© Numero Unoma
Motherhood has always been a mysterious fairytale land for me, despite the fact the I am a mother of three. Of course, there is a reason for this, I’ll tell you about that later, though.
Most people take it for granted that they can take their mother for granted. And I mean that in the nicest of ways. Mothers always love their babies, even if they are ugly. Mothers will always forgive you and find a way to make it better. Mothers will not judge you without first hearing or even intuitively knowing your perspective. Mothers will love you until the day they die. At least that’s how it should be. Thankfully, it mostly is that way. We Igbos honour this fact of life with the beautiful and profound name, Nneka, which means a mother is supreme. After all, there is not one of us, rich or poor, great or lowly, female or male, who is not born to a mother.
I am often bemused and amused by the whole concept of Mother’s Day. I would have thought that there’d be 365 mother’s days, but officially there are two of them, the American one, and the other one. Some territories who ought normally to celebrate ‘the other’ by virtue of their ties to the erstwhile British Empire, now insist on ignoring that one, and celebrate instead, the one whose empire they currently have the greatest proximity to, namely the American one. Former British colonies in the Caribbean do this. Meanwhile as Nigerians we don’t do things in halves, and so we take advantage of doing BOTH days!
You see the concept of Mother’s Day is something alien for me. I am inclined to agree with my Nigerian culture, which marks a woman’s membership in the beautiful panopticon that is motherhood, via the identity of her first born. So, while I grew up being known as Unoma, I am now Mama Chiedu. Chiedu is my first born, whose birthday it was yesterday. His birthday will forever be Mother’s Day for me. Before his birth, I was just me. But on that day, I became a mother, never to return to my previous state of being again. I am now and forever Mama Chiedu.
Even when a mother (God forbid!) loses her first child, she will always be identified as being the mother of him or her whom she first bore, no matter how many children she has thereafter. She will always be named after her firstborn, and not without reason. Indeed there is something enchanting about being entrusted with a whole new generation, and I will always be humbled by the charm, wit and power that my Chiedu has brought into and kept in my life. As much as Chiedu has entrusted Unoma with a new generation, he too has been entrusted to lead that generation.
My own mother, though blessed with three children, has not been as fortunate as I have. Mama Unoma died on the old Lagos-Ibadan Road at the youthful age of 26, leaving behind three babies, none yet three years of age. Yes, I am the eldest of those infants. Please don’t feel sorry for us, we are over it, we have grown up, are growing old, and have children of our own, even grandchildren. What it meant though was that we never had the classic role model to glean from, in the quest to understand just what it means to be a mother. Nor did we have the support that human beings can normally and naturally expect to enjoy, as a fundamental part of one’s development. Instead, we had the fairy tale version of the stepmother, ruthless in her efforts to undermine any other children of her husband’s, than her own. For those who grew up reading western fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Snow White are cautionary metaphors for what not to do as a step-parent. They are also pretty accurate observations of the basest of human nature.
As a growing child, I was not the sort of girl who wanted to own, or to play with dolls. I preferred to hang out with the boys and have a race or climb a tree or build a den. I did not find changing a doll’s diaper to be fun in any way, there would be plenty of time for that when the real thing came along one day in the future. I like a good challenge, and contrary to baby diapers, dolly diapers simply didn’t make the mark. Motherhood came early for me, and I still wonder today, how it must feel to have the privilege of Omugwo, something I never experienced. Somehow nature equips us with an instinctual hand book, an inner program that is triggered by pregnancy and childbirth. On the one hand apparently I was too strict, on the other, I somehow managed to spoil my children.
Many years later, I am still in awe of this miracle. You mean a human being has…in fact three humans have actually resided inside of my body? You mean I actually fed and sustained three human with my breasts! I look at the three tall adults who lovingly bully me around today, and find it impossible to conceive that I carried them inside me. Sometimes I feel like a fraud, as though it all did not really happen, and I have to consciously remind myself by looking back on the many milestones of motherhood that prove to me that it was not all just a dream, and I really was there for real.
Many Nigerian and African cultures revere mothers and motherhood. In Igbo culture, Ala, the Earth, from whom all life sprouts is the mother of all growing things, including humans. The Earth co-exists with her male partner, Amadioha the Sky, who fertilises her with his thunder, lightning, and rain. The ancestors return to reside in her womb, when they leave the living realm. According to a UCLA publication, “she is the source of fertility, morality, tradition, and, therefore, culture. She is at once nature and culture, which in her are joined and simultaneous.” Ala is depicted as a woman nursing a twin at each breast.
The Senufo people of Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Mali are patriarchal societies, though because they are matrilineal, they are socially propped by female societies like Tyekpa and Bandogo, who among other things perform funerary rites, supported by the male Poro counterparts. Their artistic carvings generally depict a nursing mother figure, described by the Smithsonian to “emphasize fertility, most obvious in her rounded stomach and pointed breasts. The hairstyle also is symbolic, taking the form of a hornbill bird’s beak. The hornbill is a favoured choice of imagery among the Senufo because of the bird’s natural habit of forming pairs and showing devotion while hatching eggs and raising young birds.”
Unfortunately motherhood evades some of us. In 2019 we had an exhibition at my Abuja Gallery, The Nu Space, titled Art and A.R.T. in which we raised awareness about infertility, and offered solutions. The turnout was encouraging, but what was truly significant was the amount of followup interest and enquiry, as well as the interest in the female condom we were giving away for free, after women learned how these could help to preserve their fertility.
I recently read about the world’s oldest mothers. There are women in their 60s and 70s having babies in India, where IVF is administered controversially, it is said. Whereas most Western countries would not offer the treatment past a certain age, India understands not just the democratic power of money, but importantly, the pricelessness of maternity, in a way that one cannot expect western cultures to do the same. I am grateful to have had three children by natural conception and birth, and while I am glad that I had them early, I am deeply intrigued by the urge of these mature women, who opt to subject their bodies to the traumas of pregnancy, just to bear an offspring, so late in life.
As much as its is revered though, motherhood can also be romanticised, and there are many instances in which outcomes are far from optimal, despite the best of intentions and greatest of effort on the part of the mothers. Not only are mothers mere humans, but life is a mystery. We can only do our best. There is no handbook, and even if there were, life is full of variables, the most divergent collection of which can be found in the personality of each child that we bear.
I spent a great deal of Monday communicating with family members who were expecting the birth of their first child. She was born just hours before I began to celebrate the anniversary of my own initiation into the club. It is an initiation of blood sacrifice, in which we are inflicted with pain, and rewarded with the greatest esteem in the world. And an even greater joy. Yes, Nneka, a mother is supreme.