LIFE – Page 6 – PurplePretoria

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.

When I first began to write about 2020, it was before our national peak of Corona virus infections. During the lockdown, I had began to see the world for what it was, an oyster. Every day was the same. The sun rose and the sun set. Every day. It was what we chose to do with the time that mattered.

It had been predicted that November would be the month when infections surged and, they did. There was a collective trepidation when it was first reported that we had 1 infection and then 3 in the country. Between June and August, one newspaper had termed ‘Black Thursday’ a day when 14 people were reported to have died of Corona. The next day, it retracted the statement rectifying the terrible misinformation that all 14 had died on the same day. The nation breathed a sigh of relief. By November, we had over 20, 000 cases.

Perhaps this was one of the most distinguishing thing about this disease, a collective pain, a collective loss, a highlight to the lives that have been lost, different from the everyday lives killed by other shy diseases which lacked the diabolic infamy of the corona.

Fresh from the Presidential tea parties that had been somewhat numbing, we peeled ourselves from the domestic and into the capital. There were reports that the business community was being intentionally strangled by the closure of malls and arcades. There were rumours that the disease might not even exist. Then, people started getting sick and people started dying. The stigma was not half as deep as the HIV/AIDs stigma of the 90s, when it was believed that those who had it deserved to have it, that they were immorally complicit, but there was fear.

Contrary to African culture, vigils became smaller and funerals became virtual. People usually hurdled close to the bereaved families for long hours. This time, attending was a test of courage and solidarity with a soundtrack of ‘foolishness’ playing in the back of your head, saying that you were walking right into the devil’s trap. Yet, there was still space, a hollow drumming on of the loss of the vibrant personalities and unmistakable voices and laughs that had forever left our world. In the mind of a mourner, there are two things, fear for the lives of their loved ones that still breathe, and the pitch black image of what happens when the door closes. Do they stand besides their earthly container and watch the people they loved break down and get torn apart or do they just sit and laugh with God and say, ‘Owo, this was all part of the plan, wasn’t it? Ha Ha Ha.’ But, at least in your dreams, they should not talk, mother said. They are not supposed to. And they don’t eat either. If you invite them to eat, they will stop haunting you.

Suddenly, 2020 had become the bleak Armageddon of March when it was announced that the Wuhan virus was no longer in Wuhan.

When Ebola came, it was an African thing. it was the year 2000 and at our Primary School assembly we were advised to stop shaking hands, to just do the bonga like the street people. The symptoms were, bleeding out of every outlet, fever and eventual death. There was no cure. Dr. Lukwiya and his nurses died saving lives. The rest of the world was safe. It was just us, third worlders.

The end of the year has coincided with a history repeating itself. Civil unrest, blood on the hands, blood on cameras, blood on the streets, a once national ideology evolved into a personal ambition. How at peace, are those who sit powerful, above on thrones, knowing how it all began and how it will all end.

2020 did revive old dreams. It sparked new ways of thinking, changed the status quo. It threw off the best laid plans and it revealed our desperate yearning for an anchor.