by The kids in school were asked to wear odd socks for World Mental Health Day. That’s crazy — pun intended. What’s not crazy is that my mom was depressed for most of my childhood. Heck, I think all moms were depressed for most of our childhood. We just didn’t have a term or the time for it.
One of my mom’s friends committed suicide. Her name was Irene. I remember Irene because they were as close as two P1 teachers who always signed each other’s loan forms could be. It was bizarre how Mom talked about Irene’s choice to end it all by rope-on-the-neck. She seemed to admire that her friend’s problems were gone. She was very understanding; envious even.
I now know how to detect when someone is flirting with death thoughts. I didn’t then. One day, screams woke me up. Suddenly my heart was thumping so hard it’d have flopped on a polygraph test.
Ours wasn’t a family that slept early. We cooked late and ate late — often by the fireplace light. The lamp rarely had paraffin in (you can call us the foolish virgins). Until one day, mom went to town and came home with a solar panel the size of a mini-laptop. The power always ran out by 8pm, but we were elated — we were still among families that turned on a switch to have light. Ah, we were going to make it after all.
But we almost didn’t.
One pre-solar panel day, when we used to feel our way around purely by touch, imagination and memory, Mom tried to kill herself. My sister caught a glimpse of her as she threw a rope on the mango tree right outside the kitchen where eight-year-old me was dozing off, sitting on a wooden stump that served as part of kitchen furniture.
A childhood of worry
The mango tree was the family’s ever-reliable shade, the pillar on which I hung my very first swing. This tree that held all the secrets to my childhood was just about to aid and abet suicide.
My sister’s screams woke me up from the smoke-induced coma I was about to fall into. She jumped over sufurias blackened with soot and the poverty of not having scrubbing wire, over me, over death itself, and caught mom before the rope was on her neck.
They wrestled for a little while before falling into a heap, crying together. Then she escorted her back to the main house, a brick building still under construction. It didn’t have window panes or any warmth. The floors were as rough as life in the middle of the month.
Mom eventually slept the suicidal thoughts off, but she lived to try it another day.
My memory of my life as a child is one of worry, of whether I’ll come home from school and mom will be gone. I had vivid, scary dreams of her finally having her way and ending her life.
The only problem with the picture painted above is that my mom was the most normal person in the village. She was a teacher, which means she was revered by the children and respected by the adults. She was the epitome of hard work and compassion. She’d pick poor kids from the neighbourhood and make them hers, ensuring they got the education that was the key to a promising future. It’s a pity that we get the key and then find doors that only open with a passcode.
But that’s not the point today. The point is that mom is alive and well, and she probably doesn’t remember any of these things, partly because she has Alzheimer’s.
Life was hard then, and life is hard today. It’s a different kind of hard, but hard is hard, no matter how you look at it. There have been more cases of suicide than an excel sheet can handle. Amid ridiculous CBC assignments, the price of cooking oil and petrol, narcissistic partners and toxic bosses, the mind can only handle so much.
I know because I’m my mother’s daughter, and I must think about my mind and how to polish it from all the life-induced dross. So, I run. But I had stopped for a while because there just wasn’t enough time. But I had time to watch memes and short reels of people laughing at things I don’t find funny.
So I went back to my first love — running. I threw in the gym just for special effects. Had I been voted in as the MP of the Chuka-Igamba Ng’ombe Constituency, I’d have passed a law that all bodybuilders be allowed to wear whatever they want, even if it’s a handkerchief!
Choosing my hard
The gym is hard, and discipline is even harder! I repent of all the times I’ve sneered at girls whose stomachs are fused with their backs. I repent of all the times I’ve looked at them in their tiny shorts and thought, “Where are your internal organs? Does that body still have the loop of Henle?”
I repent, my people.
By the second day at the gym, I was sure Moha, the instructor, had a secret desire to commit homicide, and I was his target. I haven’t died — yet.
I was running today. As I ran through the Bamburi trails with the backdrop of crickets and frogs, I wondered, “Did Eli — the one who was fat and fell over in his chair and died — go to heaven? If Eli was fat and went to heaven, why am I running? Is the said Eli in heaven with the inflammable trio of Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego? If they are together, are they forcing Eli to eat cucumbers and drink sea moss?
Before any of those answers came, I hit a stone and fell. One minute I was walking and the next, my face was approaching the ground at 100 nautical miles per minute. Until that second, I did not remember the last time I fell. I don’t think my body has gone involuntarily horizontal in about 72 years. What surprised me was that I didn’t feel like falling from the skies and didn’t get hurt. Ok, my ego was bruised a bit.
I rose like the motivational speakers said and ran with new energy—partly because I needed to stop seeing the guys who saw me fall. I ran all the way to the beach.
When the run was over, the dopamine levels were high, I was feeling great, the running pain was gone, and I was sweating like a man of the cloth caught in a lie.
As I wiped the sweat off my brow, I knew I’d do this again. I have a newfound respect for people who’ve successfully sculpted their bodies in the gym. That mettle should be awarded the Order of Burning Fat by the president because, wueh! Exercise is a wonderful way to keep the mind healthy.
Find a hobby, a distraction, something that takes your mind off things and gives you space to breathe and think straight. Your mind will thank you.
“For physical training is of some value, but godliness (spiritual training) is of value in everything and in every way, since it holds promise for the present life and for the life to come.” I Timothy 4:8 AMP
