A. M. K

Toxic– very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way–

commonly used in modern culture in relation to a hurtful, uncomfortable unresolved web of miscommunication, mistrust or disappointment. / this term may perhaps be used incorrectly at times [in the same way as the word ‘OCD’ (obsessive compulsive disorder) for every excessively neat person]

***

Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Contained. As if as soon as I step up onto that doormat I box up some part of me. To let me loose, I dance carefree at the balcony, jumping up and down as if I was at an American hippie concert.

It’s cold again. We are sitting at that table, at the cake and coffee lounge because we didn’t make a reservation at the prestigious Sunday brunch. We three are late by a few minutes because I had a change of mind for my dress. I thought that, maybe I should reserve the maternity dresses for when I’m actually pregnant. He spread his hand out, greeted one of us. For myself, barely an eye’s contact. So, I had already done something wrong.

The atmosphere was tense. The second one of us was moving out [in protest] this weekend. She told me that she would do it well, in a civilised manner. Not like you that time, this she did not say. I nodded. Don’t I always? It was strange. She had got the help, all the understanding and now she had also received the worst branding for it, in the current cacophony of castigation.

I knew what it felt like to be in her shoes, walking across the corridor door, almost bursting into flames as they burst into laughter. I had heard caught some of the words they wanted me to catch. I boiled, I fried, I cried.

I had loved her all of my life, with a fearful intensity and dependence that I lived in constant trepidation of losing her. “You were like my bestfriend! I told you I had gone for counselling and you said nothing! You didn’t even ask me what it was about,” I cried. She replied coolly, “Those are your problems.” She deflated my heart, it never quite opened up the same way again.

There had been whispers again the first time I walked down the stairs. Sometimes I woke up and called, just like I had called in the hospital, but no one picked. My neck and shoulders could not carry my head long enough to let me walk. I was almost always alone until he came back so I spent hours in the house, acquainting myself with the maid. Like any other cold war, I made an alliance with her and she became the symbol of my disdain. “She’s not her maid. She needs to get her own maid.“

“The case of Lesh Lights, you know it?”

“Yes,” I say quickly, ransacking my brain for details, finding only one loose excel sheet of receipts and invoice payments.

“This is them, our clients. But they cheated us.”

“They cheated us?,” I exclaimed.

He looks stonily back at me, leaves his mouth open for a second in indecision, as if he would rather not say what he wanted to say.

I sigh. I feel too much.

***

I’m six months pregnant and I’m sitting on our bed. He’s in the shower and baby moves. I decide to sit with him and introduce myself.

Hi. My name is,…” I say. “That’s what your father calls me,” I continue. “But my family calls me differently.”

“I’m your mother.”

“Okay,” I pause. What can I tell you about me?…Okay, what do you want to know about life?”

“Well,” I answer. “It’s…” I change my mind again. “There are so many things you can do. You can swim, maybe you will like that. You can ride bicycles. I don’t know.”

***

Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Good morning is a question that may be treated, constructively, as unheard or heard. And the density in the air is like a balloon that is about to pop, my very presence a cause of insecurity that would prompt the trickery that I imagine is only reserved for the Secretary’s office of a six term President.

Then I, drunk with confusion, had arisen, clad in a red riding hood and dared to question the way of things.

“You are so … weak … Sensitive.” “And why don’t you know? Why don’t you know! Why don’t you know!!,” became the growl and snarl of the jaws of the grey wolf that visits in the spaces when I am not dancing.

***

We are sitting at that table, at the cake and coffee lounge.

“Give the child more cake. Why shouldn’t he have more cake?” she smiles with a strain. She’s beautiful, dark and youthful as if her soul never aged; the mask of a low-blow warrior.

“No, its too much, he’s had five.”

“I’m going to give him more. Why shouldn’t he have more? “she insists.

“-Does Dona still post her cake business anymore? I don’t see her statuses anymore,” the ‘steel’-water pacifist cuts in.

I turn and whisper to the teenage boy I met when I was 17. “I didn’t know that he reads statuses, does that mean he actually sees what I write?”

He stares stiffly at me and looks up at the table. We are on one end of the table and we are whispering and someone is leaving in protest, in a civil manner this weekend. The celebration of this precious day has come at such an odd time and yet we still sit here, all together.

“Waiter, my whisky,” he calls to the waiter rushing by.

I need a weekend from my weekends. I morph into a lawyer during work hours, some of the work hours, because its been two years and I still need maternity leave hours, and I morph into mum for the rest of the day. On weekends I am fully mum- most of the time, [although sometimes I long for girlfriend mode]. Other times I am a half creature, both of something at the same time. But because I am fully mum on the weekend especially on Sundays, Monday is usually a severe jolt, a somersault into a different sea and it takes me time to find my rhythm in those waves.

I think all mothers need a weekend from the weekend. It is the change. It changes everything and it feels like losing yourself to someone else’s control- the whims, tantrums, the tebi-bubbies, the tsusibrush and when they are unwell, to the darkness they imprint on half your soul. Someone else might say, that stagnation is more terrifying than change. It depends on who is moving, and what they are trying to hold on to. For me, it depends on possession and the need to control, it depends on the smell of the familiar and the comfort of aged layers of things I keep for years, which I have touched and felt over again and whose particles lie against my skin in a pattern, as those which have lain there before, over and over again.

But if you are to wake up early on a Monday morning, definitely, sleep early. Do not indulge your need for me-time with a replay of a love triangle or matchmaking show in the middle of the night. Do not undo the child’s crib and put him in an adult bed which he can slide out of at any time so that stretched out in the middle of your bed, his face angelic, you shall be leaning on the edge of a fall or with a foot pressing against your cheek.

However, if you really would like to wake up early they say, plan an enticing breakfast to lure you out of your bedcovers at 35 degrees on a 27 degree morning when the inevitable soothing shushing Monday rain patters. Since it is not recommended to eat Lays crisps or Cerelac [if you are an adult and milk tends to show up on your skin long after you last had it] for breakfast, millet porridge will do, without sugar of course, and today, even without honey.

But, definitely, do not buy that katogo from the nearby restaurant again. The smell of burnt beans from a charred saucepan is one of those smells that lingers in your mind, long after the event, serving as a constant reminder as to why you should never get burnt beans from a place whose kitchen you have never seen. It is probably like the kitchen of many restaurants, with fat cockroaches and sweat flying, leftovers re-placed onto the next customer’s plate as bread and side dishes. You should in particular never go to the kitchen of a restaurant that was last busy in its opening week.

I know for certain, that you should never eat a cheese omelet from a hotel in a small German town where overt racism is nothing to be ashamed of. The waiter will wink at the kitchen chefs, saying, This is for the black girl over there. And you will get yellow slime, which on second thought will not look like cheese alone. And you will treat it, how you treat overwhelming things for which you are not prepared, try to normalise them or forget. But it will always creep up, and you will allow your mind to conceive that it might not have been cheese.

Twice last week, I finished my breakfast before I got to work, and I got to work hungry and without breakfast. But today I fell into a deep sleep, like that time I fell asleep for about an hour, abruptly, in a dark dreamless sleep in the full glare of the sun. Though, this time, it was with many anecdotes, different people, I talking, them talking, under the shadow of a morning greyness, the grey that launched this brilliant year- the year after the pandemic- the year after the year-. I had been holding my mouth so tightly in my sleep that the fine line on my right cheek was creased deeply. Yet, even after all that sleep, I forgot my porridge.

Author: A. M. K

Lunch

Monday