I recall feeling it from a distance. From as long ago as memory allows, Mama would be gone by dawn and return around quarter to dusk. Grinding for me, and then for my brother and me. Without much of a choice, I always had to feel the warmth in her room from a distance. As a child, I was unaware of just how profound the impact would be. You see, the impact only began rearing its ugly head in my young adulthood. I was confronted by the monster that no longer sought to remain buried in the deep, dark depths of my existence. It felt like an ambush. Perhaps it was an internal intervention for growth I was unaware of at the time. This ambush—or intervention—exposed the anger and resentment I felt towards Mama and even myself for feeling angry and resentful towards my own mother. I’ve always been able to give love and receive it by reflex, but at some point in my life, I felt unworthy of receiving love. Only starting in my midtwenties did I realize that I had some unresolved issues shaping my interaction with Mama and my approach to life. 

Church was a huge part of my childhood. In Block 3, a suburb in Gaborone, Mama would wake my brother and I up every Sunday morning, or every other Sunday morning, so that we could prepare for church. Like every child, we disliked being woken up so early on weekends, especially to take communion with a community of strangers. We preferred sleeping in. Truthfully, I doubt that either my brother or I liked attending services either. There was a hymn we looked forward to hearing, usually sung to signify the near-culmination of the church service. Because I had to feel the warmth in Mama’s room from a distance, I suspect I took the services as an opportunity to spend as much time with her as possible. We had family taking care of us for the longest time while Mama was out grinding. We had access to their rooms, but these rooms always fell short of the right temperature I craved. Inside of me lay a void so cold it could only be filled by the warmth in Mama’s room. I went to church for her. And when I was old enough to comprehend the church and its purpose, I stopped going, opting to attend service in the temple within me.

The transition from city to village coincided with a period of self-discovery. “You don’t appreciate me,” I remember shouting at Mama one day when I could no longer hold my feelings within. She was somewhat nonchalant about it, like the Aquarian she is, and nothing was truly resolved by my outburst. I just learned to hold my feelings in better, operating from my head more than my heart—expressing my true desires less and less in her presence and in the presence of life. My craving sought to show face, but I suppressed it like my desires. The only desire I failed to suppress was the desire to constantly be by her side like her guardian angel, like her knight in shining armour, like an appendage, and cater to her every need, hoping that would grant me unlimited access to as much warmth as I needed from her room, to no avail.

One of the few memories that stands out for me was my graduation day. I remember it like it was yesterday. That Saturday morning, our car wouldn’t start, and we couldn’t get help at such short notice. Mama and I had to use public transport to travel to the venue where the ceremony was to be held. Luckily, we arrived in the nick of time. I was enraged at Mama for not trying harder to get help—unfair, I know—because the car had been fine when she arrived home from work the previous night. Although I blamed her for that morning’s misfortune, I wore a poker face that fooled everyone, including me, when I finally laid my eyes on the day’s pictures. I mirrored Mama’s nonchalance with my own aloofness that I wore like a badge of honour, but that was, in actuality, a cloak for all my suppressed emotions and feelings. A recipe for disaster for an aspiring writer, bottling things up, isn’t it?

Because I had plenty of time to myself after leaving my first job in 2018, my late twenties were engulfed by meditation, journaling, and ample introspection. Every morning before meditating, on my way to the bathroom to put a final nail in the coffin of the night’s reign and start my day, I’d notice a golden glow emanating from Mama’s room. One morning, curiosity got the best of me, and I shuffled in. As the sun rose, its rays entered through Mama’s window with the curtains open, creating warmth that was extra potent at the peak of winter. I finally felt the warmth in Mama’s room—warmth so potent it threatened to dissolve the frost formed in the void that had existed in me for most of my life till that point. I embraced it unknowingly. Her room is still the warmest in our home. Unbeknownst to me, this routine of mine, plus all the meditation and journaling, would set off a journey of inner healing. My openness to figure out why I felt the need to go to the extreme of what feels like self-sacrifice for her happiness helped me understand why the warmth in her room overrode the warmest of all the rooms in my house. It helped me understand the concept of self-compassion and for our loved ones, for the lemonade they made from the lemons life gave them. It even helped me regain the voice I had lost over the years—the voice I utilise now to express my desires more and to speak my truth.

The saying, “old habits die hard,” might be true, as I sometimes feel the anger and resentment surfacing from within. Instead of suppressing these feelings, I strive to allow them to show their face and channel them into written and oral work. They do not control my actions as much as in my adolescence and twenties. Every day is a lesson that I’m willing to learn. One thing I’ve learnt about life’s lessons is that not all of them need to come with pain and suffering, and hurt like a ton of bricks falling on me. Some lessons are soft and come with love, as Ms. Blue the Soulful Oracle has pointed out several times in her YouTube videos. I feel and receive the warmth in Mama’s room now, not in the way I want it, but in the way she naturally gives it. There is freedom in seeing things from her perspective. And maybe that’s the lesson I had to learn with this entire experience: to appreciate the perspectives of others, including loved ones, and “love them for where they are and not where you want them to be,” as Ms. Blue once said in another of her YouTube videos.