By Bookie Ikeotuonye
I love Thursdays. They are a preview of coming attractions, a sign of good things to come. You can literally stand on the Thursday hill and appreciate the horizon of the beautiful weekend sunset.I consider the month of November in like manner – a prelude to the yuletide cheer and literally all the bells and whistles. I was born on a Thursday in November some years ago so I may be a little biased, what can I tell you? My point is, expectation is always a good breakfast though not a good dinner. If you see the synopsis of a movie and you have anticipated a blockbuster, a disappointing showing would represent an anti-climax in every sense of the word.
The reason the best items are displayed in a shop window is so that buyers can be attracted enough to walk into the shop. They venture in on the premise that every other article is of the same quality as the ones on display. The shop owner has put her best foot forward in the hope that the other parts of her body are not too far beneath the expected standard. Parties are taking a gamble based on expectations, the question is – who wins? If you walked into an electrical shop to purchase a light bulb and upon testing, it refused to ignite, would you buy it just because the seller convinced you it would eventually work when you got home? Quality, they say, should be paid for only once.
Dear Eve, your eyes are the window to your soul – what is displayed in them? Is the state of your heart commensurate with the quality in your eyes? Do you have a measurable intrinsic value or is your price far above rubies, invaluable to the bidder? You are born carrying a multitude of eggs, each one with different characteristics, but are you aware that a faulty container could change the features of the said eggs? If your insides are suspect, what kind of eggs are you going to produce?
Your vessel is intricately made and bears the gift of life. Your body nurtures it, grows it and brings it forth to reality. It is therefore your quality that determines that of your offspring. If you have no character, no oomph, no spirit, no virtue, it will be evident in your output. A broken machine cannot but churn out a defective product, if at all. You are indeed a key contributing element to the value of the generations you produce, you are a kingmaker.
I know an Eve, Diekolola Abegunde, a 38-year old interior decorator and event planner. She always wanted to be a model but did not have the stature for it despite, being pretty and tall at 5ft 10” – a slightly protruding tummy due to her inability to keep her ice cream cravings at bay kept her from making it to the big time. Her dreams of gracing walkways were only in her mind, it seems. The truth is, her occupation (both the dreamed and the reality) are inconsequential to the aspects of her I want to tell you about. You see, Dieko prided herself on being independent and strong-willed, making her own decisions and taking responsibility for any choices she made. Those choices ranged from demonstrating bad manners to all and sundry, to getting involved with so-called tough guys who could ‘handle’ her strong personality, who ended up abandoning the relationship as soon as they experienced her caustic tongue and toxic attitude. As a matter of fact, she used to have a day job as an HR generalist in a Consulting Firm. She would sometimes talk down at junior staff who presented any welfare requests, citing non-existent company policies to discourage them from pushing. Other times, she would deliberately delay Management requisitions just because she thought they were frivolous, even when it was the staff’s entitlement. She was a real handful. Her boss could not make any more excuses for her attitude and had to get rid of her after four years. She tried a few other places over the next couple of years, but she eventually had to opt for self-employment when no one could ‘handle her big character’ (these were her exact words).
In her defence, Dieko came from a dysfunctional family where her father had 26 children from 7 different women, none of whom lived in the family house, including her mother. She was the 3rd of her mother’s 5 children and the 21st overall of her father’s 26. The me-against-the-world attitude was something she grew up with and she was not properly trained by either parent, to be honest. The household was one of survival-of-the-fittest and the one with the fastest tongue got the lion’s share of whatever was available. The good part though, was that her father was well-off and was able to see all 26 of them to tertiary level of education in good schools. Still, it was war growing up in that environment, regardless of the fact that their home was an 18-room mansion with three-room boys’ quarters.
One bright Saturday afternoon in October 2007, Dieko met Eyimofe Ojalo at a client’s wedding. She was in fact, in the middle of tearing into the caterer for purportedly distributing food too slowly when he spotted her. He was immediately enthralled by her beauty and obvious feistiness, she was just his type. Mofe soon set about wooing her and they soon became an item, against his family and friends’ advice. His mother, a quiet, mild-mannered woman, tried her best to dissuade him from entangling himself with her. He uncharacteristically ignored his mother’s caution, stating that her disapproval of Dieko chewing gum on the first day he introduced them was unsubstantiated. He accused her of using that first meeting to pass a lifetime sentence on Dieko’s personality.
Exactly 18 months later, in April 2009, Dieko and Mofe got married in a surprisingly short wedding ceremony and small wedding reception, considering Dieko’s vocation. They began their life together with great hopes of happily ever-after like every newly-wedded couple. May I mention at this juncture, that a husband and a boyfriend are as different as night and day. A rebellious attitude may excite a boyfriend but will irk a husband if he gets such from his wife. The ill-mannered, take-it-or-leave-it trademark of Dieko’s continued and got worse as the weeks, months and years wore on. Mofe’s mother carefully avoided visiting their home as the few times she did visit, she would witness Dieko’s tantrums and thinly veiled insults to her husband. The advent of children did not dissipate the situation. Instead, the offspring were little replicas of her, their mischief and pranks being more destructive than cute. She could not train them as she had no such leanings – you really cannot give what you do not have.
Mofe had hoped that marriage would calm Dieko down and age would mellow her.But as the years went by, he realised that this was not to be. She disrespected him at every turn and tested his patience to almost breaking point. And so he developed a system, an internal defence mechanism by which he survived – He turned to God. He spent 80% of his free time in church and the remaining 20%, asleep. He arranged his time-table such that he was hardly ever home at the same time as Dieko and he came in when she was already asleep so he could quietly slip into bed. He thought he had perfected this system until he glimpsed what his two unruly children, aged 5 and 8, were going to grow up to become – another generation of untrained, ill-mannered and offensive adults. His wife simply did not have the content of character to imbibe good values in them and he was not helping matters, spending all that time away from home, even if he was in church. So he subtly began to arrange more time with them. He took up taking them to school in the mornings, attending mid-week service with them on Wednesdays and taking them out to serene locations on Saturdays, where they could talk and share ideas. He slowly began to notice positive changes in his children. Dieko however, did not. She assumed that the fear of her wrath was responsible for Mofe taking up school run and Saturday duty, which were her business peak periods. Little did she know that he was slipping further and further away from her, getting used to living without her. They are still married, but merely living as housemates. Mofe is playing a waiting game now for his children to become a little more independent in order to make a decision regarding continued marriage to Dieko.
Dear Eve, are your contents liquid only?