INTRODUCTION
Since the pivotal work of Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, motherhood, and mothering experiences have remained a thematic focus in Nigerian literature. Writers like Buchi Emecheta have been instrumental in the development of this genre by creating a stellar body of work on the challenges, sufferings, and triumphs of the heterosexual African woman with a view to dismantle patriarchy and birth a society where women have choices and are regarded as equal. Similarly, third-generation writers like Yewande Omotoso have also expanded the genre by engaging sexuality and by challenging us to reimagine and broaden our conceptualization of what liberation means or could look like for a Nigerian woman, especially one who is a mother in the 21st century. Through close reading and analysis of Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief, this essay explores how normative motherhood intertwines with maternal guilt and grief and examines the good mom-bad mom dichotomy, how maternal regret leads to guilt and shame, and how maternal grief can serve as a medium for self-discovery and rediscovery. By focusing on intensive mothering as a contemporary practice of normative motherhood and exploring dictates of normative motherhood, such as naturalization, idealization, intensification, and expertization, this essay argues that they are catalysts for repressed maternal regret, which exacerbates and complicates maternal guilt in the wake of loss. Furthermore, this essay asserts that matricentric feminism and unmasking motherhood provide a good framework and approach for resisting the dictates of normative motherhood and dismantling the institution of motherhood.
In Normative Motherhood: Regulations, Representations, and Reclamations, Andrea O’Reilly defines Normative Motherhood as a term used to “denote and emphasize how the concept of good motherhood operates as a regulatory institution, both discursively and materially, to construct mothers who are not white or middle class as de facto bad mothers” (7). O’Reilly also notes that normative motherhood, through ten dictates, oppresses and controls mothers and mothering and establishes a relationship between normative motherhood and the institution of motherhood—which she argues is deeply oppressive to women (8). While stating that the concept of good motherhood emanates from patriarchal culture, O’Reilly notes that judgment, surveillance, and regulation are determining factors or tools in constructing and apprehending the bad mother (7-8). Although race and class are integral factors in conceptualizing and developing normative motherhood, normative motherhood underwent different phases of evolution from the post-war era to contemporary enactments through intensive mothering—a normative ideology (12).
Set in South Africa and published in 2022, Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief tells the story of the novel’s protagonist, Mojisola Owolabi, who grapples with losing her estranged queer daughter, 24-year-old Yinka, to suicide. While wrestling with complex emotions like her failing marriage and the institution of motherhood that blames her for her child’s death, Mojisola, who is almost 60, is drawn into her daughter’s world and forced to unearth her own past and confront her self—identity, desire, career, childhood. Furthermore, by asking the question: “How do we understand mothering and motherhood through grief and loss, and what does a mom look like after the death of her child(ren)?” this essay opines that mothering is an act that continues through death and grief.
Maternal Grief and the Oppressive Power of the Institution of Motherhood in An Unusual Grief
The representation of maternal grief as a complex, multi-layered, (potentially) consuming experience and evolving lifelong journey is one that Omotoso skillfully portrays in the way she tells the story of Mojisola’s loss and how she goes and grows through it. In what can be said to be a three-part story that aims to reposition the mother as a person whose autonomy and agency should matter, Omotoso invites us to deconstruct the oppressive hold of normative motherhood by creating a character who resists this hold, as never seen before in Nigerian literature. While there has been much literature on the diverse ways and sites through which normative motherhood attempts to regulate and oppress mothers, for example, through the bad mom-good mom concept, I argue that maternal grief is another primary site through which normative and patriarchal motherhood tortures and oppresses mothers. Hence, the goal of the institution of motherhood is to compel and interpellate mothers into believing the fallacy that they are capable of saving and ruining their children at the same time so they can self-destruct—it is through this self-hatred that the institution thrives and retains its control.
According to the Encyclopedia of Motherhood edited by O’Reilly, although any kind of grief is complex and complicated, maternal grief is a distinctive kind of grief because of its intensity—“the death of a child, however, seems like a perversion of nature and is seen as a death out of order” (2). The belief that a child dying before their parents is unnatural, given that a child is expected to outlive their parents, is also something typical of the African culture in which Omotoso’s book is set. Additionally, while the death of a child is always a great anguish, the time, age (of the child), and circumstances of death can worsen maternal grief. The Encyclopedia says:
Mothers of children who die suddenly by violence, through suicide, homicide, in natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or accidents experience grief that is especially traumatic. Thoughts of the terror and pain their children may have felt prior to and in death can be overwhelming. These deaths often leave the grieving mother wondering, but perhaps never being able to answer, why the death happened to her child in this way. The specific circumstances around their child’s death may never be known. (5-6)
Although the Encyclopedia of Motherhood suggests that often, the circumstances in which a child dies can keep the mother wondering why her child died without an answer, this essay shows the way maternal grief is implicated in the institution of motherhood by arguing that maternal grief becomes a site of crucifixion—a place where a mother’s loss is weaponized and is forced to blame herself for the why. Normative motherhood attempts to impose a savior complex upon mothers—it tries to legitimize the illusion that mothers have answers to everything. It depends on stifling the humanity of mothers and withholding access to their humanity by creating an illusion of perfection—holding mothers to a standard that does not exist and is primarily unrealistic—convincing mothers they are unworthy of empathy, which in turn makes them hold themselves to a higher standard of mothering. Hence, the turn to matricentric feminism
One morning, while doing the dishes, Mojisola receives a call from a policeman telling her that her estranged child, Yinka, has died “by her own hand”—precisely the morning Mojisola was thinking about calling her to insist that she sends her address so she can visit her without her permission (15, 21). A few weeks later, she receives a letter from Zelda Petersen—which is addressed to her and Yinka’s father, requiring them to terminate Yinka’s lease (which must be done by the executor—Yinka’s parents in this case) and notifying them of the need to pack her things (20-21). Amidst her marriage problems and grief, Mojisola leaves Capetown for Gauteng, Johannesburg, not just to retrieve her daughter’s belongings but to get away from the silence in her marriage, sit with her grief, and hopefully understand why Yinka committed suicide—“she needed to get away, go away, but she would have to go far—she needed to run from the news, run from a moment when Yinka Owolabi could be dead by her own hand” (21). As with any loss, Mojisola goes through the first two stages of grief almost instantly upon hearing the news of her daughter’s death over the phone. She experiences denial and shock (25).
Mojisola leaves the house and keeps walking. She thinks about jumping into the water in the hope of waking up in a world where her daughter did not die, but she keeps walking still—“She struggled to excise from her mind that Yinka was gone, by her own hand, that was what he’d said, that while she’d been on her way, just a little late but coming, her baby had died” (25-26). While walking, she slips, falls on the pavement, and cuts the strap of her sandal (26). She walks into a store for new shoes but notices she has no money and cannot pay for them; still, Mojisola keeps walking. This time, she begins to jog, then run, without shoes on, on a hot tarred road for 3 hours until a search party sent out by her husband, Titus, finds her on the streets with her feet bleeding and her heart broken (28)—she hopes to run away from the reality that is now.
Subsequently, Mojisola’s denial evolves into anger—towards herself, her husband, and even her late daughter, Yinka:
For many days afterwards she’d wanted a gun. Never having considered herself a killer, suddenly she’d lusted for blood. She collected all her anger—at herself, at Yinka, at Titus, at the world that won’t wait—and held it at the base of her throat. It hurt to talk. And she was brimstone. If she’d owned a gun, people would be dead by now. (15)
While the death of Yinka is a terrible loss, considering she dies at 24 by suicide, all of which, according to the Encyclopedia of Motherhood, are factors that worsen maternal grief, what is not obvious but later becomes apparent is how Mojisola’s grief is encumbered by shame-ridden guilt through normative motherhood and the bad mom-good mom construct. Mojisola plunges herself into her daughter’s world. She renews the rent for her daughter’s apartment and stays in Gauteng for a while to be closer to her child and to figure out how Yinka got to the point where she had to end her life and prove to herself that she might have contributed to it: “She is here to see, to untangle everything” (22).
The viciousness of the institution of motherhood lies not only in how it weaponizes a mother’s vulnerability in the face of loss but also in how it interpellates them through the myths of motherhood, maternal omnipotence, intensive mothering, and unrealistic standards that many mothers have unconsciously internalized—and this is reflected in how Mojisola expresses her thoughts about Yinka’s death—namely, that she could have prevented it if she had called sooner and visited her (26). Expanding on Intensive Mothering as a contemporary manifest of normative motherhood, O’Reilly, referencing Sharon Hays, states that intensive mothering requires mothers to devote their entire being to their children—that is, be fully involved in their children’s lives, live only for their children by giving round-the-clock attention to them, prioritizing their children’s needs above theirs, seek guidance from experts, etc. (498). Notably, citing Linda Ennis, O’Reilly argues that intensive mothering states that a good mother should know everything about her children, down to minor details. Hence, to intensively mother is to be a good mother, and to not is to fall into the bad-mom spectrum.
For example, when Mojisola arrives at Yinka’s apartment for the first time, she feels a level of shame because the institution of motherhood has interpellated her: that a good mother does not wait to be invited to her child’s home before she visits, a good mother should not wait until her child is dead to know where her child lives. Documenting this in the text, Omotoso writes: “This is what it is like for Mojisola to be standing in No. 81, standing in the home of her dead child, a space she has never been in, was never invited to. She is still for a moment” (10). Again, when she finds a note in a language that she does not speak in Yinka’s apartment, Mojisola feels inadequate. She feels she has failed her responsibility and must now redeem herself by learning this language:
Someone has left her a note but in a language she does not speak. It is not sufficient to translate: the language must be read in its original language. If she had lived a different life, she, Mojisola, would be fluent by now and in no need of translation. But she has lived the life she has, and it has brought her here, now. The task ahead is daunting but clear: she must learn the language in which the note is written and ultimately read the message. (10)
In this regard, O’Reilly argues that “it is not until the rise of intensive mothering that the patriarchal mandates of expertization and intensification become fully enacted and enforced” (39). Also, in Maternal Theory: Patriarchal Motherhood and Empowered Mothering, O’Reilly claims that “the guilt and shame women experience in failing to live up to what is in fact an impossible ideal is neither accidental nor inconsequential; rather, it is deliberately manufactured and monitored” (28). When Mojisola picks up a photograph of Yinka in which Yinka looks more robust than the last time she had seen her and in a dress she does not recognize, Mojisola feels like she failed as a mother because Intensive Mothering dictates that a good mother should know everything about their child (15). Not only does Mojisola feel responsible for Yinka’s death, but Mojisola feels worse that she was not by Yinka’s side when she died—a good mother keeps her child safe and does not leave her child to die alone—as this means she was not a perfect mother. In The Myths of Motherhood, Shari Thurer asserts that “a sentimentalized image of the perfect mother casts a long, guilt-inducing shadow over real mothers’ lives” (193); this guilt is clearly found in Mojisola.
While emphasizing that the ideal mother is nothing but a construct and does not exist, Thurer claims that almost all mothers are saddled with parental performance anxiety (193). Therefore, she posits that “the current ideology of good mothering is not only spurious, it is oblivious of a mother’s desires, limitations, and context, and when things go wrong, she tends to get blamed” (194). In this regard, when Mojisola is unable to guess the passwords to Yinka’s laptop correctly, she processes it as a kind of failure and the universe’s way of punishing her for her inadequacy. Again, when she tries accessing Yinka’s laptop by typing in her name as the password, and it returns as incorrect, she feels ashamed for considering that possibility (16, 19-20). When a call comes through Yinka’s phone, but she misses it and wants to call the person noted as ‘PM’ back in the hope of getting more clues into Yinka’s life, Mojisola discovers the phone also requires a password.
When she’s done, she reaches for Yinka’s phone, presses the button, and the window gives her a face of dots. ‘Aah,’ she exclaims. More passwords; our lives are coded, nothing ever given in the clearest of terms. The grid of dots. Mojisola understands she must make a figure without lifting her finger. She first draws out the letter y—a v on a stick—imagining this to be the obvious code Yinka would use. Y for Yinka. Y for…It doesn’t work. For ‘yes’, for ‘yesterday’. Mojisola next tries m. For ‘me’, she thinks, but secretly she is thinking, For Mojisola. Mummy. Mama. Mine. It doesn’t work. Now, with neither m nor y, Mojisola decides that somehow the code must be random. There is no real logic to this decision, but she feels it instinctively and despairs. (22-23)
Although Mojisola begins to wrestle with the institution of motherhood by considering the possibility that Yinka’s passwords are more random than personal or intentional, still her desire to unlock Yinka’s gadgets is not only to be able to find out everything she needs to know but also because she needs a moment she does not feel like a failure (23). Upon gaining access to the phone, Mojisola scrolls through her daughter’s contact list. When ‘PM’ calls again and she picks up, Mojisola feels too ashamed to introduce herself as Yinka’s mother and instead says she is a friend (23). Crippled by the guilt forced upon her by the institution of motherhood and intensive mothering, Mojisola believes presenting herself as a mother trying to know her child’s world is shameful:
She knew that if she were to come and see, to check, to insert herself into a life she should have known but didn’t, she could come as neighbour, as friend, as classmate; she could come as teacher, as gym-buddy, as enemy, but she could not come as mother. So what? So she presents herself (friend) in front of these names. (24)
The shame, guilt, and overwhelming responsibility that Mojisola feels for what has happened to Yinka continues to be made clear in how she expresses ideas that align with the oppressive dictates of intensive mothering. By comparing her upbringing (which she did not like very much) to how she raised Yinka (to have more agency than she was allowed to have), Mojisola believes that she failed in how she brought up Yinka. She did not enjoy her mother’s parenting style, but it kept her safe and allowed her to grow old, something she was unable to do for her child (28). In this regard, Thurer asserts that “today, mother love has achieved the status of a moral imperative. Our current myth holds that the well-being of our children depends almost entirely on the quality of their upbringing” (196). Consequently, Mojisola asserts:
That was it: parents were meant to be obsessively interested in their children’s friends. As are the proportions of life, the friends would eventually take up more room than the parents, so while you still had a greater fraction, you were to influence the nature of those friendships, calibrate them, take out the bad influences and introduce the good. (29)
In line with this chain of thought, O’Reilly argues that intensive mothering is impossible to achieve—it is an unrealistic attainment (28), and it is for this reason that the discourse functions—it “works psychologically to regulate (i.e., paralyze) mothers through guilt and shame” (28). Omotoso shows this when the narrator says, “Mojisola had resented her mother’s intrusions and thought it best to give Yinka much more room. Was that an excuse or a reason? Was her daughter dead because of it? (29). She also wonders if Yinka would have still been alive if she had done more for her when she told her about her depression (70). Beyond judging mothers and making them a target of their own self-criticism, the institution of motherhood also exposes them to outside judgment, which mothers are usually aware of. Mojisola notes this in a conversation with herself and her interaction with Zelda Petersen: “They’ll see through her, smell the guilt. See that she is the mother and come around finally to the same question everyone else has: ‘How did you let this happen?’” (24). In her exchange with Zelda, Mojisola also sees that same thing:
She is looking at her, the failed mother, the spectacle of the mother who lost a child. . . Zelda is like all the others, their humanity disfigured by curiosity. . . They don’t ask it outright, but it is tucked into the corners of their speech, and all the while they’re looking at her, the mother, asking with their eyes, ‘How did you let this happen? (18)
According to Cheryl Rodriguez, “Whether a Black mother’s mourning is visible or invisible—whether the Black maternal response is public or private—the pain of losing a child is wrenching and bottomless” (65). Hence, being blamed for the loss by others should not be an additional burden a bereaved mother should bear. Thus, for Mojisola to have her child die is to be inept as a mother and to process that as a terrible thing. Also, to confront Yinka’s demise is to come face to face with her failure—a thing defined and imposed on her by the institution in which she mothers—the institution that governs normative motherhood.
Maternal Regret and the Mask of Motherhood: Essentialization, Naturalization, and Idealization in An Unusual Grief
The role of maternal regret as an activation tool for guilt, shame, and blame, especially at the site of maternal loss, cannot be overemphasized. In Maternal Regret, O’Reilly asserts that the normative motherhood dictates of essentialization, naturalization, and idealization, which are crucial to the functioning of patriarchal motherhood, are at work in maternal regret (583). Defining essentialization as the assumption that all women want to be mothers, naturalization as the belief that all women possess an innate ability to mother and show maternal love, and idealization that all mothers find joy and fulfillment in motherhood, O’Reilly claims that it is essential dismantling these oppressive conditions to normalize maternal regret and ambivalence and interrogate it as a site of unmasking and empowerment (583-584).
In An Unusual Grief, Omotoso represents these manifestations and their harmful effects through Mojisola’s experience. Mojisola, who is raised by a staunch Christian mother who dies before her wedding due to an illness, gets married to Titus, a young man in his doctoral program raised by a Nun, and gets an appointment at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria as a lecturer (33, 35). Mojisola’s mother raised her a fervent, godly child who, at the time of her marriage, remained a virgin and had kissed no boys, unlike Titus, who boasts of experience and mastery at lovemaking. Mojisola had neither of the women she had known as a child present at her wedding—her mother and her Aunt, Modupe (her mother’s sister), who her mother stops from babysitting her because she considers her wayward (39). Although Mojisola and Titus have been exploring “themselves and each other with a curiosity set loose and legitimised by the priest who’d pronounced them man and wife” (40), her pregnancy surprised her, not because she is surprised at her ability to be pregnant, but because she had never gotten any sexual education, just biology lessons. Most importantly, Mojisola and Titus have never discussed having a child (39-40). Moreover, Mojisola does not want to become a mother (44). Omotoso writes thus:
There she was with a pregnancy that had been neither planned nor unplanned. A pregnancy that made sense to her husband (‘At last,’ he’d said and kissed her hand). The pregnancy made sense to science but not to Mojisola. And even her surprise was a surprise. It was a moment where she saw her naivety her [sic] capacity to live in an unreal world. In Mojisola’s world, her aversion to children should have been contraception enough. In fact, after five years of marriage and nothing, she’d felt justified and relieved to conclude that she was unable to conceive. (44)
O’Reilly states that “most women become mothers simply because this is the normative trajectory of womanhood” (584). While the pregnancy makes Titus happy, it disturbs Mojisola. Quoting Orna Donath, O’Reilly states that “it is inconceivable that a woman who is purportedly healthy and sane, and who is able to choose her own trajectory in life would decide against motherhood” (Donath qtd. in O’Reilly). While noting that maternal regret is a by-product of essentialization, O’Reilly states that the “dictates of naturalization and idealization cause regret in mothers by creating a normative model of motherhood that is impossible for mothers to achieve” (585). Hence, mothers are forced to perform intensive mothering—to wear what Susan Maushart calls the mask of motherhood (586).
In An Unusual Grief, Mojisola’s regret worsens when she convinces herself that the vulnerable moment when she feels tempted to hold the child in limbo rather than push is despicable and shows her to be a bad mother—“Holding her new sticky child, she’d felt ashamed for having possessed this will (greater than her will to mother) to resist, to fight and hold the child in limbo, rather than push it out into motion” (48). Years later, Mojisola feels the same way as she did giving birth when she grieves the loss of her child:
She would experience the very same, but in reverse, many years later when she heard of the death of her child, but in that moment on the birthing bed, Mojisola fantasised that she somehow had the ability to reverse time. The fantasy that the child would go unborn, that she could reverse the irreversible and return to a simple existence that had gradually, over the many weeks disappeared. (48)
O’Reilly asserts that normative motherhood creates an unrealistic and impossible image of motherhood that makes mothers “feel guilt, resentment, and anxiety about their own messy and muddled experiences of motherhood” (586), as seen in Mojisola’s experience. Additionally, O’Reilly argues that essentialization, naturalization, idealization, and other conditions created by the patriarchal institution of motherhood produce maternal regret; this is also why some women do not want to be mothers—just like Mojisola (589).
Notably, Omotoso draws a connection between Mojisola’s worsening maternal regret and her role as a wife as both roles—being a mom and wife become a site of judgment, thereby exacerbating her resentment (34). In Detangling Wifehood and Motherhood, Lynn Hallstein argues that the role of a wife is intertwined with her role as a mother—“being caught between the new and the old becomes even more pronounced when women become mothers. Indeed, the boundaries and roles between “wife” and “mother” remained so blurred and intertwined, especially in the private sphere and despite the profoundly changed roles for (at least privileged) women in the public sphere” (558). Mojisola’s marriage with her husband is one that “has always worked best when she’d muted desire” (45). A relationship where her job and needs take the backseat, and she is expected to make sacrifices.
With the birth of Yinka, things become worse between Mojisola and her husband. For example, “it took the birthing of a child for Mojisola to discover that there were things about her husband she didn’t like. He tagged the word ‘understand’ behind almost all of his sentences” (49). Hallstein argues that “becoming a mother fundamentally undermines this perceived similarity and changes women’s lives in ways that most often do not affect many men’s lives after they become normative fathers” (561). Mojisola “hated the fact that his breasts were not the size of cushions, his nipples were not cracking. His bowels didn’t oscillate between two available modes, constipated and diarrhoeic. Regular and solid, well formed was Titus” (50).
To make matters worse, she becomes repulsed by his demand for a second child when Yinka turns two: “What?’ Mojisola said, pulling herself away while Titus was still anticipating more sex. ‘I need another two lives to recover from the first” (50). While Mojisola struggles with performing naturalization, she also struggles with idealization. Auntie Modupe prayed for a good child for Mojisola—a heterosexual child (44), but Mojisola thinks the prayers did not come to pass in Yinka because she turns out to be queer and strange—“crumpled up somehow, and creased. Her eyes seemed to take up most of her face which was unsettling, the staring child” (48). Although Mojisola has help from Auntie Modupe, who helps her with the baby and is eventually revealed in the novel as her biological mom, Auntie Modupe criticizes her for how she nurtures her child—all of which makes Mojisola feel inadequate (51). In Faking Motherhood, Susan Maushart argues that the mask of motherhood is made by women and largely sustained by it, for example, through maternal grandstanding (292, 294).
Maushart further asserts that “instead of an honest sharing of experiences of mothering, women indulge in a fearsome kind of maternal grandstanding which has less to do with sharing their concerns than with showcasing their triumphs” (294). This constant criticism of Mojisola’s mothering “skills and/or methods” by her Aunt turned Mum makes her feel jealous and lacking. Omotoso writes thus:
Auntie Modupe scrutinised Yinka for evidence of neglect. On an almost daily basis during her visits, the old woman would pore over the child as if looking for cause to take her away from the parents. She never found anything sufficiently indicting. . . She envied Auntie Modupe [sic] the space that she took up in the world. It felt as if she’d missed out on some birthright, some metaphysical connection to ancestral strings and pulleys constantly directing knowledge and behaviour. Her mother had been the same. Expansive except, because of her devout leanings, she’d thrown it into the service of God. . . Auntie Modupe had that same air of superiority: she carried herself in a certain way and addressed you as if every second she spent doing so was a grace she bestowed. There was a poise to both women that Mojisola was certain she had not inherited. Further proof was how flummoxed she was by motherhood. She could not imagine her mother becoming undone by her entry into the world. How could a child—a simple small being—have come and shifted her so? (51-52)
While Mojisola loves her child, one thing she loves just as much is working—she loves flowers and working with them—“she had no training as a botanist but shored up her poor knowledge by reading an extensive amount” (65)—all of which she leaves behind to support Titus as a full housewife and mother as he takes his new job in South Africa. While intensive mothering says that it is impossible for Mojisola to desire fulfillment elsewhere other than through mothering, she finds a new standard and truth through empowered mothering—a possibility that sadly requires Yinka dying to become visible.
Matricentric Feminism and Unmasking Motherhood: Empowered Mothering, Sexual Liberation, and Sisterhood in An Unusual Grief
One of the things Thurer calls our attention to is the relevance of demystifying motherhood and dispelling the myths of motherhood to access authentic mothering in order for mothers to attain selfhood—all of which becomes possible through matricentric feminism, at the centre of which is unmasking motherhood. Furthermore, Thurer argues:
Although a “mother is all-powerful, she ceases to exist. She exists bodily, of course, but her needs as a person become null and void. Upon delivering a child, a woman becomes a factotum, a life-support system. Her personal desires either evaporate or metamorphose so that they are identical to those of her infant. (197)
Although a “mother is all-powerful, she ceases to exist. She exists bodily, of course, but her needs as a person become null and void. Upon delivering a child, a woman becomes a factotum, a life-support system. Her personal desires either evaporate or metamorphose so that they are identical to those of her infant. (197)
Therefore, O’Reilly, in Matricentric Feminism, states that “matricentric feminism begins with the conviction that mothering matters and it is central to the lives of those who identify as mothers” (473). Although Mojisola has set out to figure out what happened in her daughter’s world that she has not been a part of, she finds more of herself navigating the grief and processing the discoveries she found. Her journey highlights empowered/feminist mothering as the site where a mother’s agency is restored—a space that does not “deny a mother her agency, autonomy, authenticity, and authority, and allow her both her selfhood and power” (506). Mojisola not only finds closure regarding the death of her daughter from her landlady who discovered her body, but she rediscovers the self she thought she had lost:
She had a desire to be in the world, to venture, but on some days it was too hard to cross the threshold. In this way she and Titus were a cliché: the birth of their child had sent him hurtling into the wide world while it shut her in. She travelled tight trajectories away from the child and towards her as if they were joined by a rubber band with only this much give. (53)
According to Deborah Davidson and Helena Stahls, “Mothers often report their child’s death was a life-changing event, and that they were not the same person they were prior to the loss (19)—this is the same for Mojisola, who no longer finds use for the mask of motherhood and rediscover a new way to be a mum after loss, by entering her daughter’s world and discovering her drawings—a mother may not know everything, but she wants to know. Although when Mojisola first meets Zelda, beyond initially finding her nosey, Mojisola speaks of her as “a woman with only two gears: caution and business” (5), but ultimately, a friendship and sisterhood blossoms between them. From discovering shared grief to becoming a symbol of empowered motherhood for Mojisola, Zelda helps Mojisola to forgive herself by answering the questions Mojisola desperately wants answers to—like who Yinka was, how she died, how she killed herself, and guiding her through the questions: why have you come here? Why are you punishing yourself? (62-64, 88-92). When Mojisola discovers Yinka’s drawings, she also rediscovers her own passion for drawing, a passion her mother did not allow her to develop and something she once stopped Yinka from doing out of her own motherly concern.
In her daughter’s world, Mojisola sits with her past—her upbringing. She finds her sexuality, freedom, and compassion towards herself; she finds her voice and learns to unmute her desire and becomes a woman Yinka would be proud of, not one who stays with her husband even though he cheats on her, but one who creates a new life for herself, who moves on, and continues to do her daughter’s work:
Mojisola has continued to work for the company, grateful for the money, modest but adequate, grateful for this late break into a career as illustrator, something she could never have imagined for herself. Something she sometimes feels her daughter handed to her, something she took from her daughter’s hands. (224)
In her essay, Deb Bennett argues that enduring relationships exist between parents and their deceased children—“this is a relationship that remains with parents throughout their lives” (53). Mojisola is an example.
Conclusion
This essay argues that to access authentic mothering and selfhood, mothers have to wrestle with the restrictions and oppressions of the institution of motherhood; through Mojisola, Omotoso creates a figure of possibility. This paper further asserts that mothering is a lifelong act not terminated by demise. Most importantly, contrary to the ideals of normative motherhood, a mother does not have all the answers and cannot undo or prevent harm from occurring. There are certain things beyond her control—a mother is not a savior—she is not supernatural, and mothers need to know this to continuously find and return to themselves as they do mothering work. Just as Adrienne Rich says, it is not sufficient for mothers to let their children go; they need their own selves to return to (34). Hence, this essay asserts that maybe a mother is not one who necessarily prevents a loss; a mother is one who goes through loss and finds life afterward.
Works Cited
Bennett, Deb. “I Am Still a Mother: A Hermeneutic Inquiry into Bereaved Motherhood.” Mothering, Bereavement, Loss and Grief, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 16-25. Journal of Motherhood Initiative, https://jarm.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/issue/view/1794.
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