I don't remember much. I hardly remember her face nor the cadence in her voice when she spelled out every syllable of my name. But the little things bring her back from the dead. The little things make it feel like she is here with me.
Now, while I'm eating our leftover boiled slices of yam with generously sprinkled groundnut oil, she rears her beautiful head back from the dead and sits with me. It is her who taught me that a woman is never stranded. As long as she has got a few leftovers, some oil, some salt, some seasoning, some pepper, a woman can never be stranded. Her machinations featured a wide array of concoctions, concotion rice, concotion spaghetti, palm oil spaghetti, yam and groundnut oil, not because my mother could not cook the important expensive delicacies, but because when all is spent, and a mother is left alone with her five kids, she must feed them, some way somehow.
She comes alive when I am in the kitchen, frying my first perfect akara. I remember watching her take these same steps, her akara balls a bit bigger than mine. It was one of the things we loved about eating her food. We always ate to our fill.
Even when our neighbours and well-meaning relatives would sneer and scoff saying, "You're spoiling these children. You're expanding their tummies," my mother paid them no heed because what did they know about being a mother? What did they know about her kids?
Of course, if she had been blessed with the gift of sight, if she had known that she wouldn't always be here to spoil us and expand our stomachs, maybe she would have reduced our portions a bit? Maybe she would have prepared us for the difficult life that laid ahead?
But then again, maybe she wouldn't have. Maybe she knew that everytime we stepped into our new kitchens and cooked with our new washed up pots, every time we dodged the hot akara oil from splashing on our skins, every time we sprinkled cold groundnut oil on our yams, every time we made toast bread and ginger tea for ourselves on the rainy days as she always did, every time we scraped and ate the burnt part of the jollof pot, her favourite, every time, we would remember her. Maybe in spoiling us and expanding our stomachs, my mother created a never-dying portal, for her to always stretch out her hands and touch her kids again, hold them and watch them eat as she loved doing.