At the swearing in of the members of the Court of Public Opinion, only two people made it in person. The rest attended by zoom meeting but they were late to that too. The meeting began two hours later than it was supposed to begin. Soon after members had introduced themselves, most of them chose to go by ‘Anonymous’ for fear of being arrested by ‘drones’, they made their oath.

We, the members of the Court of Public Opinion, hereby solemnly declare and promise:

Our allegiance to the cause of justice, through social media jabs at opponents most especially on the lazy, idler streets of twitter

When you call us to action, make sure it is outside work hours but before happy hour

We pledge to support you in words

We shall ridicule you only if it suits us

We shall stay home when push comes to shove

We promise to be safe and not put ourselves in the line of danger

We promise to sleep through election day

And vehemently complain when the internet is still off a month later

We promise to retweet, like and share funny memes of this season

We shall always be at your beck and call

Uttering endless cowardly monologues like one Mwenda

But if you are imprisoned behind your walls

Our food shall be vague promises of street protests

We are in truth, invisible

We only exist on the world wide web.

I now know what it means when you tell your child,

…”And if you hurt yourself, I will beat you.” [translated from my mother tongue] It holds a much more violent connotation now than it did in the nineties when I was growing up, but, literally it means, “Don’t you dare put me through the trouble of watching you hurt yourself after I already warned you to stop what you were doing”.

This threat is made in situations where your child is standing on top of the dining table running towards the edge and you have told him over and over again to sit down. The last time he fell head first over the table, legs disappearing over the edge of the table just as you tried to hold onto that little stubborn foot. He is trying to run along a slippery floor whose water came from a bucket he has dragged and tipped over. He has already once before slid and fell backwards with a thump the last time and he had that cry, the one which begins with a soundless scream.

Nevertheless, in his presence I always feel a bit of accomplishment. Although, I do feel it less and less as he goes deeper into his “tantrum/meltdown/power struggle” twos. However, three months ago, when I most needed to feel a sense of purpose and accomplishment, my heart knew where to run to before my mind did. I had been home for two weeks on study leave before I realised that part of what I had been looking for on this break, was not just time to study. The week before, I had experienced what to my emotions had been almost like a public flogging.

…

I had gone home to find my other identity, the one whose word was the last word, the one whose documents did not get exchanged in a swift corrupt and collaborative manner. I was mother to a little boy who opted to call me by my first name as he had heard his father doing. Still, motherhood is not instantly gratifying or always effective at championing your strengths. In fact, a lot of the time, it reveals your weaknesses. But there is something about that moment, when your child eats the balcony plants and comes wailing to your door for attention, completely confident that only you can solve this problem.

“Being pregnant is like being possessed,” I said to him.

Motherhood and pregnancy have this in common. They have a way of making you dependent. If you hate being vulnerable and you are afraid of relying on others, well, pregnancy and motherhood will leave you exposed.

I combed over my pregnancy, labour and post partum up to more than two years after it all happened. I would dive into my memories, as I often do, almost hoping that I could go back in time and change things into exactly as I had hoped they would go. I did this a lot, [as I also often do, going back and forth between the past and the future and judging the present by the past]] until once, when I was talking to a visitor, I heard myself out loud. I had completely overlooked the fact that while I had got an emergency C-section [in a manner which I suspect was planned from the beginning], she had not been able to breastfeed her child because her milk just never came in. I had become so caught up in what had not gone as planned and for so long that I had failed to see that someone else could have had a different kind of a hard time. I also had not paid much attention to the fact that I had undergone a successful surgery, received my big healthy baby and had a lot of milliliters to a litre of milk a day every day. [Yes, it sounds like you are a cow and that is how it feels too]. I had walked again after a mind numbing spinal headache, my body had sucked itself back into a shape I could love and most of all, we three, me, him and baby, we had stuck together, through it all.

I shiver at the responsibility, the hard work, the courage, the anxiety, the fatigue, the toll it took on me, but it is nice to have that one place I could run away to and be one of two MVPs.