Prisoner To Your Mother

“You can call me orange” read the email.

“Like the fruit or the color?”

“I was told this was where to go if I wanted to talk about my mother”

Oh man. Orange must have the wrong email. But then, I thought, that would be pushing it a little far right? That there is a person out here with an email address so close to mirawuor@gmail.com that I was sent the troubles of another?

“Well she drinks. I mean I do too, but she drinks like a whole lot. For breakfast, for brunch, for a midnight snack”

Ah, my kind of trouble. So I gave her my number and when she Whatsapped me, I thought I would call this story “Orange”. I saved it as Orange. I almost color-coded it as well. Almost changed the wordings from black to orange. But I’m also practicing self-control because I have been too impulsive lately and that has bitten me in the arse a few times.

She told me she was not sure if this is the kind of place she would want her story to go. She said she would have wanted a smaller platform [do you feel my head swelling just a little bit?]. Has she seen a psychiatrist? I asked. She said she was “not comfortable doing this face-to-face”. That this was safer. Nobody would know her. Nobody would judge her. So I said “Let’s talk about your mother” because I don’t know if nobody would know her or judge her here. I am not people’s judge-mentality [this is underlined so maybe I should explain that I mean it as an individual’s ability-to-judge. Somebody tell Merriam Webster to document more words]. Also, lightbulb; I’m sitting here thinking how Judge Mentality has a nice ring to it. There should be a series about a beat up judge who gets hit by space rocks and acquires the ability to use his/her brain to make court rulings. We should be able to see the brainwaves swirling trying to come to said ruling. Seth Rogen could play it, or write most of the lines at least, and obviously Idris Elba should be the bailiff and at the beginning of every episode he would say “Order. Court is in session. The Honorable Judge Mentality will be presiding” and Seth Rogen or Rebel Wilson would come in on a wooden horse.

Orange’s dad, who I am tempted to name Peel, supposedly left her mother when she was born. She clings to little anecdotes that her mother blurted out in her late-night drunken stupors when she forgot the existence of Orange in her life. Her dad was fun. That’s what she texts me. I can’t imagine a fun dad. No one spends time with their dad and comes out of it going, ‘Hey dad, that was fun. We should do this again sometime’. It only borders “fun” if at the end of it he reaches for the wallet. So I think it is because she looks at her father with her mother’s eyes. This seems like a falling road to go down. I am afraid she will start texting how hard his abs were and how his laugh made the hairs on her skin rise. I change the subject back to her mother.

Most girls grow up being told they are beautiful and strong and smart, and that anyone would be lucky to have them in their lives. They are the rays of the sun. Their beliefs are affirmed and the ideas they have are the best thing their mothers have ever heard of. Most girls have it good. Orange was never most girls. She never woke up to the smell of pancakes in the mornings. She had to come home fed or she would have to sleep hungry. She learned to cook just last year and up until she was 10, she thought mothers were not obligated to do anything for their kids.

She says she discerned the difference between a house and a home when she spent an afternoon at a friend’s place. She understood that one could laugh loudly in a home without fear of a condescending remark. Mothers touched their children in homes without flinching. Homes did not have the constant stench of liquor and vomit that could not be scrubbed out even if her fingers bled fire. Homes had onions in the kitchen and a welcome mat at the front door. She found out just how much was missing in her house and she began hating her mother for it.

When she told her mother about this, she was told of how ungrateful a daughter she was. “She said I was a thankless no-good daughter who didn’t even appreciate all that she did for me.” It’s hard writing a story in my head without a tangible subject in mind so at this point I went offline. I needed a break and break-time has always meant something to eat, has it not? The first thing I see in the kitchen is this deformed unhealthy looking orange in the fruit basket and my brain screams EUREKA! I pick it up and this has to either be a rock or the hardest orange to have ever walked the planet. It doesn’t help that I can’t remember when oranges were bought last. This is a forgotten orange. A sad orange. An orange that has seen days when the basket was full of his brothers and sisters and shed so much when sibling after sibling was taken away to face the wrath of the knife. I don’t cut it. Not yet. This orange is my muse. You don’t destroy a muse. You study it, from afar. You place it on a pedestal and watch it, lovingly, as it sits there, unmoving, unflinching, while the words come pouring out of your brain as if the orange was the cork. I see the orange for the first time. I mean really see it. I think Orange and this orange must be related in a life before this. Before this orange was on a tree, a seedling, a seed, manure, trash, a human. So I sit there for what seems to have been an hour, staring at an orange until someone knocks on the door and I wake from my reverie.

“I’ve been looking at an orange,” I text Orange.

“Ha-ha, the fruit or the color?”

By the time most girls were celebrating their sweet sixteens, Orange was trying to tape her breasts into her back because her mother said she was developing too quick for her age and that she was abnormal. “I can’t tell you how many times I wrapped my chest in masking tape so that I could feel normal. I was going to school on an Equity Bank scholarship and I was scared that they would pull me off it if they realized I was not like other kids who got the sponsorship.” I ask her what she means by not being like the other kids. “My mom made me believe I was not deserving of anything nice I had. She made me doubt myself. I doubted my walk, the way I talked, even my body. She made me feel inferior to everyone else, even her. She constantly woke me up at 2.00am to tell me I did not deserve the scholarship. That I should have let someone who needed it more to have it.”

The tempo changed when she finished school. The 2.00am wake up calls became questions. Why did she not have a man? What was she doing to get herself a husband? Was she thinking that she would live with her mother till she got old? She remembers one time when she was coming from those computer classes we do after high school like a ritual and found the door locked. She was sure her mother was in, because it was 3 in the afternoon and she usually did not leave until about 5:30 for when the bars had customers who she would nag to buy her one or two. She knocked twice and heard her mother’s groggy voice inside. “She said that if I ever want to get into her house again, I would come with alcohol as my rent.”

And so for the next three years, Orange bought quarters for her rent. She tried to avoid being known to the liquor store keepers. As soon as one knew her name, she changed to a different store. People called her names. They said she was going to end up like her mother. That she was wasting away. Women snickered when she walked past. Everyone she met commented on how bright a future she had had before she destroyed herself with alcohol.

In 2017, at 23, Orange packed up her clothes and left. She did not say goodbye. She says she did not want her last memory of her mother to be as painful as her life with her.

“What do you remember of her?”

“Well,” [she begins most of her texts with ‘well’] “I definitely remember the smell. Sometimes I am in a matatu and a guy brushes past me and I swear my mother must have clung to him. It haunts me. I feel like I have failed her as a daughter, and for real this time. But that house had no color. It was grey and I hated it. I hated that life.”

I ask her if she would like to see her again. To mend things. To try and get her help. “Well I have done all that. I went back for the eighth time last month. I cleaned her up, got her clean clothes and took her to some rehab in Limuru. She stayed three days then ran away. Again. So how do you help someone who does not want your help?” I look at my orange, then get up to get a knife. “I have tried so much. I cry every time I see her. she looks worse on each visit. I tell myself ‘You know what Orange, you escaped this. You are no longer a prisoner to your mother’, but every time, it feels like she holds something over me. The fact that she stayed with me. She didn’t leave like my father [Peel]. I will forever be grateful to her for that.” I cut into my orange.

She will try again in April.

[Do you have an AA worthy story, send me an email on mirawuor@gmail.com and Let’s talk drink.]