Dear Mama Afam,
The last time I wrote you a letter, I was 12. I was a terrible 12 but then again when I was 12, I thought you terrible too. You’d sent me away to a boarding school that I didn’t really like, and I refused to stay completely gone. When your peers were celebrating their freedom from their children, you were dealing with lengthy letters, and weepy phone calls from the Vice Principal’s office. And then let’s not forget the times I fell ill (one life threatening illness a term for the first two years) because that school was in the middle of nowhere and the malaria that the mosquitoes gave there was vastly superior to that which I had encountered in Lagos. You must have worried till you were nearly as ill as I, and I was pleased. I’ve always been a little bit of an attention monster so I spent all my time in hospital smiling secretly because I knew you were worrying yourself ragged.
So forgive me if I’m not sure about how exactly I should go about this. Our emails, are significantly less flowery than this, and our iMessages are even worse. I bark demands at you and you bark counter demands back. Or we bitch about something secretly when we’re at dinner in public. You berate me about how my refusal to learn Yoruba is reducing what could have been a glorious gossip session to online chatter and you complain about how you’ll never be able to tell me that the guy that’s sitting next to me on the London Underground is a serial killer without letting him know that you think he’s got ears in his fridge and skeletons in his closet. And what’s more, this letter isn’t just for you. It would be nice to apply copious amounts of tunnel vision to it, and bang it out, but I can’t. It’s for everyone. That makes it more difficult, because our jokes would be lost on them. I find it difficult to believe that anyone who reads this will be consumed by the giggles every time anyone says monkey bottom. I just cracked up. I’d explain it to the lot of you, but you wouldn’t get it. I think it’s a genetic thing. There are some things that simply can’t be got.
There are only two things I want to say, and those are I’m sorry and thank you. I’m sorry for a lot of things. I’m sorry that I break more things than I fix, even though you and Papa Afam are partly to blame for that. I cannot understand how you did not consider that some of your worse traits would be transmitted into one of your children. Of course you could not have predicted that I would have been the sole inheritor of the disorganization, the occasional bout of carelessness, and the lack of coordination. I’m sorry that I do not tell you that I love you enough. The thing is I don’t think I need to. Words can be so inefficient! There is no one word that can summarize everything I feel when I think of you, so love will never do. I suppose it would be better for me to say that I cherish you, but that hasn’t got the same ring to it as love. Love sounds nice, but it means too much while managing to mean too little. How can I say I love my iPhone, and then go on to say with the same breath that I love you. You bought me the iPhone and as such you cannot share adjectives with it. The very thought of it is ridiculous. I’m sorry that I don’t listen. Well, I do listen, and I do agree, but my brain suppresses the instructions that I find distasteful and only focuses on the ones that I find agreeable. I’m also sorry, that I haven’t asked the laptop guy how much he’ll be willing to buy my laptop for. Even though the thing is useless, I remain unreasonably attached to it. When parting is such bitter sorrow, why part at all?
Lastly, thank you for everything. I’m aware that everything is very broad, grand and unspecific, but it will have to do. You’ve done too much for me. You continue to do too much. Sometimes I cannot believe that you’ve read everything I’ve ever written, and that’s a lot. I write more than the lot of you know. Thank you for not disowning me after seeing me do some incredibly cringeworthy things. I cannot believe that you survived the Mammy Water halloween incident, and the sexy clown debacle, and the flash costume unzip me scandal, and the help my son just bought a cat onesie thingy. I’ll tell you everything else when I call you on Sunday.
Love you like Always,
Afam
Afam tweets @Afam20 and keeps a blog.