My father is dead so
we now watch television a lot as a family. (Come on, we all know that fathers
make television awkward so when they walk in, everyone walks out). So we are
watching TV and somewhere in the movie a mother gives the son her engagement
ring to give his girlfriend. Oh! It was Spider-man 3 and Aunt May gave Peter her
ring. Anyway, so my young brother suggested that my mother should give her ring
to him so that he should give his bride also. In an indifferent tone she says
that she doesn’t have one. Suddenly Spider-man loses everyone’s attention
because there is juicy and less pathetic story being told in the room, we all
look at my mother urging her to go on. “You guys didn’t know? I didn’t have an
engagement ring because he couldn’t buy me one. I didn’t have a kitchen party
because I couldn’t afford one. We didn’t do a wedding or anything because we
didn’t have the money.”
I looked my mother in
surprise because I didn’t know, I had assumed things because she never let on
that she hadn’t had every girls dream, she had her life and she was content
with it. A silver ring has sat heavily on my mother’s finger for years and her
kitchen has been stocked, she has attended weddings without a shred of
bitterness and in her marriage she invested 100% for the twenty years that it
lasted. I was born first and in my baby pictures everyone looks happy. They
looked happy because they were. My mother with her careless big afro and wide
smile chose my father. Above all her suitors and more successful friends who
could have thrown her a grand wedding and turned her life up, she still chose
my father. She chose to love him though it all, she saw someone in him and
loved until the man she saw in him became the man he was; he was a nobody to
society but someone to her and she loved him until he became a somebody to
everybody. No wonder she is proud of him.
Sometimes I wonder if
that kind of love exists. Everything is currency these days whether it is
actual currency or social currency. Dstv prices have increased, fuel has the
tendency to either be expensive or scarce, electricity units run out before you
even earn the money for the next ones and don’t even get me talking about
internet bundles. Life is expensive and because of human nature and Darwinism
the survival of the fittest is as real as ever. Everything is currency. Women
are getting fit at the gym, it is a fact that hips that don’t lie pay bills
because beauty is the currency by which they survive. Men are coming up with
all sorts of business ideas both honest and dishonest because handsome ‘Ni
patumba’. If your currency is beauty you will attract a mate who can afford a
beautiful life. If your currency is intelligence, you will have the career and
network that will attract a mate of your standing. If all you have is love,
what can you afford when people don’t know you enough to love you, there you
are deemed irrelevant. Children are stealing from parents just to keep up with
peers and be relevant. To be wanted and to find love you must be relevant at a
grander scope than just love. What is love when you are homeless? Can warm and
fuzzy feelings pay rent? Will love feed when you are cuddling and you hear your
beloved’s stomach rumble? Love results in babies… babies result in hospital
bills, formula, diapers….you know let me not even go there, the point is clear.
I see women claiming
that all that matters is love but when I look closer all I see is their single
status and a line of broke heartbroken men that they will not consider. If you
are materialistic just admit it and up your own currency, I think that’s better
than living a lie just because you think people will judge you. And that’s not
just for women, even men who only want to date women that look like video
vixens, add more zeros to your pay check or look like a male Calvin Klein model
then so that it balances out. This is the unfortunate truth of the world we
live in.
For every situation
there is different versions and the truth. Different versions are viewed
through the eyes of experience and perception. Your perception is your reality.
On the other hand, the truth is simply the truth.
The truth is, if
anyone encountered the all-consuming authentic unwavering love and they felt it
for someone they would live through it all. Sometimes even if it isn’t
reciprocated the right way. For that kind of love people would make things
happen and be together. I like to think that my mother felt that love for my
father and then felt it for us, her children and that’s why she made it all
work. What makes us rely on currency to survive is our inability to love. Our
faith has been shaken to the point where we can’t see how a world can exist where
loving someone makes things worth it so we rely on money, looks and titles to
survive and that in itself is settling for a life that is less than we deserve.
Loving someone completely is hard, it takes patience, trust, sacrifice,
compromise, forgiveness and in brief moments you see that it is well and there
is no other place you’d have rather been than with that one person.
I have deviated
thoroughly from the point of this note but I wrote it to thank my mother for
loving my father completely. Her love was what made him strive to be the man he
was made to be. It made his life beautiful and has made mine complete.
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