She Did Not Raise a Weakling.

I.

You were nine years old the first time you saw your mother cry. The heaving of her shoulders and the snot running out of her nose seemed to work in the same rhythm as the buzz of the refrigerator.

The reason for her crying: She had just been promoted at work and your father had sent army men to beat up the man who had promoted her.

She lost her job.

II.

You were twelve the first time you saw your mother speak back at your father. The room seemed to close in on both of you as she pointedly replied to him when he demanded fresh soup. She was on her way to the shop he had started for her. The school bus was honking outside for your attention.

She said no.

You were about to leave when you heard the sound. Like the brittle cracking of twigs affected by harmattan dryness.

Your father’s hand jamming your mother’s head on the glass doors opposite the kitchen caused it. 

III.

You were fifteen the first time you watched your mother take driving lessons. Each day for an hour, when you came back from school, you watched as she secretly practised driving your father’s Sedan in Uncle Thomas’s backyard. Your father would come back at 10pm reeking of alcohol and other women and for the first time your mother’s eyes held calm even then.

It was Uncle Thomas, the freshly divorced neighbour in the next house, who always paid your mother extra, that taught her how to drive.

It was Uncle Thomas who kept the secret of you and your mother’s whereabouts the night you both fled in the Sedan, your mother’s hand clutching the steering wheel and her eyes refusing to look back even once.

It was Uncle Thomas who helped both of you furnish a two-bedroom flat in Ikeja away from your father’s roving eye.

IV.

You were seventeen the first time you saw your mother speak up in a court. She was recounting that day he almost shattered her head with the glass doors. It was a part of the open court divorce proceedings.

This time, she was not cowering in fear or whimpering at your father’s direct stare. Neither was she crying as some of the other female divorcees did when their husband’s lawyers probed them.

V.

You are twenty-two now. Your mother has several poultry farms in Lagos, Abeokuta and Ibadan. She has sent you to a private university and you are in your final year. But the boy you love has decided that you are unlovable because of your larger than life afro and an acne filled face.

You want to send him another long text on Whatsapp. You want to beg for his love.

But you stop.

You stop as you remember the victory in your mother’s face that day almost five years ago.

You stop as you remember how her eyes held unbelievable joy as the judge ordered your father to pay your mother half his life savings.

You stop as you remember how your mother was not bothered even when your father kept screaming: “Is it not because that buffoon of a judge is a woman? Is it not?”

You stop as you remember that you are your mother’s daughter and she did not raise a weakling.