Me, My Mother, My Life

Life was tough but Mum was tougher. “Ayo! Have you finished in the bathroom? Yetunde, get in there and have a quick shower while I finish preparing your breakfast. Ayo, did you sweep the living room before you went into the bathroom?” Mum’s lonesome voice echoed throughout our apartment in the stillness of dawn, like it did on many a term-time morning, as she shouted out to me and in the same breath called my dithering younger sister to order. On this occasion, she didn’t call me by my full name, Ayomide; she used that variation only when she was frustrated and her words were almost twisting her tongue, or if I had endeared myself to her, in which case she would have called out A-yo-mi-de and the syllables would drag rhythmically and meander out of her mouth like the legato movement of the choir director’s hands. Silly me, I thought I’d grown out of Mum ordering me about, after all I was staring end of school in the face. Not a chance! When I didn’t give an answer to her question, Mum assumed the task hadn’t been completed and I heard her call out again. “Ayo, you know you need to be a lot quicker than that.” It was 1987; I was in my penultimate year in secondary school and Yetunde, my younger sister, had gone past the half way mark in primary school. Our days usually started at around 5.30 a.m. I would normally be woken up by a cock that crowed near the boundary wall, between our compound and that of the adjoining house. The nights always seemed to have gone too quickly and the mornings arrived too soon. Mum was usually up before me. I would hear the clanging of pots and pans as she tried to boil water on the kerosene stove. She had a good command of the mornings; she would handle them with such precise strictness that I couldn’t get through those early hours of the day without her classic commands. As Mum would hurry in and out of the kitchen to make breakfast and get me and Yetunde ready for the day, she would also make sure we were fully on board and sailing the morning ashore with her. “Yetunde! Have you finished your breakfast? Hurry up! You know the Adiguns will leave you behind if you are not on time. How are you going to get to school if they do? Ayo, Make yourself useful and pack my breakfast for me; I will eat it when I get a break at work.” Such a statement as that would mark the beginning of the end for our early morning rush. Our family of five consisted of Mum, my older brother Olalekan, my older sister Ibidun, myself, the third child, and Yetunde, the lastborn.