant, exploring stories never told or amplifying the ones quietly told. He lives in space, but he can be found in Lagos, Nigeria.
What a beautifully written sad story. May the souls of your parents continue to rest in peace. A mother’s love is unconditional indeed. I’m sure she’s proud, her boys are turning out to be great men.