NANCY FRIDAY WILL BREAK YOU BUT YOU WILL BE ALRIGHT

Nancy Friday is regarded as one of the IT women of female sexuality. She has been read by many women who have cultivated a consciousness of their sexuality and personhood. Many of my friends have not read Nancy Friday. I would not have read My Mother, Myself: The Daughter’s Search for Identity but for the used books dealers I patronised when I was an undergraduate in Lagos State University. I have two trunks full of books ranging from Charlotte Bronte to Virgil. Throw in Toni Morison and Jacqueline Wilson. You never know what you will come out with if you go into my trunks. You may never come out. It is the magical wardrobe into the world of Pooh, Narnia, Hogwarts, Life after Life, Necessary Losses etc. My library will be extremely hard to rebuild should I lose it. I would like to say my library is a testament to eclecticism. It is not. I bought what I could buy for N50 or N200 at the bend down bookstore because I loved reading and my taste for good and insightful writing found that good books came in many garbs. Perhaps, I am too much like the duchess of whom Robert Browning poetised: “She had a heart too soon made glad.”

I think my mom would think so too. I have stayed in nine Nigerian states across different geopolitical zones and if you ask me about any of them, I have beautiful things to say. After a while, my mom simply said, ‘it is everywhere that is good to you.’ The world is my home.

I read Friday’s My Mother, Myself again recently and I was left feeling like I got an epiphany. The book is a little unusual because it does not tell you your mother is a goddess or a jewel. No. Friday tells you your mother is probably a klutz, not your regular Madonna and that is all okay. Your mother does not have to be perfect, she only has to be true and to show you how to be true.

The book is full of gems such as:
“The primary rule is always that a mother can’t go wrong, ever, by encouraging her child after age one and a half to be as individuated and separated as possible. If she was not as good a mother before as she would like to have been, she must get over her guilty desires to overcompensate, and place herself on the side of the child’s developing.”

It celebrates in one breath the vastness of possibilities that is inherent in how a mother loves her child. It is possible to love too much or to love wrongly, which is equally as dangerous as loving too little. Friday makes me realise that you can love and not like a person, and the duplicity is always apparent to every participant in the drama at a subconscious level.

There are so many things mothers give to their children and from Friday, I have learnt that the best gift of all is the permission to be and to grow. The permission to get burnt and know it is okay to get burnt and to learn from it. I learnt from Friday that the best gift a mother can give her child is her imperfection and the refusal to be sneaky about it. You own yourself and you teach your child to own yourself.

There are so many things mothers give to their children and from Friday, I have learnt that the best gift of all is the permission to be and to grow. The permission to get burnt and know it is okay to get burnt and to learn from it. I learnt from Friday that the best gift a mother can give her child is her imperfection and the refusal to be sneaky about it. You own yourself and you teach your child to own yourself.


I also learnt from Friday that our mothers or primary caregiver are the biggest models of love we receive in our early years. She can make or mar your love relationships for life. If your mother teaches you love is pain, then you swallow so much hurt in your love life because you believe that is what love is about. If she puts you down, then you promptly lie on the floor and become a doormat lifelong. If she teaches you that love is conditional and can be withdrawn as swiftly as it takes you to make a mistake, you will always walk on eggshells.

Simply put, I learnt from Friday that Mother is home. When we set out for life, it is setting out from home. There is a freedom that comes to be and to explore when home is real. I use the word ‘real' because the beauty of home is not its perfection but its ‘realness’. There is a freedom to give and to receive love. It is a gift to be able to do both.

Many people know how to receive love but haven’t found the freedom in giving love. The misfortune of many is that they haven’t been shown what love really is. So they go along life and collect costume jewelries, hoard them because they never saw the real thing. John MacArthur wrote, “Federal agents don’t learn to spot counterfeit money by studying the counterfeits. They study genuine bills until they master the look of the real thing. Then when they see the bogus money they recognize it.”