So my phone rings around 7am on a Tuesday, and I already know from the ringtone it’s my mother. And I know from the time that this isn’t a “have you eaten” call.
“Dara, did you hear,” she says, before I’ve even gotten hello out properly. “Amara’s mother don vex finish o. She wants to disown the girl.”
I sit up on my bed immediately. Amara’s mother and mine sit beside each other at every women’s fellowship meeting. I was actually at Amara’s wedding two months back, family friend or not, you know me, I’m not turning down a wedding party invite.
I sit up on my bed immediately. Amara’s mother and mine sit beside each other at every women’s fellowship meeting, and everybody knows Amara’s mother, she’s the fellowship leader. She is the one who prays the loudest, she’s quick to correct other women too if their skirt is too short. She’ll pull you aside and talk to you like you’re her own daughter, whether you asked for it or not. I was actually at Amara’s wedding two months back, family friend or not, you know me, I’m not turning down a wedding party invite.
“Disown her for what.”
“The dress now. The off shoulder with a low cut wedding dress she wore.”
I and everybody who was there remembers that dress because Amara looked so stunning. White silk, fitted close through the waist before it flared out at the bottom, sitting off both shoulders with a neckline low enough that you could see her collarbones. I also remember two empty chairs up front, the ones with the little card that said Mother of the Bride and Father of the Bride.
I called Amara myself that night. She picked up on the second ring, like she’d been sitting there with the phone in her hand, just waiting for someone to finally ask.
“Dara, is this even real life,” she says. And I can hear it in her voice, that thickness that stays even after the crying stops. “My mother is trying to disown me and she hasn’t said one word to me directly. I heard everything from my brother.”
“Okay, start from the beginning.”
So she’d told her mother about the dress weeks before the wedding, she knew her mother didn’t like the dress. Amara probably should have paid more attention to that. A week later, both parents told her they wouldn’t be coming to the wedding at all.
“I thought that was the worst of it,” Amara said. “Sulking, staying home, fine, I could live with that. I thought they’d come around after. Then my brother calls me, 2 months later, to tell me Mummy is planning to disown me because I’ve lost my old fashioned values.”
“Wait, she used those exact words?”
“His exact words. I have lost my values.”
At this point, I didn’t know what to say to that. So I just sat there holding the phone, letting her breathe on the other end for a bit. Sometimes that’s really the whole job, just being on the line to listen.
I keep thinking about how many mothers have a version of their daughter in their head, the one who agrees, who follows, who stays within what they expect. In Amara’s case was it really about the shoulder, the neckline? Or was it because she became her own woman making her own decisions, disagreed with her mom, and for her mom, the dress just became the easiest thing to point at.
Amara still hasn’t spoken to her mother directly, by the way. It all still moves through the brother, careful, secondhand, like two countries negotiating through an ambassador instead of two women who used to share a room.
See you next Saturday.
Xoxo, ‘Dara
