this is me

I went home last week. Wait a minute I am not sure what I mean by that now. I mean someone will say home is where the heart is, in that case I have several homes coz my heart is in several places. Logic would tell me that home is where I have my husband and my children. But society tells me that home is where my mother and father lives. Again culture tells me that home is where my mother-in-law is since I have married into that family. To confuse the whole absurd situation more, ancestry tells me that home is where my father originated, his roots, where his umbilical cord fell off and was buried like they say. I shall not give myself a headache by considering all these semantics, simply put I went to visit my folks. And oh what a visit. You see my folks live in a rural part of the country, which (thanks to some momentary madness) is electrified, so I will be glad to say I never cooked over an open fire, nor did I have to look for firewood. But I could have and I can actually. In fact this is the person that I am, you can find me one day in my (ok not so fancy) office, wearing killer heels and a sharp suit, arguing a matter with a colleague. Then the next day you find me clad in flatties and a long dress and cooking over an open fire. I am dynamic like that, I am not ashamed of what I can do. No offence to my new-age peers, but I have no qualms about slaughtering a chicken for relish, or cleaning the inside organs (matumbu) of a goat. I don’t like the smell but I can do it, I have embraced my roots and I am not ashamed. I shelled maize while I chatted to my mother and sat in the sun watching my son running away from chickens. Poor thing he just couldn’t get over his fear of those creatures.

I went to see my mother-in-law. She stays in the urban areas but she might as well been in the rural area at the rate at which electricity goes. So I did cook over an open fire. And oh I did do all the cooking, and cleaning up. In other ways I was a traditional daughter-in-law. And I didn’t complain, I have nothing to lose, its only for a few days. I am an African woman after all, so I am not going to pretend that all this education made me any different. I came back to my house, muscles aching in place si didn’t know had muscles, washed off all the dust from the visit and put on my favourite tight pants and curled up in front of the telly and let my maid serve me supper. I was me in a different mode now, whoever I was during the visit was only a passing phase. It comes and goes and I embrace it when it comes.

This is me, and I don’t apologise for it. Neither do I judge anyone who is not like me, because after all everyone is unique. And the sooner we stop measuring ourselves by a certain standard the more we will all recognise how unique and special all of us are.