Every Mother: a goddess!
A Mother is someone who has replicated her life biologically, spiritually or intellectually. This definition transcends the traditional definition of a Mother,
which is limited to physiological reproduction, extending it to encompass the role of the woman who raises children that might not have been biological conceived by her.
As a woman who is raising three biologically conceived children along with two ‘not brought forth from my body’, I am very much aware of the importance of this definition. Where I come from in Western Africa, a woman’s husband’s children are considered as hers but I found it was not that straight forward when I married a man who had two young children from college dalliances. I was quite determined to raise the children with him because I felt that providence had already given me two children ahead of the marriage, hence our home would not be complete without them. My reasons were not purely altruistic. They were borne out of my own childhood experience. When Mother married Father, he already had a child born outside wedlock. My brother – from a broken engagement – was a great source of heartache to my mother who tried unsuccessfully for years to convince his Mother to let him ‘come live with his sisters and brothers’. It never happened except for a brief stint when I was about 9 years old and by then the damage was done. He was ideologically and intellectually different from us and very suspicious of my mother. My father had had not been able to influence him and he already had many behavioral traits that were problematic for our small conservative family. Moreover his mother and some others who did not know Mum had repeatedly told him that Mum could not really be as nice as she made out to be, warning him that he would ultimately find out that she was the proverbial ‘step-witch’.
A few years after he moved in with us, the family prepared to move to another city just as my brother was about to leave for college. He had indicated preference for college abroad and Dad agreed, making the arrangements. Dad had his fees paid and bought his ticket, sorting it all out. My brother was to leave for the US a day after the movers came. Although they wondered why they had not heard from him, my parents assumed everything went according to plan until about three weeks afterwards when someone claimed they saw my brother in Ghana where he was said to be trading in gold. Dad went in search of him. It turned out my brother had cashed in his ticket, asked the school for a refund and taken the funds off to start a business. ‘Why?!’ Mum asked my father incredulously. It was many years afterwards that my brother admitted to Mum that his mother had convinced him that Mum must have hatched a plot to get him to leave for the US in order to get him out of the way so that he would not inherit Dad’s estate. As it turned out, Father did not pass away for another thirty odd years after that and my brother never got a college education. Incidentally, considering each one of us – three sons and two daughters – got an equal share of Dad’s estate when he eventually died, we could argue that my half brother actually got a disproportionately larger share in total if we were to add up all the unpaid loans he owed for his hare-brained business deals over the years. Until the day my father passed away three years ago, Mother relentlessly mediated between father and son. We all lost count of the number of times Dad threatened to cut him off, while Mum pleaded on bent knees as he came back home time after time with the consequences of poor judgment, blowing millions of Naira along the way, which he had loaned from my Father to execute one business or the other. One time, he was remanded in Police custody in yet another business deal gone wrong. It took Mother weeks of pleading with our exasperated Dad to intervene. In the end, he was released but he soon threw it all in my parents’ face in as many words. At a point we were convinced that my half brother was on a mission to see how far he could push Dad but Mum’s pleas continued for the simple fact that she feared everyone would blame any major fallout between father and son on her. It seemed as if she spent her life atoning for the ‘sin’ of marrying a man with a child outside wedlock.
This experience left an indelible mark on my mind and when I found myself about to marry a man in similar circumstances, my prayer and mantra during our very short courtship became: ‘Omniscient God, if you know that these children will ever come live with us, please make it sooner than later so they can grow up with their siblings and be one’. God answered that prayer speedily, as the children were generously offered to me a week after our wedding at the ages of 6 and 4 years. I have been raising them for over ten years now. My conceived children came along in quick succession thereafter and by the end of the fourth year of our marriage I had me five youngins!!
Next year would be my sixth year as a full-time homemaker, a decision that became necessary as my husband’s business grew and he needed to travel more. That same year our eldest will be going off to college, followed quickly by the second, while the third and my first biological child goes starts high school this year. What would have seemed like an impossible task – had I stopped to think about it – has turned out to be a whole lot less harrowing than I was warned it would be. Everyone I knew: from my family and concerned friends to the family of my husband’s children tried to dissuade me from taking on the children. I was warned: ‘There’s no joy in it’. ‘It seldom brings good fruit’. ‘There’s no reward in raising someone else’s children’. The only people who never questioned me were my parents and my Mother-in-law. Of course, I noticed their anxious looks when my parents met the children for the first time and over the years as they watched the dynamics between us. I observed their pleasant surprise when the children started to call me ‘Mum’ rather than ‘auntie’ of their own volition. Many a cousin or relation got their ears ticked off when they tried to point out behavior that they preferred to attribute to the fact that they were defiant step-children but which I chose to overlook – most of the time. There have been a few times when I have broken down under the pressure and begged God to take this cup away from me but for the most part, as I prayed and talked to the children (often) I found that somehow, God has made their hearts soft towards me. I really cannot imagine our family without them. As they grew older, I had my husband sit them down and tell them in very simple terms why he and their mother never got married. I felt they had a right to know. No doubt they might still have lingering conflicting feelings at times but their mother got married and is raising her own family now on another continent. I imagine it would have become clearer to them that much as she would have wanted it, living with their father and I is the best arrangement – their mother has step children from her husband’s first marriage along with her two children with him. I imagine that although her step-children do not live with her, the situation is tense enough without adding the pressure of two older children from another relationship into the mix.
On our part and against the odds, we have become one family and the odds were sure stacked against us. I was a very independent, over-achieving, fast-tracked executive who married a man who is only a few weeks older than me. By every overt standard, I was more successful than he was but although slower paced, he is a brilliant individual (bordering on genius) who had potential and an auspicious future. More importantly, we shared a deep personal faith and relationship with God. He is a Christian man with real integrity, someone I look up to and learn from daily. So I went ahead with my hand in God’s.
Recently after another subtle incidence of subtle defiance, I realized they needed to hear it from me, so I told them: ‘This is your home. I am your mother by fate just as much as by choice. You were not forced on me. We are a family by a deliberate and sacrificial act of love’. I have told them: ‘I may not have brought you forth from my body, but you are my children as surely as if you had been’. And they are. By sweat, by toil, by tears, by prayer and groaning before God, through sleepless nights, mopping fevered brows, first days in school, through school-yard bullying, bed-wetting and bringing other children’s toys home, through school work and preparing for qualifying exams, funding fads and fancies, onset of puberty, career counseling, early retirement so as to become a stay home Mum, through abandoned (maybe rescheduled) dreams of a doctorate, grounding and cultivating first ‘fros and hundreds more parenting acts, I tell them: ‘I have earned my Mother’s stripes and stars’. I am also doing something different from my Mum. I refuse to hold back any manner of chastening that I consider necessary. Of course I second-guess myself all the time: wondering if I am doing the right thing, being too soft, or too hard, sharing the right values, explaining enough, over-explaining… But I defy the fear of being misunderstood, I defy the fear of being called a ‘step-witch’ for the greater fear of failing before God. I remind myself that it is to Him that I am accountable for their lives as I am for the other three. I am content not to be their best friend sometimes and even to be hated temporarily (as I did my Mum) so that one day they will say as I now do: ‘Thank God Mum’s love was tough when it had to be!’
