I haven’t lived very long on earth, but in my few decades of existence, I have interacted with women of different age demographics. I have become friends with some, loved a few, and learnt from many, directly and indirectly. Reflecting on my professional and personal trajectory, I have drawn inspiration from several women, each to various extents.
From my SS1 English teacher whose critiques shaped me into a creative writer, to Kechi Okwuchi whose life story provides me with an example of what it means to go against the grain, I have been able to gather a lot from the experiences of the female entrepreneurs, creatives, academicians and corporate executives I have become acquainted with or simply read about. However, there is one woman whose actions and life journey succeeded in leaving indelible impressions on me.
My mother (God bless her soul), Veronica Chiemeke, handed me my first memories, and more importantly, her day-to-day routine painted a picture of what it was like to be a career woman in the early 1990s. Maybe it was because she spent weekdays as a class teacher in one of the private schools in the city of Warri. She loved populating the house with books, and very early on, I found myself developing a large appetite for new knowledge. I would read anything. From novels like Cyprian Ekwensi’s An African Night’s Entertainment to Awake!, pamphlets to Brighter Grammar textbooks targeted at 10-year-olds and were supposed to have been too complex for my four-year-old mind to comprehend.
In the years that followed, we would bond over jointly marking her students’ Christian Religious Knowledge examination sheets; she would giggle whenever I drew a big “X” over a wrong answer to a question that I felt was too easy to fail.
My mother did her best to raise me on Biblical injunctions, but every now and then I would forget the portion of Scripture that emphasised turning the other cheek. My primary school days were characterised by bruises to my jaw, neck, knees and fingers, bruises that did not exactly come from shaking hands with my peers. One day when I returned from school with my school uniform torn and a bloodied lower lip, she took me into the bathroom and dabbed my face with hot water, but not before flogging me with some of the branches from her little garden. My pleas that I got into fisticuffs out of provocation – a true claim – were met with severe admonishment in the lines of “I hear you, but you will still have to face punishment for fighting in school.” That day, I learnt that even if there are logical grounds to justify certain wrong actions, said justification doesn’t preclude you from facing the consequences. It was a lesson in accountability that has come to bear in my adult life.
One morning in the nine-year-old days of my life, I had arrived at school in a uniform that my mother had carefully washed the day before, but was unable to iron due to lack of electricity. Midway through the day’s classes, my form teacher, whom I felt took pleasure in picking on me (at the time), suddenly began to twitch her nose as if she had detected a foul smell, and barked at the class, ordering those students “whose clothes were dirty” to come out. For some reason, I stepped out on account of my unironed shirt, and my reward for my misplaced (?) honesty was 12 strokes of the cane. On relaying the day’s events to my mother, she further chided me for “not being confident enough about the cleanliness of that shirt.”
I didn’t understand the relevance of her statement then, but over 21 years after her demise – heart attacks be damned – I can say that I get it now, in all its fullness. I’ve had a rollercoaster journey with my self-esteem, having dealt with weight issues and self-doubt for many years, and whenever I find myself falling into that black hole, I hear my mother’s words still ringing, urging me to never sell myself short.
Although the time spent with my mother was ridiculously short – nine years and seven months – I was able to draw a number of lessons from watching her live out her days as a parent, wife, sister, teacher and friend. But these are the ones that stay, these are the ones whose relevance has transcended times and seasons. Sometimes I wish she was around to see the kind of man I’ve grown into, and with every win, I mull over her absence, but I am grateful for what she was able to do with the little time she had.
