I’ve been meaning to blog about the process of turning a
large proportion of this blog’s content into a book. I still mean to and will
absolutely do so; I just haven’t found the time. May has been such a crazy-busy
month.
One of the things I will say about the process in the
meantime is that I was introduced to my editor a couple of months ago; the
editor has done the first review of Book Draft 1 and sent back comments, which
I recently addressed before sending Draft 2 back. In the very first set of
comments, a key message to me was that I would have to get written permission
from the identifiable people in the book to actually use their words. As you
can imagine, as I absorbed this message, I wondered what I had gotten myself
into.
I immediately emailed practically all of the other
identifiable people, sharing the excerpts that involved them and asking for their
written permission. With my mother, though, I held off until this week. I
should also say that the editor’s comments included encouragements to say more,
to go deeper on certain issues. After I’d fleshed out ‘Permission from my
mother’ a bit, based on the feedback, I was really reluctant to have my mother
read it. I just wasn’t absolutely sure how she’d react. I finally forwarded it
to my sister on Monday or Tuesday this week, though, and asked her to print it
out and have my mother read it for the first time.
By Wednesday, I sent my sister a one-sentence, nervous email,
totally on edge:
‘Did she read it?’
She hadn’t.
My sister forgot to give it her. There were just too many
distractions that day because my mother had all these impromptu doctor’s
appointments, etc.
I got a two-sentence email from my sister the next day,
though:
‘I gave it to her this morning. Give her a call.’
Uh-oh.
This was really nerve-wracking.
‘Why?’ I replied. ‘What’d she say?’
‘She was reading it when I left this morning,’ my sister
explained.
Oh, Lord.
I took a deep breath and called my mother. She didn’t pick
up.
I panicked and called my sister: ‘She didn’t pick up. I hope
she’s okay …’
‘Of course, she is,’ my sister said impatiently. ‘She’s
probably just on the other line. She’s going to say ‘yes,’ anyway. Calm down.’
I hung up, unconvinced. I decided to focus on my two million
deadlines at work and get back to being on edge later.
I called my mother again that evening.
As usual, it took her some seconds to figure out which one of
her children was on the phone. This ritual never fails to amuse me. I suppose
with six children – four of them, girls who probably sound sort of alike – it’s
easy to get us mixed up.
I nervously asked about her health and we chatted about this
for about five minutes. This was followed by a pregnant pause. It’s hard to explain
why I felt this way – extremely uneasy. I’d asked several other people for permission
to use their words from actual conversations we’d had, after all, and they had
all said ‘yes.’ I suppose my mother’s approval (which her permission symbolized
to me) meant more to me than I ever realized.
‘Well, what did you think?’ I finally asked her – in my
mind.
As if she had heard me, she said quietly: ‘I’ve read what
you wrote.’
She said it in Igbo, suddenly switching the language with
which we had begun our conversation.
I exhaled.
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t
reply. I listened carefully with my ears pricked up, trying to use her verbal
cues to picture what her expression was like.
After some seconds of silence, she said quietly, in Igbo: ‘You
wrote well.’
I exhaled again, blinking back unexpected tears.
I finally spoke out loud: ‘Thank you.’
I said it in English.
I could’ve said much more, but I sensed that it wasn’t
necessary. Without being verbose, we were having probably the most important
conversation we’d ever had in my life. My sister later said – and I agreed –
that those three, simple words (‘You wrote well.’) were high praise, coming
from my mother. They actually seemed to hold deeper meaning, in Igbo, than they would have in English. In my mind, in Igbo, the words referred not just to the quality of the writing, but to the importance of the message conveyed by the writing as well.
Ordinarily, the fact that my mother carried out this entire
conversation practically, in our language, shouldn’t be remarkable. However, my
parents never really spoke to their children in Igbo, and so her doing so now
made me wonder if there was any significance. The most my mother would do,
typically, is give a, brief, one-sentence instruction in Igbo – you know: ‘Get
me this’ or ‘Go get me that.’ So it was very unusual for her to be addressing
me in Igbo throughout the conversation.
So unusual was it, that as she spoke, I wondered whether the
choice of language was a conscious or sub-conscious decision. I knew the
subject of conversation was extremely sensitive for her. It’s one thing to talk
about other people, but talking about your own daughter – talking to her about her own divorce must be
extremely difficult. And so, at first I thought that in choosing to speak in Igbo
(a language she never actually speaks to me in), she was using the language as
a sort of barrier between me and her raw feelings. It must have just been too
close for comfort – a bit too overwhelming. And then I changed my mind and thought
perhaps she just needed to speak in the language she’s most comfortable with, and so her first language made the most sense. I
don’t know.
‘In our days,’ she continued, ‘that’s just how it was. You didn’t
talk about those things. You couldn’t talk about such things. You just kept
quiet. That’s how it was.’
I nodded understandingly on the phone, reaching out with my
heart to the woman she once was decades ago as a young bride.
And just as we had made this rare connection, my mother
brought us abruptly back to reality (the reality of our relationship), saying:
‘You got what you wanted, now.’
My heart sank momentarily and then I burst out laughing. Good ole Mummy, I thought. You just
had to ruin the moment, didn’t you? LOL.
I thought to myself that perhaps this was yet another
measure to ensure that we didn’t get too close for comfort. Of course, with my
knack for over-interpreting things, I could be totally wrong.
‘I wouldn’t say I got what I wanted. I just did what I had
to do. If I had stayed and gotten HIV, what would you have said? That I got
what I wanted?’
I listened patiently without surprise as she swung (in her
characteristic fashion) like a pendulum, back in my corner, re-hashing stories
of the many she knew back home with ‘malaria’ that wasn’t really malaria. I
continued to listen, bracing myself for the time when she would, like a
pendulum, swing back to her earlier position.
She spent some minutes lamenting over what good people my
in-laws were, and how she couldn’t understand how I had hand-picked the ‘wrong’
brother to marry. I patiently pointed out that the problem might not have been
that I married the ‘wrong’ man; the problem could simply be that he married the
‘wrong’ woman. It could simply be that his brothers are married to women that
are very different from me. Who knows? They may have had similar experiences as
me without talking about it. Not to suggest that they have – I’m just saying. I
pointed out that in my days, it’s still rare to really talk about these things,
so her generation really isn’t all that different. Maybe I’m just an outlier. If
I had just kept mum, I would still seem like the ‘right’ woman, and he would
seem like the ‘right’ man. What’s happened has happened, so let’s just move on,
I urged.
In the end, she didn’t actually indicate verbally that I had
her permission to use her words, and although I didn’t actually ask, I sensed
that I had it. The next day, my sister emailed me back a scanned copy of the ‘Permission
from my mother’ excerpt. My mother’s signature was on it. She had signed it,
indicating the date: May 17, 2013.
I marveled that her hand-writing was still the same after all
these years. My mother is in her seventies now. Her beautiful, neat, cursive
hand-writing stood out from the page almost like art work. I thought about what
a stark contrast this was to my absolutely hideous, chicken scratch writing.
My mother and I definitely have our differences. Apart from
our shared natural shyness, we are really nothing alike. Both of my parents
firmly believe(d) I am my father’s mother reincarnated. This idea is way to
spooky for me and far too removed from my own belief system for me to have ever
given it much thought. But I am aware that this belief on my parents’ part
informed their individual relationships with me. To my father, I was the mother
he adored; to my mother, I have always been the mother-in-law whom I never met, but who allegedly
made her life a living hell.
All the more reason why I’m grateful we’ve come as far as we have in our relationship ‘second time around.’
