The torrents of Anger that wept down when I rose to greet my first pregnancy took us all by surprise, shock and horror. When it drenched us again during my second pregnancy, we were doubly astounded. Anger is not an emotion typically associated with motherhood, let alone ‘good’ motherhood. I think I shocked myself the most, because I had always believed & often declared myself to be a fairly peaceful, conflict-avoiding citizen. I’m known to my colleagues as Zen Seun, to my family and close friends as The Mediator, always sticking my oar in to diffuse and placate wherever high emotions and injustices arise.
Thirties approaching - a brief reflection
Nope, don't panic. I'm not 30 yet. I've only just entered the final year of my twenties (hbd2m, yay!). I simply felt obliged to offer a somwhat brief reflection on this precipice of an age because why not. Perhaps you will make sense of, and even relate to, some of it.
First I must confess: I've been looking forward to the start of my thirties ever since the first time I caught myself trying to figure out a precise formula for whatever it meant to be a happy and successful mature adult woman in the prime of her life. Second confession incoming: I started seriously pondering and then trying to work towards such grand theories from a weirdly young age. I remember ten year old Seunny watching all those 00s rom coms with their frazzled leading ladies at the ripe 'old' age of 30 and clutching at varying levels of shit-togetherness, thinking 'I wonder what I'll get right/wrong when I get there... I can't wait to get there'.
Bourdain & Mother
Do you remember, ma? We used to devour episodes of No Reservations together in front of that bulky silver Hitachi thing that stood in the corner of our mouldy ground floor flat like a three-legged robotic rhinoceros. You’d sometimes let me stay up late watching it with you and we would gobble up together every morsel of the familiar ease, the nobullshit take on cultures and their cuisines, the simplistic escape to places we could never even imagine taking breath in, the heartfelt meals and the many many people across this earth with whom he would converse and eat.
Food was the language we all shared as we crossed over and passed through those borders, partakers all in his culinary pilgrimage. We ate and drank and burped with the gumbo shack regulars in the Deep South and the noodle stall hawkers in Thailand or wherever it was he’d bring us to. Those minutes spent sat before his world, nestled in next to you, were absolutely everything to me. Do you remember, mama? It’s why feeding and being fed are sacred and deep acts of care to me. It’s why travel is not mere escape, but a wholehearted embrace of the familiar within the other. It’s why I have so often sought out that experience of being unmoored and unfamiliar as we all felt we were then. But it’s how I've often ended up finding home and comfort buried in the pockets of a hand turned pastry or long broiled stew…
Bourdain & Mother blessed me with a gift of loving home in places, faces and foods I never thought I’d find it.
Notary Votary
So I’ve decided, realised, come to the conclusion that I cannot be a full time artist however much I would like to. My whole adolescence was filled with the tussle between two denominations: art & literature. I know more about the former and have a deep passion for it that’s actually a part of my lineage on both sides of the family, but the latter seems to be what is in my marrow when I’m cut open.
Besides, I’ve not got a disciplined enough bone in my body to practise something so ruthlessly talent-based as painting or drawing or sculpting. That requires quite a lot of skill, grit, focus, selfmastery, clarity of vision. I’m too hazy and vague and ‘meh’ to consecrate myself to it...
That’s why I will stick my votives under the shrine of writing, where 90 percent is bullshit that passes for masterful work and the rest is pure truth, so I’ve decided. You, I will let decide what side of the percentage my words fall. But before you do, I will confess: there’s always been one great shadow dodging my light. In truth, if that’s what we’re really going for here, I’ve always made the worst student of literature. Despite having read English at Oxford (did you know?) where I was forced to build up out of nowhere an appetite to devour 20+ texts a week - I never was very well-read.
Short Satire: A Complaint of Karens
The crown of the gently braised egg was cracked and ripped open with merciless routine and a heavy silver table knife, the latter no doubt a gift either from one of her three ill-fated weddings, or from the legion of dead and distant relatives that always gave up useless heirlooms at their expiration. Never just a boxful of cash with those ones.
Once silver and crown were lain aside with neither care nor haste, in fell those warm, golden soldiers. Fell one, then the other - yielding soft and delicious crunches in place of screams - until the prompt 06:45 ritual sacrifice was complete, betraying no more of itself than briskly swept crumbs and a half empty shell, dipped of all its golden goodness.
Karen was a good woman, a devout one even, so she often said. Nobody ever dared meet her quietly hateful and routinely condescending gaze to ask why she felt so often the need to assert that statement aloud when it was so very clearly far from the truth of her. They all knew and saw, but were never quite sure if she ever suspected herself deep down, and all were reluctant to be the doomed lamb who would turn her head into the mirror to finally observe the small town tyrant they had watched her grow into over nearly five decades. None of that was really their problem. No, so long as they were spared her petulant and entitled attacks for one day more.
One day like this
Every hour is our whole life, or something like that. How do these hours anoint my soul?
Sam is in the kitchen already preparing fresh coffee in his cafetière. An act performed in the softness of dawn and total habitual abandon. He’s probably listening to the cricket, or more likely a YouTube video about last night’s AEW tag team tournament.
I am woken with the same soft light upstairs, by my baby boy shouting ‘mummy’ across the corridor as he too wakes. I say my simple line of morning prayer and go to greet him with a big cuddle and, let’s be real, a heaving and stinking nappy.
I change him, we go downstairs to greet daddy in the kitchen and the breakfast ritual begins for the two of them - they must have their own things, as must I.
This year and all I move towards
to slow down. the whole way down. whatever metaphorically comes before first gear. this does not mean to coast, but to glide with my full will behind the absence of force.
to live in the Lord's ease and peace. nestled right in where no body or spirit can drag me back out ever again. ever.
to be generous with my time, attention & resources. to give and to give and to give and not to horde, so that I will feel not empty but replenished at each turn.
Expression of Interest in Frenzied Tones
I will kiss myself in the name of the Lord, I will
ask open-handed and allow the voice at the door
in the unknown hour of night into my throne so that I
may receive.
My son, my love and I will hold hands in the gale,
we will form a ring and shout and laugh
and run round each other, with each other, to each other.
This is our year of plenty, of wilderness and home,
of light thought.
We come from one another, we will not fold
unless to Truth. We show our glinting mystery
to the vastness and, still, are more
than it can take.
This is so much that I have held, so much I have held away,
it would be sin, now, to place it anywhere but here on the pedestal.
I’m here too, screaming, crying, smiling, kneeling,
confessing the red ruthlessness of my whole being and oh my God,
I love this and don’t understand it.
I love me so much, I love you, Sam and baby boy, yes!
I love this world (but I am confused),
the whole world, the one in his hands, so much.
I am not done.
Why I should draw, but can’t. Not right now anyway: An Amateur's Manifesto
I fear the blank face of the page or canvas. That’s the tip of the truth. I dread the moment just before creation is expected. There is an overwhelm of possibility that stuns me almost every time: where on this space do I start? which colour or word comes first and then next? what is my subject? or is it an object? do I focus on line form texture or function? do I design or simply emote? is that even a real word? how do I best go about figuring out this piece of work, it’s totality and afterlife, before it’s even begun..?
This state of constant self-questioning can appear purposeful. In reality it is a well worn distraction technique. It's also not something that can be shaken off very easily when you have myriad other distractions waiting for you to slip quickly into and drive away… what I ask now is how do I overcome this artistic inertia?
My village came
Mama has power, but has she enough strength? I have found an old definition of motherhood and it is simply, complicatedly, ‘Everything’.
My village arrived in drips during the weeks after the birth of our son. To tell you the truth, I do not really remember anything other than the relief & gratitude I felt whenever my door would swing wide to the smiles and coos of some warm person I loved so much, often bearing food or open arms.
There were photos, of course there were, with our new bundle where he should be: at the centre of all of them. And I was there too - not the headless, bodiless arms that were only there to hold him up so others could see. But me, my whole self, my whole bloated and sagging and lifegiving body. We were there and my people held me as I held my baby and I swear it was God on Earth all over again.
There is power here, oh yes, power in abundance. And deep within my village there is more strength than could be told.
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