by FADHILI DECHE & FANIKI DECHE
For the last decade or so, the family has been used to a jurist mum who is rarely at home. She has been travelling a lot to Nairobi and occasionally out of the country both for work and studies. With the onset of Covid, the Jurist has found herself grounded and mostly working from home like many other people. The family has had to get used to her presence. Her daily routine is nothing remarkable. The jurist is the only girl in a family of five. Given that the boys tend to stay up rather late watching soccer, we often wake up to find her already sat at the dining table having breakfast while working on her laptop. She then gets into a marathon of virtual meetings with her colleagues at the JSC or at the University of Nairobi or holds her classes with her students from the university.
We constantly interrupt her work when we seek her permission to go somewhere. We are able to figure when the permission is given reluctantly. This is when she first sets out a whole list of demands for us to fulfill as a condition to getting the permission. She says things like, ‘You may go but first go and take a shower/brush your teeth/clean our rooms’ etc. We fear that the list of conditions may keep growing to include, ‘clean the TV, fix your hairline, or memorize 1st Corinthians 13.’ She particularly has a problem with our last-born brother visiting neighbors’ houses which she calls ‘hunter-gathering’ behavior. That’s all well and good but the boy is twelve years old and all he wants is to hang out with his lifelong friend who literally lives ten meters away from our house. At the same age, we hear the jurist specialized in getting into physical fights with her brothers and climbing trees so we are not so sure who the real ‘hunter-gatherer’ here really is (We still love you mum).
Working from home means that the jurist must deal with constant noise. She gets easily vexed when we play loud music or laugh loudly. Unfortunately, our neighbor’s young children prefer riding their bikes and playing hide and seek at night. This really peeves her. Amidst the noise, she is quick to point out and correct our grammatical mistakes. She is obsessed with grammar. We wonder how her students cope.
During lockdown, we have spent some evenings playing Bible Charades as a family. None of us is particularly sure how the jurist has managed to consistently beat us and remain at the top. We are not sure if God created her just for this game, or whether the men of the house just aren’t smart enough for it. Perhaps it is her tough persona that gets her through (notably when she argues like the lawyer she is on every contentious decision that goes against her in order to gain the upper hand). It is probably the combined effect of studying the word and having a close relationship with God for decades, along with the six years she spent studying C.R.E. in high school. We now have plans of playing a Bible Kahoot sometime before the lockdown ends. If you are wise with a taste for gambling then you know who to place your money on.
With a lot of time in her hands, she has had time to experiment with Tik-Tok with below average success. The three of us tried to re-create a Tik-Tok dance she had found online. Not to slander the jurist, we can comfortably say that she was the weakest link in the trio dance. She demanded for a re-shoot three times because she was unsatisfied with her performance. That shows her great determination even in small things, but boy, was it tiring for my brother and I? The video is on my brother’s Tik-Tok account @ibakedyouapie3000 watch it if you please.
The jurist mum has that kind of paranoia that is typical of any mother. Let’s not get started with the anxiety that seizes her when her first son who is a new driver goes out driving on his own. She only gets to exhale when he gets back home in one piece. Our diet has gone a full 180 degree in a bid to protect us from COVID-19. We’ve had to take some immunity boosters and vitamin supplements. Steaming with mwarubaini and taking an assortment of herbs from our grandmother’s farm is part of the routine. MoH sneezing Guidelines are seriously enforced. ‘Don’t sneeze into your arm if you are wearing a short-sleeved shirt. It does not make sense.’ she says.
The anecdotes that we’ve become accustomed to hearing about our jurist mum are mainly about her forthrightness: how she is more than willing to say the sorts of things others might be thinking but wouldn’t think of saying themselves. A willingness to risk ruffling feathers that borders on proclivity. Incidentally, this characteristic is very much mirrored in her second born son. He is known in our family and friends circle for the number of unorthodox – bordering on outrageous – things he has said and done. He will voice his opinions without hesitation. Whenever my mum shares stories of his antics, the general reaction is to comment on how he is indeed his mother’s son. What’s funny about this is how often she tries to downplay or deny the similarity between their versions of stubbornness. Mum has only recently started to accept the truth of the similarity, and rather begrudgingly at that. She alleges that the particular kind that her son possesses is comically extreme. He is a person who speaks first and thinks about the consequences later. But, of course, she is not like that. She speaks up whenever something needs to be said and it doesn’t matter if she’ll end up stepping on some toes in the process.
Ultimately, the jurist mum is like any other mum. She is a manifestation of the “stubborn African mother” archetype that we are all familiar with: always nit-picking, but always doing so out of love. This extended period of time together under one roof that the lockdown has granted us has brought that to the fore once more. And we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
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