Everyone knows that doing daily house chores are all part of
growing up in every home, except of course, you’re allergic to chores and your
parents totally understand and sympathize with you, and go on to hire a live-in
help.
This is the same in a standard Nigerian home, the only
difference being that nobody cares if you’re somehow allergic to chores, you’re
going to have the devil smacked out of you for even trying to pull such a
stunt; and no one is ever satisfied with how diligently your chores are done,
there’s always going to be something you missed. I think Nigerian parents
actually get some sort of training for this.
There was this joke my younger siblings and I made up back
then. We used to say that even if we somehow found a way to raise the
foundation of the house, sweep and mop underneath it, our mum would still come
home and find something amiss, something we didn’t do, and that would
ultimately earn us some long speech about how lazy we were, sometimes it’d earn
us some sweet spanking.
Now understand that the problem wasn’t in doing the chores,
it was how nobody ever seemed to be satisfied after you were done; there was
always something else . Thinking about it now, I feel it maybe had more to do with
preventing us from being idle (so that we don’t get recruited into the devil’s
army I’m guessing), and less to do with the chores. Nigerian parents can have a
stroke from just seeing you sitting around idle or clicking away at your mobile
device.
Once my mum saw you sitting around watching too much TV, or
even just being idle in your room, just forget it, cos’ she’d most likely find a
shoe rack that needed rearranging, dishes that had to be washed or a floor that had to be
cleaned spotless.
I remember one day, my siblings and I got back from school,
did the chores we were to do and went to go watch cartoons. My parents weren’t
back from work yet, so that meant free time sitting around doing nothing for me.
Immediately I heard the sound of the horn of my mum’s car which meant she was
back from work, I literally jumped up from my bed and went to go stand by the corridor.
Understand this—of course I’d done all my chores, finished my homework for the
day, etc, but I knew if my mum saw me sitting in my room, doing nothing, chores
would magically appear from somewhere, so I had to go stand by the corridor just to look busy. It sounds a
bit extreme but I ain’t kidding on this one.
Anyway, one incident particularly stood out and that was the
day we, (my siblings and I) realized we were totally finished.
It was a regular day like any other, though I think it was
the weekend because my mum was at home.
My younger sister and I were in the kitchen, supposedly
cooking and tidying up.
My mum had just gone into the bathroom to take a bath.
Now the old house we
lived in while growing up had this wooden bathroom door that was pretty worn
out and would always creak whenever it was opened. With that sound alone, we
could tell when someone was coming out of the bathroom.
So my sister and I decided that for all our hard work for
the day, we might as well take a little break, and decided to enjoy our break by
taking some chicken from the pot of stew to eat, specifically, the drumsticks--thick,
juicy ones too. We sat down on some stools in the kitchen, chatting away, with
each bite we took out of those juicy drumsticks making the conversation much
more interesting. It hadn’t even been 5 minutes since we sat down and we heard
that all too familiar high, groaning sound- the door to the bathroom being
swung open, which meant that mum was out of the bathroom and would most likely
be heading to the kitchen next.
What happened in the next few seconds was a classic
definition of what you’d call a “fight or flight” response. Without thinking,
we quickly stood up from the stools, and with reflexes too fast for anyone to
follow, threw the barely half eaten pieces of chicken into the trash, then went
over to the sink to start doing the dishes—dishes which weren’t there few
minutes prior I can assure you, but we had to make dishes appear in the sink
somehow, cos’ no way in hell was my mum going to walk in and see us sitting down
and not doing anything.
She walked into the kitchen sure enough, saw us, and asked
what we were doing.
It’s funny and also not funny how in our response to her question,
we particularly said out loud for emphasis and I quote “we’ve just been here, standing
up, doing the dishes; nobody has been sitting down idle”
I know most of you right now are more concerned as to what
happened to the barely eaten, thick juicy chicken drumsticks in the trash
right?
Well, I know I’m a Nigerian, born and bred here too, but the
US citizen “to be” in me right now
is going to plead the fifth in
response to your questions and concerns. I mean, I might as well start now to
practice how to exercise my constitutional rights for when I jakpa to my true
country.
On the
upside of all this, my siblings and I, have all grown up to become adults with
high functioning OCD, especially when it comes to cleaning and having things
kept in an orderly manner. Those who know me personally understand what I’m
talking about.😏😏
Until next
time people!
Xoxo!!!
Alma Rosenfield