Mother, Mummy or Mama

A story about motherhood and its expectations — by Michael Emeka

The Kalahari Review
Kalahari Review

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Beyond the edge of the shade provided by the huge German mango tree in their Chimamaka’s compound, the earth was hot and the weather sweltering. The sun shone so brightly it hurt the eye. But beneath the tree, the air was cool and comforting. Chimamaka and I sat here, on a long wooden bench, discussing. I was on a visit to their house and until now our conversation had centred on generalities. Without warning, she leaned towards me and said, teeth clenched tight and eyes bulging, “Do you know you’re an orphan, that you were adopted?”

Shocked, I gave her a sharp look and chuckled. “You must be joking.”

“I’m not.” She shook her head.

Pondering this for a moment, I couldn’t make anything of it, for it held no sense to me. I glanced at Chimamaka, at the set of her gentle jaws, the certainty in her dark eyes and the sureness of her posture since making this cruel revelation, and my heart went whew! with trepidation.

“Ask your mom if you don’t believe me,” she pressed on.

“How did you come by this information?”

“I heard it from my mother.” Her small roving eyes widened for emphasis. Oh yes, her mummy told her. Now I knew where all this was leading. When we were little, we used to play in the sandy playground right in front of both of our compounds. And each time one of her sisters provoked me, my mother would come flying out of our house. She would rail at the child, and if their mum comes out, Mama would also turn on her, shrieking until the veins stood out on her forehead and throat. Sometimes it got to where she would untie the headscarf on her head and use it to bind the wrapper around her waist, ready for anything. One day as Mama was dragging me back to our compound after another round of railing, I heard Chimamaka’s mother telling the people gathered, “See the way she’s fighting over the girl as if she’s the one who gave birth to her.” That happened a long time ago. I was five or six years old then, and the words had meant nothing to me.

I sighed. “How did your mother know?”

“Look, you’re the only one who’s not aware of it. Everybody in this area knows.”

Me, adopted? I refused to believe her. All the same, I walked home that afternoon dejected.

#

Our living room was spacious and airy. Framed baby photographs of each of my six siblings and I hung on the walls. My siblings are all boys, I’m the only girl. Treading further into the room, I stopped at my baby photo. I was about a year old when the picture was taken. Bare-chested and wearing only a white nappy, an angelic smile brightened my face. I looked plump and chubby, face round and cherubic, my eyes trained on someone in the background, behind the camera. Who else could have been there if not my mother? They must have used her to get my attention. There were other photos in the house too that showed me in swaddling clothes, cradled in my mummy’s arms at my naming ceremony. If I was adopted, it means my biological mother abandoned me just a few days after giving birth to me.

Mama was at the backyard, darning one of my dresses. She complained often, albeit good-humoredly, that I was growing like a pumpkin shoot. And that hardly does she get home from the market with a new dress than I’d outgrow it. Nowadays she buys me dresses two sizes too large, so I’d grow into them. Money was scarce to keep wasting on dresses. And besides, she wasn’t ever going to have another daughter to reserve the clothes for, was she?

Mama’s face lit up as she saw me. Her eyes grew bright and you could see the beginnings of a smile around her mouth. But at the gloomy look on my face, those feelings drained off like water from a bowl of garri. She put aside the red floral dress in her hands and held them out to me.

Nwa m o gini? My child, Why is your face like that?”

“Mama, is it true?”

“What?”

“That I’m adopted.” Mama’s body went slack suddenly. She deflated like a punctured balloon whose air rushes out with a sibilant hiss. Her shoulders slumped and her back arched so we had to move the bench she sat on the further back so she could rest on the wall. All at once, she looked limp and small in my eyes.

I put a hand around her shoulders and shook her. “Mama, I’m your daughter, adopted or biological, okay?” I rose. “Untie your hair, let me look for grey hairs in it.”

Mama chuckled, coming back to life. But her hands were still too weak to untie the headscarf herself, so I untied it. Keeping the white satin material aside, I went to work.

She shook her head. “Nwa m, my child, no matter how many grey hairs you pluck out, more will still grow out.”

“Not while I can help it. I’ll keep removing them.” I burrowed into her hair, parting and pushing aside the thick curls, digging deeper until I arrived at her hair roots. Her scalp was neat and fleshy. Though her hairs were still very black for a fifty-one-year-old, at the root you could see they were going grey. Now and then I found a long and complete strand of grey hair. Whenever I did, I uprooted it with extreme prejudice, as if by doing that I was going to keep her from ever ageing.

“Who told you that thing you just asked me?”

“Chimamaka. She said she heard it from her mother.”

“Now I understand. A snake can only give birth to something that has a long tail. They’re both trying to destroy our happiness. But God will not allow them. Our enemies will never succeed.”

“Amen!”

We were silent for a while. And then Mama blurted out, “But it’s true.”

My hands froze just as I felt my heart speed up. “It’s true?”

“Yes.”

Everything in our backyard blurred as tears filled my eyes. I stopped digging through her hair altogether because I could no longer differentiate each strand from the next. They were all now a single giant clump, too dense to search through. I came round and sat beside her on the bench.

“How? How am I adopted? What about the others?” I meant my six brothers.

Mama shook her head. “You’re the only one we adopted. When your sister, my first daughter, died, I couldn’t bear to be alone. I knew I would never be close to any of my son’s wives the way I would be to my daughter. And your daddy and I had already stopped bearing children. So, I had to adopt. We went to the orphanage and adopted you, my little angel.” She embraced me from the side, pecking me on the head. “Don’t cry. Have I ever treated you any differently than I would treat my biological daughter?”

“No, ma.” I shook my head. “How old was I?”

“You were just a few days old.”

“A few days?” More tears poured from my eyes. Mama cuddled me closer and showered kisses on me.

Ebe zi na. If they hadn’t left you, we wouldn’t have got you. It is the will of God and man cannot change it. God has made me your mother in this life. Okay? Sh!”

Before my eyes, memories of my days growing up with my elder brothers flashed. Some people said I was a tomboy, growing up in the barracks. Yes. With so many boys in the house, they called our home the barracks. I remembered I never shied away from their rough games. I ran and played ball with them, though they always tried to avoid clattering into me. When they lined up to take a leak by the roadside on our way home, standing shoulder to shoulder, I lined up with them too. Whipping out their “things” they splashed urine on the shrubbery on the road’s edge. But as for me, unable to bring out my own “thing” for obvious reasons, I peed that way standing, the hot urine dribbling down my legs and soaking up my trousers because Mama always insisted I wear a pair of trousers whenever I go out to play with them. And my brothers would laugh at me. When I got home Mummy would spank and admonish me: “You’re not a boy. I bu nwanyi! Nwanyi! A girl, that’s what you are. Not a boy. At your age you squat.”

#

One afternoon I came back from school and found a woman who looked just like me perched on the edge of a chair in our living room. Her lined forehead, fidgety hands on her laps, and nervous, twitchy legs told me she was tense. She had high cheekbones, like me, widely spaced eyes, a wide mouth painted a harsh red, and a nose partially pointed. As I entered the living room, she jumped to her feet, as if she was guilty of some heinous crime I couldn’t place at that moment. I greeted her, gesticulating. She returned my greeting with warmth, too much warmth and attention that left me feeling queasy. She looked me all over as if I owed her something, the corners of her mouth acting like they had elastic bands in them that kept snapping back in place, ruining her smile each time she struggled to flash one. Her large anxious eyes trailed me as I walked past her towards the room I shared with my mother. I kept glancing back as I went, wondering what was going on.

Mama was already in the room. She looked much older than I’d ever seen her, with the rings around her eyes much more prominent today than at any other time I’d known her. Her hands clasped on her laps looked bonier as they kept twirling the edge of her wrapper.

Seeing her, I rushed and knelt beside her. “Mama, o gini?” I greeted her, and she returned my greeting. “Gud afun nwa m.” She asked about school and I told her how it went. She looked weaker today as if recovering from a debilitating illness. Her movements were slow — even the act of looking at me she did with some effort. Shoulders slumped and arms slack by her sides, she reminded me of a marionette.

“Mama, I hope it’s not that woman out there.” My voice was high enough for the woman to have heard.

Nne, please, lower your voice.”

I clammed up, removed my backpack, and flung it across the room. I folded my arms on my chest and waited, scowling.

“That woman is your mother,” Mama said. Even before the words were out of her mouth, I countered with a swift, “She’s not my mother.”

Ngwa, let me put it this way. She’s your biological mother.”

“Being my biological mother gives her no right over me after twelve long years!”

“True. But not entirely. It all depends on you.”

Papa was late, Mama was getting on in years. All her sons apart from the last two, Brother Obi and Brother Vincent, were all married. There was no way I was leaving her to follow that stranger.

“True in every way, Ma. She had her chance to be my mother, but couldn’t handle it. She only lasted a few days before giving me up. So there’s no way I’m ever going to leave you or stop seeing you as my mother because that’s what you are to me.”

And that was how it went. The stranger begged to hug me, and I permitted her to. She clung to me as if about to drown and I a piece of log floating on the water near her. Weeping, she pleaded for forgiveness.

“I conceived you when I just finished secondary school. The boy, your father, who impregnated me, rejected us after I’d delivered you. My parents threw me out of the house. That I was a disgrace to them. Broke and with nowhere else to turn, I had no other option than to give you up for adoption, so you’d survive. After graduating from university and getting a good job, I began looking for you. It’s taken me eight long years to find you.”

Eventually, she left, dropping her phone number and address.

I never called the woman, not to speak of visiting her. Until one day, a few weeks after graduating from secondary school. I had slept with Joshua, a certain classmate of mine I was smitten with, on the night of our graduation party and conceived.

When I knocked on my natal mother’s door and she opened it, even before the smile had fully formed on her face, I said mean-spiritedly to her, “I’m pregnant.” The smile morphed into tears as her face crumpled, and for a second there, she looked ugly. Notwithstanding, she took me by the hand and drew me to herself, enfolding me in a bear hug so tight I thought she was trying to strangle me.

“Sorry.” She apologized when she finally let me go, rubbing away the tears with the back of her hand. “Come in, come in. Pregnant or not, you’re my daughter.

“And your mother?”

“I told her I was going to Abuja to visit a friend.”

#

Her name was Sorochi. But she wanted me to call her Mother. I could not because it didn’t seem right. The thought of it alone left a bitter taste in my mouth and a hurting tightness in my chest.

Calling your mother “Mother” should come naturally, like breathing the air or falling asleep. But in my case, it was a struggle. Each time my mouth formed the word, I hesitated to utter it, the way a child hesitates to swallow a bitter pill. And trapped in my mouth, it soon scalds my tongue, my palette. With a deep sigh or a painful gulp, I’d either expel it through my nostrils or send it towards the pit of my stomach.

Two days later, after she had gone to work, I stood before her narrow wall mirror and practised calling her “Mother”. For starters, I didn’t know which would be preferable: Mother, Mummy, or Mama.

My lips folded in as I formed the mm sound. But as they uncurled outwards, I didn’t know if an “ah” or “or” sound should accompany it. I stamped my feet in frustration and after a few more failed attempts, I resigned myself to calling her “Aunty”. She had to earn the Mother tag. Just pushing me out of her didn’t merit her it.

In the evening, when Sorochi returned from work and I called out in greeting to her, “Aunty, ilo. Welcome.” She halted in her tracks, eyes round. She threw a glance behind her, searching for the visiting aunt.

“Aunty,” she muttered, brows knitted up. It was neither a question nor a sharp rebuke. She looked back again, but this time over the other shoulder, just in case this very aunt proved to be a prankster.

“Aunty,” she repeated, giving me a level look. Her eyes narrowed as understanding dawned. She swallowed. “Ichoro i na akpo m aunty. You want to be calling me Aunty?”

I nodded, feeling like my intestines were in a tangle in my belly.

She pursed her lips and shrugged. Walking past me into the bedroom, I saw her throw her handbag on the bed and instead of slumping on the bed like she normally did after a hard day’s work, she remained standing, backing me. What thoughts ran through her mind, I couldn’t fathom. After a while, she breathed a deep sigh and started undressing.

#

Aunty Sorochi returned from work a few days later accompanied by a man. The man was dark, of average height and burly. His arms were thick and his hands huge, but he was handsome and wore a genial expression that belied his muscular physique. Entering the house, he went straight into the bedroom and dropped the large, bulging holdall he had arrived with. I followed him and Aunty with curious eyes as they went inside. The bag hit the floor with a loud bump, and then the curtain parted and they reemerged.

“Ogechi, meet my boyfriend, Azuanuka,” Aunt Sorochi told me. “Azu, my daughter, Oge.” We exchanged pleasantries. The man expressed his surprise that the woman had a daughter my age.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “Early marriage is good o.” An awkward moment of silence followed this ejaculation. I wondered if Aunt Sorochi hadn’t filled him in on the reality of my existence. I looked at her, but she quickly averted her gaze. The guilty look on her face was enough evidence she had told him a fictional story about being a divorced single mother.

“He’s going to be staying with us for a while,” she told me.

I shrugged. “Okay.”

That out of the way, the couple rushed back inside. The door slammed, but it didn’t shut properly. Aunty screamed with laughter as Azu picked her up in his arms and threw her on the bed. He flung himself on the bed after her and went to work on her clothes.

Aunt Sorochi looked towards the door and realized it wasn’t properly closed. “Azu, wait. You know my daughter is around and…”

“None of this is new to her. You told me she’s expecting, didn’t you?”

“I know. Mechie uzo. Shut the door.”

The man heaved himself up from the bed, walked over and slammed the door shut so hard the entire house shook. There was a click as the key turned in the lock.

I sighed, picked up the remote control lying on the centre table and turned up the TV’s volume.

“So she had told him I was expecting,” I thought. “But didn’t tell him she’d had me out of wedlock.”

With Azu having joined us, I wondered where I’d be sleeping from now on. Normally I slept in the bedroom with Aunty Sorochi, but as her boyfriend was around now, it didn’t look like there’ll still be room for me on the bed.

Hours later, the bedroom door opened, and the couple emerged. Both of them had wrappers tied around their bodies. While Aunty tied hers around her chest, Azuanuka tied his around his thick waist. One glance at his crotch and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. It was dark with black tufts of hair that tracked their way from there across his belly to his broad chest. I felt my heart gathering speed as I gazed at him.

Aunty Sorochi motioned towards the bathroom. “Azu, gawa. I’ll join you in a minute. I want to talk to Oge.”

The sound of her voice drew me out of my reverie. Thank God she hadn’t seen me gazing at her boyfriend. She might have thought many things.

The sofa sank in beside me as she settled on it. “I’m sorry for this,” the woman told me, searching my eyes. She motioned with her jaw towards the bathroom. “He’s been out of work for over a year now. And to worsen things, his landlord threw his things out into the street and asked him to leave his house. It’s that serious, otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered bringing him home to stay with us.”

I shrugged noncommittally.

“I don’t know how we’re going to do with our sleeping arrangements now.” She glanced towards the bedroom.

“How do you mean?”

“You know, with Azu now, there’s three of us and we only have one bed. And it can’t contain all of us.”

“What do you have in mind?”

She peeled back the tight edge of the hair wrap she was wearing and scratched her head. “What’s going to happen is that you’re going to be sleeping on the sofa from now on. What do you think?”

“Nothing. If it’s your wish, fine. But what if my” — I placed my right hand in front of my belly and drew it outward — “gets bigger?”

The woman screwed her eyes up in thought. “For this month at least, just manage the sofa. At the end, we’ll see how things go.”

“No problem.”

She sighed in relief, drew me nearer and hugged me. “Thank you,” she breathed against my ear. Seeing no reason to hug her back and not sharing in her euphoria, my hands remained slack by my sides. She had just sacrificed my comfort for her boyfriend’s and she expected me to celebrate with her?

Letting go of me, she added, eyes bright with excitement, “You can go in and get your sleeping materials before we’re done taking our bath.”

I nodded and rose just as she hurried off towards the bathroom.

The bedroom smelt of seamen and sex. My eyes strayed to the bed even as I fought the urge not to look at it. Since I started sharing it with Aunt Sorochi, it had never looked this ruffled. I struggled to ward off images of what had gone on in the room as they obtruded upon my thoughts. Holding my breath, I went to the wardrobe, took down my nightie and sleeping wrapper and went back to the living room.

Aunt Sorochi and her lover finished bathing and rushed into the bedroom with the eagerness of two teenagers who had recently discovered something new and wondrous about their bodies. The door slammed with finality — the key turned, and the lock clicked home.

#

“So, how long do you intend to stay with your mother?” Azu asked me one afternoon.

I turned and gave him a strange look. “How long? I don’t understand.” I wondered if I was an inconvenience to him.

“I mean, do you plan on staying permanently with her?”

“And what if I plan to? Is she not my mother?”

The man shrugged. “Your baby has a father, doesn’t it? Wherever he is, I know he’s worried about you two. Okwa ya?” Deflecting.

I nodded. “About as worried as my father when my mother was pregnant with me.”

He heard the irony in my voice and stopped to ponder my words. “Yes. I expect he was after all your mother was his wife and you were his baby.” When he didn’t hear my voice after a while, he asked, “What are you not telling me? Where’s your father, by the way?”

“I don’t know him,” I replied without thinking.

“If you don’t know him, it means he and your mother got divorced either before you were born or a little after it.”

I said nothing.

“Or it could also mean your mother never married him.”

I said nothing still. Because there was no need to. Azu was smart enough to have drawn some conclusions from our brief conversation.

That evening, after another rushed round of love-making — this was the early evening version, not the late-night ones — Aunty Sorochi came out wearing a frown on her face. She did not once look in my direction or speak to me until the following day. I suspected Azu might have confronted her about having lied she was a divorced single mother.

In the morning and in the days that followed, for all my efforts at greeting her, I got grudging mumbles, hissed out from between clenched teeth. Everything I did henceforth angered her. And every so often now she bawled at me. Even for offences that required a mild rebuke. One day, angry with me, she had muttered, “All you do is sit at home and eat. One contribution, kam ofu, you’re not making to the running of this house.” I wondered which contribution her boyfriend was making (besides keeping her moaning all night) considering it’s he and I who stay home all day eating. In my case, at least, I was expecting. What was he expecting — a job?

Aunt Sorochi said she was going for a walk one Saturday evening and requested I accompany her. I knew she was looking for an opportunity to be alone with me, to talk things through.

From our house along Bright Way, we turned and headed towards the rugged hills and treeless mountains at the far end of the street, beyond the homes of people and the roar of traffic. While we both wore a pair of blue denim, Aunt Sorochi had a beige turtle-neck sweater over hers while I had a black jacket over mine. I loved the jacket because it allowed plenty of room for my five-month-old baby bump. Whenever I lay on the sofa to which Aunty and her lover consigned me, my belly sagged uncomfortably over the edge of the chair. Some nights I feared I might tumble off it and land on my tummy. The one month I was to be on the sofa had turned to four. Now I preferred bedding down on my thin wrapper on the hard tiles. But sometimes at midnight, it grew so cold I scurried back on to the sofa. My selfish, so-called mother couldn’t claim she had not noticed how much bigger I’d become.

“Why did you tell Azu you didn’t know your father?” the woman asked as soon as we were clear of our house.

“It didn’t happen intentionally. Ewela iwe. I’m sorry.” She had told Azu that I’d gotten pregnant immediately after secondary school, without a husband, the same thing that had happened to her. Yet she didn’t want her own story told. She wanted to be the shining, morally upright mother in his eyes, while I was the sullied, recalcitrant daughter.

“Please next time mind what you say to him, inu? Now he thinks I’m a liar.” Of everything going on around her, she was only interested in her boyfriend not seeing her as a liar.

“Have you tried getting in touch with the father of your child?” the woman asked after a while.

“I did that before I came to your place. If he had accepted us, the baby and I, you may not have seen me.”

“I don’t want you to feel like I don’t appreciate you, believe me, I do.”

I looked at her. “So what’s the problem? Azuanuka?”

“It has nothing to do with him.” But it did. He wanted me out of the house and she was ready to kowtow to him. “I just feel like we should try to put more pressure on that boy, what’s his name again?”

“Osondu.”

“Yes, Osondu.”

“We already did that, Mama and I and some of our people. But he said he wasn’t ready to be a father. Yet.”

“But he was ready to have sex.”

I said nothing. Mama didn’t know about my pregnancy. It was the fear of disappointing her that had driven me to Aunt Sorochi’s.

“It’s not cheap to cater to a newborn and a mother.” Her face was towards the distant mountains as she said this. Above the highest peaks, the sun looked like a ball of fire.

“I understand.” Silence. The crunch of our feet on the aggregates along the mountain trail grew louder. ‘Ehehn, Aunty…”

She halted suddenly, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “This aunty you keep calling me is getting on my nerves.”

Not knowing what to say, I kept quiet. From the way she had been acting, I might never call her “Mother”. She loved herself more than me, a most unmotherly attitude.

She started walking again, and I followed her. “What did you want to talk about?”

“I wanted to ask if Azu plans to marry you.”

“That one,” she muttered in disgust. “He’s only good in bed. He doesn’t know how to do anything else.”

“Break up with him then if you’re tired of him.”

“Break up with him and throw his things out into the street as his former landlord did?” She shook her head. “That’s not a good idea. And besides, I’m not tired of him.”

“You mean you’re not tired of having sex with him.”

She halted for the second time. “It’ll do you a lot of good to remember that I’m your mother, not your sister.”

“If you’re my mother, then act like it,” I said mentally. But to her, I answered, “Yes, ma.” Not without a touch of sarcasm.

“Is that sarcasm I heard?”

“No.” She didn’t look convinced — her eyes bored holes in me. “No. And I mean, No.”

We carried on again. Hyssops and cacti dotted the mountainside here and there. The mountain plateaued at some point and we stopped, looking down towards the sprawling city of Jos. Houses looked like patches, vehicles like scurrying ants while the roads themselves resembled dark ribbons, curling and looping in different directions.

Aunt Sorochi glanced at my face, then lower at my midriff. “I never pictured this in all my wildest dreams. I wanted you to go to school, graduate and become a working-class lady. They’re the women men go for nowadays.”

“I can still go to school after having the baby. You did, after having me, didn’t you?”

She sighed. “Yes. I did. I only wish you didn’t have to follow this route. Remember, I gave you up to pursue my dream, my career? You aren’t giving that baby up — I hope you know that?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“I’ll always be here to support you, no matter how tough it gets.”

“I understand.” She was asking me to leave her place, to go back to my mother’s without saying it. “When do you want me to leave?” I looked away, pretending I was admiring the distant hills. But I could hardly see them — I couldn’t see anything because my eyes had filled up with tears. Aunt Sorochi threw a hand over my shoulders and then embraced me.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “You must understand. I’m not ready.”

I understood at once without her spelling it out to me. She might have given birth to me, but she wasn’t yet ready to be a mother. Not until she learns to love her child more than herself.

#

There were tears in my eyes as I stepped through our front gate into our compound. A little boy of ten clad only in dirty brown shorts brought up my rear, carrying my huge holdall on his head. At one corner of the compound, Mama was bent over, clearing and uprooting grasses and weed with the small hoe in her hand. She straightened up as the gate squeaked open and I came in. Seeing her, my face crumpled and my vision blurred. Mama’s dark, gentle eyes went from my teary face to my full breasts, and then they settled on my distended midriff. Her mouth sagged, and the hoe fell from her hand. She approached me like a sleepwalker.

Ke ihe mere? What happened?” she asked as she reached me, brows furrowed in wonderment. “That’s why you went away so suddenly.” It was a question, and a statement rolled in one. But I nodded all the same. She took hold of my hand, drew me nearer and embraced me with feeling. “Stop crying. It can happen to anyone.” She drew back and stared at my wet face. “So I mean so little to you, for you to be in trouble and hide it from me?”

“I-I-I…” I stammered, gulping, tears pouring out again from my eyes like the waters of a burst dam.

“What kind of mother do you take me for?” she went on in a gentle yet firm voice. “Don’t you know what affects you affect me?”

“Mama, I’m… I’m so sorry. I was… I was afraid…”

“Afraid of what?”

I hung my head as tears rained from my eyes.

“Answer me.” She was angry and justified to be. Yet she was tactful with her scolding. I knew she would relent eventually, so I’ll learn a lesson.

“I was afraid — ” I sniffled. “I was afraid you’d see me as a disappointment?”

“I am disappointed more with your not having told me than with the pregnancy. Yes, I am angry and disappointed you got pregnant out of wedlock. But not as much as I am that you did not tell me.” She was silent for a while, her wise elderly eyes fastened on me. And then she smiled suddenly, stretched out her hands and enfolded me in a hug. “It’s okay. Stop crying. You know I love you and would do anything for you. But I’ll always rebuke you whenever you misbehave.” She planted a kiss on my head. “Now dry your eyes and compose yourself.”

I chuckled in spite of myself. And started rubbing away the tears. At that very moment, I realized Aunty Sorochi never told me she loved me. But how could she have when she was busy trying to please herself? I shook my head and followed my true mother into the house.

1. Nwa m o gini: My child, what is it?

2. Nwa m: My child

3. Ebe zi na: Stop crying

4. I bu nwanyi! Nwanyi : You’re a girl! A girl!

5. o gini: what is it?

6. Gud afun nwa m: Good afternoon my child

7. Nne: Dear

8. Ngwa: Alright

9. Ilo: welcome

10. Ichoro i na akpo m aunty: You want to be calling me aunty

11. gawa: carry on

12. Okwa ya: Isn’t that so?

13. kam ofu: even one

14. Ewela iwe: Don’t be angry

15. inu: do you understand?

16. Ke ihe mere: What happened?”

Michael Emeka is a Nigerian writer, a teacher and lover of nature. His works have appeared in Volney Road Review, Potato Soup Journal and Eboquills. A believer in the saying that the world is the writer’s workshop, he lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where stories of every conceivable sort swirl around him all day. When not trying to scribble down those stories, he spends time reading. He can be found on Twitter @michael64639151.

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