Mother taught us it was a woman's job to keep her home clean. "Wash your dishes as you use them. Keep things back in their places after use. Let everything have its own place, and Tobiloba, please, for the love of God, clean up your room!"
I would say that her words went in one ear and came out the other, but seeing as I recall them even now, I must have kept those words safe in my heart. It never bothered me that my siblings and I could never keep up with Mother's new rules because, honestly, I don't think it bothered her as much as she tried to make it seem.
Every three months, Mother would come up with a new system to keep my siblings and me in check, and every new system succeeded at first until it didn't. Until Mother forgot all about it, and, well, so did we. Our rooms would always go back to being messy (never dirty, though). Our chaos had a structure. We never folded our clothes, but our dirty clothes belonged in their place. We never learned to give each item its place, but you would never see a dirty plate in our room. My books were wrapped in calendars, my notes were always complete, but the ears of my pages went rough every term.
Every once in a while, when Mother's eyes mistakenly beheld the chaos our room had become, she would say nothing to us. She would wait until we all went to sleep, wait until the King of Dreams came to us and took us by the hands as we had the best dreams, and then, without warning, Mother would come to our room, her hands prepped to deliver each child a dosage of premium bespoke igbati, slapping us back into the land of the living. By 3 a.m., there, in the dead of the night, Mother would sit with us in our room until we had successfully arranged it to her satisfaction. And then, without saying another word, she would go back to her room.
Now that I think about it, I cannot help but wonder—did she stay up until 3 a.m. just to wake us up? Because her eyes never looked like those of someone who had slept. Or did she set an alarm to wake herself up so she could wake us up? Or did she not even notice the room before that time and only beheld our chaotic living situation when she came to do her midnight checks on her children?
We'll never know now, will we?
It was our punishment. I think she did that so the thought of our rooms being in disarray would send shivers down our spines and we would never leave them so scattered. And that worked. For two days.
But soon, we picked a different lesson from that encounter—always shut the room door so Mother never gets to see inside. Brilliant plan, no? Our logic was simple. She couldn't be vexed by what she couldn't see.
Don't get me wrong. My siblings and I were a bunch of hardworking children. And I think that may have hurt Mother a bit because she knew we knew how to keep a room clean. We just refused to.
Mother had delegated the house chores, sharing them equally between my sister, Oluwadamilare, and me. We were the only ones at home old enough to bear the brunt of the chores. Damilare was posted to the kitchen, while I was in charge of keeping the rest of the home clean. Now, I don't know if the reason my sister now loves being in the kitchen while I detest it—only seeing it as a room meant for survival—is because of Mother's delegations or if she did what she did because she knew her children and, therefore, knew our strengths.
Yes, it's essentially a chicken-and-egg situation.
What I do know is that I learned to love putting scattered rooms together. Leave me with a messy room (again, not dirty), a pair of headphones playing my favorite music, for 30 minutes to an hour, and come back to magic. It is possible, once again, that I learned the wrong lesson from this. Because rather than it teaching me to keep things in their place, it taught me to look forward to when I would have a huge mess to arrange.
Putting my room back together always felt like a gigantic puzzle I couldn't wait to solve.
How else can you know that my siblings and I weren't just lazy brats with a good story? Well, we mostly always topped our classes. Mother was a disciplinarian, and she may have compromised on a bunch of other things, but academics? You'd meet her in front, with her slippers in one hand and your report card in the other.
I still remember her voice from one such occasion. My report card was in her hands, her Dunlop slippers in the other.
"You know that the person that came first does not have two heads, abi?"
I thought of Chidera, the tiny boy who came first this term. I had come first last term, and he had taken that as a challenge. How can I let a girl beat me? he had later confessed to me.
Mother was right. He didn't have two heads. We just didn't share the same source of motivation.
"Tobi, you know, if you spent more time reading, you would have come first instead."
I knew she was right, but really, where was the fun in that? I liked burying my head in books—just not the boring school books. Give me Enid Blyton books, Archie comics, and you had a deal.
Now that I write this, I can't help but think that maybe Mother would have found more efficient ways of getting her point across and shaping me into the woman of her dreams if she hadn't departed so soon.
Maybe.
Maybe I wouldn't have graduated with a Second Class Upper degree and would have finished with a First Class instead?
Ehh. We'll never know.
Am I blaming Mother for her creative disciplinary choices? Never. I loved them.
I just wish we had more time together.
Maybe I wouldn't spend three times as long trying to put my room together, struggling because there was no music to help me.
Maybe Mother would have visited my tiny apartment in Ibadan and said, "I'm proud of you, my love. We need to get you a bigger wardrobe, though. You're not wearing 90% of those clothes, are you? We should go shopping. You need a plunger in your bathroom. I'll talk to your daddy about getting you an AC. And you need better nets on your windows."
I don't know, but that would have been nice.
Maybe she would visit me often, and we would have sleepovers in my small room before heading to my siblings' schools for regular surprise visits, her car full of goody-goodies for her precious babies.
Maybe she would listen attentively when I stumbled over my words, trying to explain why I still wanted a septum piercing. And maybe she would say, "Okay. Let's go get it."
Maybe.
Maybe she would fall in love with my kitten and bring delicious treats for it whenever she visited.
Maybe it wouldn't feel so damn hard if she were here.
Bojack once said that losing your parents is like… You know what, let me just show you:
"You know what it's like? It's like that show Becker, you know, with Ted Danson? I watched the entire run of that show, hoping that it would get better, and it never did. It had all the right pieces, but it just... It couldn't put them together. And when it got cancelled, I was really bummed out, not because I liked the show, but because I knew it could be so much better, and now it never would be.
And that's what losing a parent is like. It's like Becker.
Suddenly, you realize you'll never have the good relationship you wanted, and as long as they were alive, even though you'd never admit it, part of you—the stupidest goddamn part of you—was still holding on to that chance. And you didn't even realize it until that chance went away.
My mother is dead, and everything is worse now."
I think that's such a Bojack way to look at things.
Because now, I get to daydream and imagine how awesome Mother would still have been if she were here.
You know?