If a child dies before its mother, they’d blame her. She’d be castigated, mouths waging wars of insults towards her womanhood, stones of curses striking her cursed bosom. What sort of mother outlives her child? The world shall ask.
Who then asks, when the child lives? When they grow fat and healthy? The world ignores, they pretend as though they don’t understand the intricacies of life and death.
Children don’t just die, an elderly woman once told me. Then I wondered how it is possible that my neighbor lost two of her children to Ṣọ̀pọ̀na. Perhaps the children were still asleep. The elderly woman continued: from pregnancy we mothers must become witches, we must appease all the gods from Olódùmarè to Èṣù, for nothing other than the sake of our children. Then suddenly she glances a menacing stare at me, pointing her skinny fingers at me, you barren woman, how many times have I warned you to find a solution to your barrenness? She says, her word’s piercing my insides. She continues, look around you, all the town’s women you see here who are now mothers, undertook grievous journeys to achieve their dreams, but you lazy child, whose hips cannot bring forth fruits. It was at that moment that I knew I have had enough of the insults and threats. After-all it wasn’t my fault that my children die in my womb before they come forth, the gods were punishing me for something I was yet to figure out.
That night, I climbed on my husband and poured all of his seeds inside me. I wiggled every last seed from his manhood into my chalice. Then I stood up at once and went to the elderly woman’s hut. I knocked twice and saw her lying there, Iya wa, I am ready. I found myself saying, I didn’t know what came over me that I found myself here in the middle of the night. But I knew that I had to find a solution to my problems. She looked right at me, although the hut was dark yet she glowed. In an instance she lighted her lamp. Seeing her in the dull light, sent shivers down my spine. It was at this moment I knew the woman was much older than she had always appeared. Her body looked frail, yet she sat confidently. She urged me to sit beside her. We sat in silence for a short while till she said, my child let us make you a woman.
My son became a man. A bright star among stars. He was blessed by everything the world could bless a man with. Every time I saw him, my heart fluttered, to have a child like him, was heaven. My heart was filled with joy, my belly filled with wine and sweets and my soul drunk. But every night before I slept, I remembered my debt. No one knew when the debt would be returned.
On his 21st birthday the debt collector came. It was unexpected, I had become so complacent, foolish enough to think my debt was forgotten. Death never forget. There was nothing I could do to stop death from collecting what I owed. I had been warned that my gift was going to rob someone else of theirs. Now it’s time to give it back. Who can say no to death? In anguish I reluctantly gave him up, cowardly, without any fight.
Now there was no one who could question me, after all I was a mother. The witch that killed her child shouldn’t be questioned, after-all she was the the one that birthed the child. But, alas, in this game I won. My son gave me a grandson, before his demise. So in the game between the witch and death, I the witch won.
Omooooo