Mother’s Words
“I remember the first time we met. Most girls meet the love of their life at the mall while seeing a movie, by the road while trying to buy fried bean cakes or bumping into him while carrying a pile of books to class, but mine was different. I met the love of my life on Instagram. Funny isn’t it?” My mother told me. I wondered how sensible that was but seeing how the union produced four happy kids and an even happier marriage, I concluded maybe it wasn’t that bad an idea.
“Maybe I’ll try it too,” I mumbled but as always my psychic mom knew my thoughts and warned me,
“You’d better not try it too. Not everyone can be as lucky as I was.” Then she flashed me the proud smile she always had when she talked about dad.
How can someone so shamelessly advertise her husband to all and sundry every opportunity she gets? All that’s left is for her to get a badge to paste on her forehead bearing ‘Mrs. Joshua’ and strut around with it. I rolled my eyes and got a knock on my head from her.
“Now listen to me, sugar, men are scum. They really are. Even your father who is the love of my life and the nicest man I’ve met. He is scum too, only he’s a better scum than the rest. Men will deceive you, make you fall head over heels in love with them, blind you, and lead you into a ditch all in the name of love, but hear me, when you find the right man hold on to him. Hold him tight and don’t let go. Many things will come up and many obstacles will arise but when your gut tells you “this is the one”, follow it. Your gut will never lead you astray because it knows things before they happen.”
I looked at my mom and wondered where all that talk was coming from this hot afternoon. It’s probably the heat that is making her talk more than usual. I thought to myself. A strong breeze was blowing but the heat persisted and forced its way to our skin causing us to have eternal baths.
“Back to how your father and I met,” she sing-songed.
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“So, like I said it was on IG. You know your father loves mobile photography a lot. So like I said, he was following this friend of mine who is also a mobile photographer. You should know him. He’s big now. ‘Festifotos’.” I nodded aggressively in agreement. How my mom knew the celebrity photographer baffled me greatly but I urged her on.
“Yeah, sure mom. Of course, I know him. He’s my role model.” She nodded twice and continued.
“Well, he and I go way back to our university days. Your father was in a different university though, but he followed him on IG. He and I liked one of Festifotos’ pictures and that was how we clicked.” Her entire face shone, I could see this past she was talking about reflecting in her eyes. Her face lit with nostalgia and I could see the skin around her cheek get two shades darker. She was blushing and I couldn’t help but laugh out. Trying to stifle the laugh only made things worse as I ended up doubling over and falling down from where I sat on the veranda.
“What’s so funny now? She asked, embarrassed.
“It’s just that I’ve never seen any old mother of four children blush while talking about her husband. I mean why would you be blushing while talking about someone you’ve been married to for over twenty years? It’s just really so funny mom.” I teased.
She pouted then continued her story. “Back to our story jare… I don’t know if it was because we liked the same picture or fate simply wanted us to meet, but I logged in to my IG account one sunny afternoon and saw about ten ‘josh_987 liked your photo’, ‘josh_987 liked your video’ and then I saw ‘josh_987 commented on your post’: “hey miss”.
“I was so surprised to receive so many notifications from one person simultaneously. At first, I felt he was a stalker and it would be best to not reply to him but his comment seemed responsible enough so I replied. I’ll tell you, honey, that was the best decision I made in my entire life. We replied to each other’s comments under my post until we felt we needed to take our discussion to a more private place but sadly, I couldn’t send him a DM.
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I had to ask for his WhatsApp number, he gave me and we started chatting. I will confess though that I was dating someone else at the time. At a point, I realized I had started liking your father but I still loved my boyfriend. It was a very confusing time for me. It took me a lot of time and heart-rending experiences to come to the conclusion, but about a month after my boyfriend and I broke up, I confessed to myself and your father that I loved him.”
“Wait mom, are you saying you liked two guys at the same time? That stuff really happens to people?” I was so shocked because I was currently in that situation and didn’t know how to go about it. I knew I could trust my mom with anything without fear of condemnation but I still didn’t know whether I should tell her or not.
“There will always be a time when you find yourself at a crossroads with your feelings. The most important thing is that you follow your heart. Your heart always knows the truth and if you search deep enough you’ll find it. You can lie to everyone, Love, but never lie to yourself. Always stay true to your heart okay?” Then she planted a kiss on my forehead. Mom always knew what to say and when to say it. It was almost as if she had telepathic abilities. I nodded my reply, hugged her, and she went back to her story.
“So where was I again? Oh yeah! My confession,” mom blushed. I smiled and rolled my eyes.
“Can you just get on with the story without stopping to blush and goof around like a teenager?”
“Hey, I’m your mother. Don’t talk to me like that okay? You will address me with respect!” She half teased and half chided me. We both laughed because we knew I could never take her seriously with that cute, babyface of hers. I really was lucky to be blessed with such a pretty mom whose beauty was inside out.
“You should have seen how surprised your dad was when I confessed to him. I was already feeling super shy after all the bold proclamations I made in my confession but he had to ask questions. I wanted to just run away from his DM that night because I told him over the phone, but I knew I had to take responsibility for my confession. He didn’t care that I felt embarrassed at all.
He continued to ask questions like when I started liking him, how, why, and under why he kept asking, why him? Why now? And in my mind I was like ” Can you just accept the fact that I love you now and that’s it? Why the interview?” But of course, I answered his every question patiently and carefully because you know your father, he reads meaning into things anyhow.” I nodded aggressively, she wasn’t far from the truth. You would tell my dad “ABC” but he would interpret it as “A²+B²=C²”, and I’ll just look at him like ” really???” She really wasn’t far from the truth.
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She went on to tell me about the many obstacles they had while their relationship was entering the maturity stage.
“A relationship doesn’t get serious until after the third month. If you guys are still standing firm and strong, you know that you are truly dating. The first three months are the ‘euphoric stage’. Then your emotions are still all over the place. How do I put this? Yes. You are still drunk in love. You don’t notice his shortcomings and when you do, you wave them off in the name of love.
At that stage, he is perfect and so is everything he does, but you see after those first three months ehn? That’s when the dating really begins. That is the ‘intentional stage’, the stage of maturity. At that point, you aren’t blind. Or at least you are not supposed to be, because I’ve seen girls get stuck in the euphoric stage for a year, some even more. That is an abnormality because it means the relationship isn’t developing properly.
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Being in a relationship is like nurturing a child. The relationship itself is the child and it needs love, care, attention, amongst other things to grow healthily.”
Mum had started another one of her counseling sessions again. She did it way too often, this counseling thing. If she had studied Psychology in school I’d understand, but she didn’t. She studied Literature, yet, I will not hear a word with all the counseling sessions she engages me in. I sighed and drifted her back to her story. She complied.
“So anyway, I’m going somewhere with this talk. Your dad and I were an item many months before we officially started dating but during that period we had to face and overcome so many battles. Yes, we loved each other. There was no question about our love for each other, but we had a problem. He was already sexually active and I was still a virgin. The bigger issue was that I wasn’t only a virgin, but a virgin that had no intentions of having sex till marriage. Don’t ask me why love. That’s another talk for another day.” I sulked for a few minutes and asked her to continue her story.
“Anyway, he never pushed or pressed for it but he would always find ways to subtly bring it up in our conversations to see if I had changed my mind on the matter. All to no avail of course. In fact, one time it got so bad that I almost told him to go have sex with anyone he wanted to because he had come to announce that he was going to have sex soon.
He couldn’t take it anymore, he had told me that night. I didn’t know how it was affecting him, he had said. I was hurt but I wasn’t willing to give him what he wanted, so I told him to go get it outside. He was so shocked, he asked over and again if that was what I wanted and I told him to go ahead if that would make him happy as I truly wanted him to stay happy always.
After a while, I realized I wasn’t willing to give him out like that, so I contemplated having a threesome instead– that way I still had him and he would still get his release. It wasn’t a very easy period for your dad, love, and to be very honest, I understood his pain, but I wasn’t going to do something against my will to please anyone and that’s where I’m going with all this.
Now listen to me carefully baby. I don’t care who he Is, how handsome, rich, well mannered, smart, funny, etc he is, let your ‘no’ forever be your ‘no’ and your ‘yes’ yes. Never settle for less because of a guy. Never do anything against your will to please any man and worst of all, never do something against your will because you’re scared to lose him or want to hold on to him.
The truth is that the same guy you end up sacrificing it all for might eventually leave you for someone else who wouldn’t sacrifice a tenth of what you did. Never settle for less honey.”
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I stayed mute for minutes, meditating on all the things my mom had just told me. The weight of my mother’s words weighed heavily on my mind. She had admitted that she was also confused at a point, she also broke up and fell in love within weeks, she had also dealt with the question of self over sacrifice. She had chosen to stand by her principles instead of settling for less.
“What about dad then? How did he react to your decision to not have sex even after coming to take permission from you that he wanted to cheat? What did you guys finally settle to do? Since you are happily married with four kids it means things eventually worked out for you guys, so tell me how everything eventually played out mom.” I really needed to know if standing by her principles eventually paid off or if she had to cave in to make dad happy.
She saw my knotted brows and eased them off with her delicate, motherly fingers. After many minutes, she spoke.
“Listen, love, as I said earlier, what worked for me might not work for you. That I chose to stand my ground or cave in doesn’t mean if you do the same, it’ll yield the same result. Stay true to you and you alone. It is only on this path of truth that you will surely find fulfillment.” She patted my head thrice and smiled brightly.
“Then again, I gave birth to you, and knowing you, you will not drop this matter and let me rest. So, if you wanna know the remaining part of the story, to find out what I decided on and how we managed to scale through as a couple, ask your father when he gets back from work tonight. Now, can we get down to cooking? You know we have four lions to feed and as the lionesses in this pride, we gotta provide the food they will have for dinner.” Then she swirled away from my front and started humming “I believe in you” by Don Williams.
She was shining ever so brightly and subconsciously, I started smiling too. “Oh, I’m definitely going to ask dad when he returns.” I hollered after her and scurried into the kitchen to start the dinner preparations.
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