Footsteps

“He touched me with the tip of his extension and I knew that something deep had gone into me. It was only the tip but it was deep. I gasped in ecstasy but no sound came out. It couldn’t, not with the force that had just gone into me.

I knew I had needed petting but I never knew he would stay so true to his words by providing me with such heavy petting. I reached out to him to pull him closer, I needed him in me; all of him, not bits or parts, but every single inch of him. He reached his wide palm to the back of my hair for a gentle tug and was about to thrust in deep when…”

“Ayinka!!! How many times do you want me to call you before you decide to answer my call?! You are there counting my voice. Hmmm… you better not let me climb these stairs to get into your room because if I meet you there, you will not like what you will see.”

My mom was always fond of making threats like that and interrupting my reading time. It was almost as if a spirit was always telling her when I was reading all these romance novels so she could spoil it for me by interrupting me in climatic scenes. I hissed, swore, and cursed under my breath. I couldn’t let her hear me cussing. After all, that would only put me in more trouble.

“I’m coming ma!” I had to run now but first I needed to keep my book. I had told her I was reading a novel, but what I had not told her was that it was a romantic novel filled with graphic sensual scenes that I had been reading. For all she knew, I was reading one of the literature texts recommended by my teacher for prose class that term.

In her mind, her daughter was a good student. I covered my mouth to stifle the giggle that was trying to force its way out, this was no time to be laughing. I forced on a straight face and answered her call again before running out of my room and down the stairs to answer my call in the kitchen.

“How many times have I told you that when I’m cooking you should stand here and watch me learn? Is this how you want to enter your husband’s house? Or do you think marriage is about beauty or big breasts and a big bum? Let me tell you if you cannot manage your home and your man properly, another woman who has better features combined with the home management skills, will come and steal him away right under your nose. You hear me?!”

She had said it while dragging her right ear to emphasize her lecture. I yawned loudly in my mind, I had heard the sermon so much that I could predict her next statement before she even spoke it. I had no interest in marriage so I wasn’t bothered. Marriage was for people that wanted to stay committed and faithful to one person for the rest of their lives. For me, that was a very risky and scary gamble, and knowing my mom, divorce was not an option.

I had no interest in sticking to one person for a year, much more for eternity, so I mentally dismissed my mom’s words with the wave of a hand. “Not for me momma, marriage ain’t for me.” I thought I had thought it to myself but the look on my mom’s face said otherwise.

“What did you just say? What did I just hear? Yinka kilo só? Marriage what? Soro sókè!” She was getting hyped up, I thought

I had thought my thoughts to myself but I was wrong because the vicious stare my mom was giving me testified otherwise. I motioned for her to calm down by moving both my arms in an up-down motion.

“Mummy, enjoy ma… be calming down like this.” I tried hard to stifle my laughter but it proved violent and broke loose. “Yinka EMI lo n fi see yeye? You have turned me to a clown now, you are using me to joke around abi?” I was still laughing hard, the woman could be really cute when I messed around with her like this. “Mummy I’m just catching your cruise… loosen up now.”

I watched her try to stifle the smile that was trying to creep up her face so I helped her by raising and dropping my brows in quick movements while smiling full teeth. She couldn’t hold it anymore, she broke into bouts of laughter which I gladly joined her in. “You this girl ehn… one of these days I’ll beat this bumbum of yours so you will know how to talk.”

I looked at my mom, all five foot nine inches of beauty, she was truly beautiful. I had not met a prettier woman and self consciously, I sometimes wished I was half as pretty as she was. Evenly toned and flawless skin, I looked at the pimples that were threatening to design my face and wept for myself.

How someone as pretty as she was could end up single still baffled me. It was one of the reasons why I decided to give up on marriage, though I would never tell her this. “Mommy… I know you don’t like to talk about this but how did someone as pretty and sexy as you end up single? It still seems unbelievable to me.” I needed answers. Who knew? Maybe I would find something in her story that would help set me on track.

“You want to know?” I nodded in the affirmative and she proceeded to begin her story. We both picked a kitchen stool and she went ahead to recall her life story.

She told me about how pretty she was in her university days. Her friends had talked her into running for Miss UniPort and she had won.

She went for another pageantry at the federal level and amongst all the beauty queens from all the federal universities in the country, she had emerged third. That was no mean feat, so again I cursed myself for leaning more to my dad’s side and taking their ugly physique, instead of my mom’s. I might have been a beauty queen myself for all I knew.

After the pageantry, she became very popular in her school. Many people wanted to sign her as the face of their brand, she had modeling contracts everywhere. Indeed, the pageantry had bought her a lot of attention. She became the girl every guy wanted to date, gifts were dropped at her doorsteps every night with little cards pouring out their heart desires but she was too much of a feminist to accept any of their advances.

My mom went on to tell me about how she was so much of a feminist that she believed being in a relationship would infringe on her independence as a woman so she rejected them all. She was pretty, smart, and very liberal, she was the talk of the campus. All of these and yet, no man.

While her mates went partying or clubbing, my mom would be busy designing placards for women empowerment protests inside her room. She was an extreme feminist that thought she knew what she wanted in life but she found out later that sadly, no one waits for no man.

She had thought that with her beauty and brains she would be able to find ‘her kind of man’. She had thought that if she waited patiently enough, a guy that supported her beliefs and ideals would one day waltz into her life and sweep her off her feet. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

With time, all the guys that had been drooling over her started to move on. The gifts that usually blocked the entrance to her hallway to her room, began to dwindle until eventually, there was not a single gift by her door anymore.

Her modeling job suffered because she would miss appointments and when she showed up, she would give them an attitude. (After all, no man had the right to address her condescendingly because she was a lady. She was at the mercy of no man.) At the end of the day, of course, she lost her job. She didn’t care about any of that though because, at that point, she felt like she was fighting a greater cause, a more noble purpose, and for her, that felt right.

Eventually, the beauty queen everyone had their eyes on was forgotten and something else occupied their idle minds. Just like that, she had become a beautiful nobody in school again. She graduated just like everyone else and shopped at the labor market like everyone else. This shopping was no mean task. Finding the goods she wanted was not an easy one because there were too many shoppers at this market.

Three years later, she stopped searching.

She stumbled upon her dream job and even though she knew that the main reason why she got the job was because of her looks, not her brain, she still gladly accepted the offer. “Well, I have compassed this mountain of unemployment long enough. It is time for me to move. At the end of the day, in this life, you just need to use what you have to get what you want.”

Using her ‘force-them-to-look-twice’ face and banging hourglass body, she was able to secure herself a respectable position at a microfinance bank. There, she had met my father and even though he wasn’t exactly her type of ideal man, he at least strived to meet the cutoff at the exact average score. Since he vibed with some of her views, she had felt like they could somehow work something out.

She knew she was settling for less with him but she couldn’t complain. After all, she was beyond the marriageable age for African females. Her mother had cried herself into getting admitted to the hospital thrice. Even if for no other reason, she knew she had to get married to her mom at least, so she did.

She got married to Tom, my dad, but as for settling down, – to live in submission under a man, she simply couldn’t. She loved my dad, that much I knew, but I honestly could never understand why they refused to get back together when they still loved each other.

I have always heard from people that “true love is always worth fighting for.” Well, my parents loved each other enough to have me but I guess they didn’t love me enough to want to fix their broken marriage. My mom was a devout Christian, as well as my grandma. Divorce could not be heard in their home so she opted for separation instead.

I’m sixteen now and my parents have been separated for close to a decade. In a few months, I will be marking the tenth anniversary of their separation. It was always a rough day for me because that day was a day of mourning for me. For me, I mourned my parents’ love life, their marriage, my childhood, amongst many other things.

I looked at her again and I wondered at her beauty. It never ceased to amaze me. I looked at her again and I saw myself in her, sadly not physically, but trait-wise. I couldn’t see myself submitting to anyone for the rest of my life, I felt a very strong need to always be free and live life however it pleased me. I wanted independence, I wanted to be seen as a human being and not a woman.

She had gone back to check what she was cooking and I guess to an extent, I could understand why she was always so adamant about me growing up the way it was expected of an African woman. She feared that I would end up lonely and sometimes frustrated from single parenting like she was, so she wanted me to grow up ‘cultured’.

‘Cultured’ meant being submissive, clean, and well-behaved, which meant I would find myself a man to take care of me. My mom’s extreme feminism and its repercussions drove her to embark on an antifeminist campaign over my life but I couldn’t complain anymore, at least not after hearing her story.

She was trying so hard but sadly, I had already embarked on a journey of no return. It was too late for me to go back now because I was already moving through life step by step in her footsteps. I guess it’s like they always say;

“Like mother, like daughter.”