Thank God for Your Mother and Mine

At some point, I was sure I was adopted. I had a few arguments and pointers in my favor too

1. All of us kids have a name scheme and mine is the only one that deviates a bit from the others.
2. I don't explicitly look like either of my parents (I think that is changing)
3. I used to have typhoid way too often (by my calculations) unlike the other kids so I chugged it down to genotype. To my small 7 year old mind, the only reason had to be that my genotype was totally different from theirs.
4. Ma Petrillo, my mother, beat me the most.

What I didn't account for was that

1. I have the sexiest name of us all.....yup, I said and stop rolling your eyes, Ngo!
2. If not for the antiquity of Ma Petrillo's yore days pictures, I could have mistaken them for me now.
3. My younger brother now has favorite nurses in the hospital. No matter how often these nurses are changed, he knows them by efficiency and shift too. In other words, he is fast becoming more of a customer there than I was. #nothing serious, just plain ole malaria and typhoid sometimes#
4. Maybe I was just a "goat" is why I got beaten so much. Matter of fact, if I have me as child, I probably will beat me too.

The essence of these stories? I have an amazing mother and I am so proud of her. She is an intelligent and dutiful MOTHER. I know you are wondering at the emphasis of MOTHER.

Being a mother (should) go(es) beyond incubating an egg for 9 months and "shitting" said egg out in form of a child. It SHOULD indicate maturity especially when age is factored in, operative word being "should". I have had one a many "mother" figures in my life but I am slowly tweaking that list.

A woman was told that her son attempted to rape his sister's friend. Her response was that a penis is no respecter of humans. People, this woman is Nigerian and she is supposed to be a MOTHER, even more so, considering that she has daughters too. I don't know about you, but there is nothing appropriate about that statement and again I thank God because I know that that is something MY MOTHER would never say. Pray tell, as a young lady who hears her potential mother-in-law utter such, would be very confident in your choice to romantically partner up with her son?

I know woman who encourages her daughter to acquire material things. At some point, she even would help her unemployed student daughter to purchase gold jewelry on credit. She complained to her friend's daughter some day that she couldn't understand why men (older, married men specifically) would promise her daughter material things (like money, trips etc) and never fulfill the promises. Again, I don't know about you but I know that my mother for one will instead wonder what could have warranted such promises and she will tell you as much.

These stories are more, much deeper and much fleshier.  I cant share them in such a way that you will get the full picture. However, my point is that as mothers, mothers-in-the-making and potential mothers, we need to be careful about how we address issues, especially when it involves our children. I (sort of) understand the motherly instinct to want to protect but balance needs to be sought. We need to be able to remember that we have been enlisted by nature to act as the character blueprints for children that we nurture. Before you dismiss this as an uninformed opinion or take, let me attempt to sway you with some pieces of advice that my mum gave sometime during a discussion:

"There is no magic about how one lives for the bulk of what one exhibits is the dictate of who drives ones mind as well as how one wants to be driven. Making mistakes is no crime, making no efforts to correct the mistake is hellish. Taking one wrong decision once in a while will help one to make many other wise and right decisions."

A kii f'ini j'oye awodi, ko ma le gb'adiye (thanks Toin), a person placed in a state of authority should be able to man up to his/her responsibilities.

In other news, my technology-inept self is now on twitter, Toinlicious threw me a welcome party the other day, sorry you missed it. Follow me on @honey_dame and we can go bumper to bumper from there.