It’s mother’s day, indeed. For good reasons!
I look back in my past and I see my mother’s signature all over the pillars that are part of the character that holds me together today.
The first one was a situation she engineered for me when I was nine: to go look for my dad, who worked as a government surveyor away from home, hadn’t been home for three months. It was going to be my first time to travel alone, and to a place I had never been to. She presented the challenge so calmly I thought nothing of the dangers I might encounter. She showed me how to carry some of my money in my socks and the rest, my fare, in two different pockets. Then she gave me the directions as to how to change buses, and how to politely make enquiries as to where the Survey Camp was located.
I succeeded, and stayed with dad the whole school holiday month, then we came back home together. After he had gone back to work, it was time for mom to debrief me: who was cooking for us? who else lived in dad’s house? who washed my clothes…. endless questions. At last, she seemed totally satisfied, and the questions ended.
Many years later, seated restfully in my home as an adult, I remembered the experience, and as I went through it in my mind suddenly realised what it had all been about: Mom was conducting an investigation on my dad, in particular to find out whether there was another woman in his life! But she had done more than that, she had managed to train me as a journalist. I learned early to ask questions; to be inquisitive; to be curious…. I had ended up working as a journalist!
Mom had six boys and two girls. I guess she figured out early that if she let us think there was work for girls and work for boys, she and my sisters were going to have it rough. So she taught us to do whatever work that needed to be done. I am truly glad about that because I learned to be be flexible and positively inclined about work and accepting change whenever it was necessary.
When I was ten or eleven, mom opened a shop at our rural town, and enlisted the help of my sister and I as shop attendants in the evening after school and during the holidays. She taught us to count change in an unorthodox way: break up a note into shillings, ten cents coins and five cents – the denominators we worked with and hold the cash in your hand. Then take out and drop into the cash box each payment for the goods that the customer wanted, one item at a time, till the customers’ shopping list was fully attended to. Change was the money that would remain in your hand. She also taught us how to carry money from the shop to home at night: not in your pockets, because you can be frisked. Not with your right hand, because you might be required to shake hands or defend yourself, but in your left hand. If you meet a dangerous person who tried to rob you, submit, raise both your hands in the air, and plead for them to frisk you… After arriving home, don’t bring cash into the house: wrap it in plastic and hide it under a stone in the compound and don’t tell anyone. If a robber comes at night, he would most likely go after mom, not the children, and she would have no idea where the money was hidden!
My sister, Nancy Muthoni, and I ended up doing business (she, more successfully than I coz she stays focused when I get excited by starting up, then I lose interest).
My mom and dad separated when I was a teenager, soon after I went to high school. She took me aside and gave me a stern talk: don’t follow me, she said, no matter what happens. Stay with your dad. He has more resources. He can educate you… I hated what was happening but it was the sensible thing to do.
That was my lesson from her about the importance of learning to make practical decisions, even at the expense of immediate comfort.
Mom worked so hard in bringing us up that her labour, and her marriage troubles, brought on her an early burn out. She turned to drinking, and struggled with alcohol for 29 years, before, through God’s mercy, she recovered and now plays an active positive role in her village and in her church…But her impact on me and those of us that she brought up before her burn out is indelibly visible. We owe her hugely.
So, mom, Happy Mother’s day, to you and, and to all of you mom’s who invest so profoundly in the lives of your children.
Haron Wachira 