The following is all in good humor.
It is clear to me that there is a stage in womanhood that demands scientific evaluation.
- We know of puberty, when a girl crosses into womanhood;
- Motherhood, when a woman bears or becomes guardian of a child;
- and menopause, the period when a woman loses her reproductive capabilities.
However, the stage that I want investigated has no name.
It occurs somewhere between motherhood and post-menopause. Not all women experience it but most who do have a severe case of it and the symptoms manifest in very puzzling ways.
My hypothesis is that if you put children with a woman who is at this undefined stage between motherhood and post-menopause, she loses her mind. It sounds absurd but allow me to present my case and you might agree with me.
My first case study happens to be my own mother!
When I was growing up, my mother was to my knowledge the strictest human being on the planet. I couldn't stand to be in her presence. It felt like she watched my every move just to see me make a mistake so that she could pounce on me like a tiger on its prey.
Majority of the time, she talked to me using a very hostile tone. At least once a day she promised to deal with me if I didn't "know myself." Her aim was to raise me to be a useful human being. Apparently at the rate I was going, she wasn't sure what would become of me. Very baffling because by my accounts I was a good child. Granted, like most children, I didn't like chores. I lacked initiative concerning things like cooking and cleaning but my mother would make sure I understood that no one in the house was employed for my sake.
I heard things like "if you are not told, you don't know that you should sweep this house so you are waiting for me to come home and cook for you you can't pick up anything in this house you can't do anything for yourself."
In fact sometimes trickery was her mode of operation. She would ask me if I wanted dodo and I would of course respond in the affirmative, forgetting for that moment, just long enough to catch a glimpse of her sensitivity, the perils in our relationship. Of course this was a trap. As soon as I'd say, "yes, I want dodo," she would then say "OK go and fry some for yourself." Ah! What kind of offer was that? Of course I would quickly decline her offer. I loved dodo but not enough to:
- go into the kitchen,
- peel the skin off the plantain,
- slice the flesh of the plantain,
- heat the oil in a pan,
- place the sliced plantain in the pan,
- and watch the plantain through the process, until both sides were golden brown.
There were no short cuts and depending on how much plantain you were frying this task could take at least an hour. Raising the fire wouldn't help. All that would do was give you golden brown outsides with raw insides. I could manage raw insides myself but chances were high that my mother would have some pieces of my plantain. Who needs their plantain-frying techniques critiqued on an otherwise calm evening? It was just too much trouble.
If your mother was like mine, you know that declining the offer isn't the end of the story. If she was in a good mood, I was off the hook, if not, I heard of how lazy I was. Each year the words were the same, only my age changed: "Nine years old? Nine year old can't do anything for herself?" The next year it was "Ten years old? Ten year old can't do anything for herself?" On and on as the years went by, until she entered this undefined stage of womanhood. We are now the best of friends.
I could go on with this case but I am sure you get my point.
Today the woman I described above is a changed woman. She is in this puzzling stage of womanhood. She has legal custody of her late younger brother's children. They are ages three, four, nine and twelve.
The three and four-year-old (the babies) have made my mother's symptoms evident. The once quick and fierce tempered mother I knew is a changed woman. She has patience abounding. But here's the puzzling bit: only the babies enjoy this abounding patience. Every one else still gets a dose of her old self albeit in very mild and greatly reduced dosage.
The babies can sleep in my mother's bed without a problem. I couldn't even pretend to sleep in my mother's bed before I was chased to my own. The excuse was that I slept "rough." The babies sleep "rough"! She'd rather let them sleep in her bed and carry them to their own beds in the middle of the night than hear them cry or see them sulk. Most times they sleep through the night in her bed. Where was this privilege when I was growing up?
The three-year-old has a very strong personality. She also has a very strong sense of how to get what she wants. In one word, stubborn! A few months ago I heard my mom use a word that definitely exposed her as being in this undefined stage of womanhood. We were all sitting in the living room one evening and the three-year-old was being a handful. She was all over the place, and into everything. She wasn't listening to anything anyone said. Basically her response to everything was a strong "No." I call that stubborn but my mother sat back, very relaxed and said, "Wow, you are really blossoming these days." I thought to myself, "Blossoming! Is that what they call it these days."
My mother knows that she is guilty as charged. Although I don't know that guilty is the right word here. She has done no wrong. Sometimes I tease her and tell her how the babies are so spoiled just to hear her respond with a very weak and unconvincing "I don't spoil them, they are not spoiled." She's so unaware. I think this is the typical response to a chemical imbalance caused by this stage of womanhood. Maybe with age, her energy is running low and her disciplinary juices are just not flowing like they used to. But without the presence of these children her transition into this undefined stage of womanhood would not be apparent. What we need to investigate is whether or not there is a cause-effect relationship between the presence of children in her life post-menopause and her seeming change in personality.
The second case I want to present is a little different.
She is one of my very good Aunts (a family friend). This auntie was just as strict as my mother was. She was blessed with three lovely boys who now tower over her barely five foot frame. The oldest of her boys is the same age as I am. We all tasted of her wrath. She had no time for nonsense. Whine and sulk around her and you were asking for trouble. She has progressed from "You children don't know what you have parents that love you. You moan and gripe. These boys want to kill me. You young people just give me headaches" to "Just give me grandchildren all I want now is grandchildren. Where are my grandchildren?"
The pressure is on but none of us seem to be breaking under it, least of all her three boys.
All of a sudden children no longer pose a threat of imminent death. Although she says she wants grandchildren, she's very specific. She doesn't want boys. "No boys, please." Raising three boys must have taken its toll. But she does seem flexible; she just wants grandchildren.
In this case although there are no children present, the prospect of having grandchildren being so appealing leaves no doubt in my mind that we will see the same change in personality and philosophy as with the first case.
The third case is my friend's mother who now bears that coveted title, Grandma.
He recounted a situation to me that is evidence that his mother is also in this undefined stage of womanhood.
Like me, my friend is an only-child. I can assure you that this did not stop our mothers from threatening bodily harm and possible homelessness when we misbehaved. But now like my mother, his mother is a changed woman. Her granddaughter is only 18 months old and very close to those terrible twos.
One day, she threw an ashtray down to the ground under circumstances and in a manner that my friend believes would have cost him the roof over his head as a child. I forget what the circumstances surrounding the act of throwing down the ashtray were but my friend's mother's response was simply "Ah, you are such a ruffian" in a very sweet and loving tone.
What happened to those frequent (now occasional) taps across the backside because you have to nip bad behavior in the bud, before it gets out of hand?
How about those warnings "Na so pickin dey spoil" foretelling the future without discipline in a child's life?
In this undefined stage of womanhood, women adopt a new, more relaxed philosophy on raising children. Some call it experience, I call it a chemical imbalance, something that needs investigation.
There are more cases but space and time limit me to these three only but I am sure that my hypothesis now sounds less absurd. Even my grandmother exhibited symptoms of this phenomenon. When I was going through my teens and knew everything in and about the world, my grandmother would most times just laugh off my aggressiveness and say "adolescence." My mother wasn't so understanding and I imagine neither was my grandmother when she was experiencing it with her own children.
I remember the threat of being slapped into oblivion from my mother and from my grandmother. The same threat, two sources, but two very different effects.
From my mother the threat seemed like a real possibility. She was still agile and had come through on other admittedly less severe threats.
From my grandmother, the threat only seemed like a reminiscence of her hey day. There was no evidence that she would even try to back up her threat with action.
So far what I have observed is that the children must be at least once removed from the woman for her symptoms to manifest. There are exceptions like with the case of a love child, a child who comes years after a couple has "finished having children." These children have the same capabilities as those once removed, to make evident the resulting chemical imbalance from this undefined stage of womanhood. Women in this stage of womanhood are usually over forty years old and have been through motherhood at least once.
This is a call to all of my social scientist friends, please let me know if what I have just described has a name. If not, make this your next project. I think it's interesting.
Until we hear from my friends, let us continue to love and honor our mothers and forgive them for they knew not what they did in early motherhood.
KaiKai
July 2000
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