Item 1: Make Mama Proud

1. Make Mama proud of me. ALWAYS. (Not just on report day.)

That's the first item, in blue Bic, the capitals pressed so hard they came through to the next page like Braille. The parenthesis was a later addition in the same pen, squeezed in after I'd apparently stood back and decided the main clause had a loophole. Even at twelve I was drafting like a lawyer for a client who might try to wriggle out. The client was me.

I've had this item in my head longer than I've had the exercise book. I suspect it was there before I could write. The book only made it official.

Our house in Ntinda was loud the way a good market is loud: no single voice in charge, everyone negotiating. There were four of us children, me second, plus whichever cousin was "staying with us for a short time," which in Ugandan family accounting can mean anything from a weekend to the length of a secondary education. There was a radio in the kitchen that only ever played CBS FM, and a television in the sitting room that only ever played whatever my father had decided was news. There was a gate that squealed. You could tell who was arriving by how long they let it squeal. My father opened it in one decisive shove. Mama opened it slowly, because she always had a basin on her head or a child on her hip.

Saturday mornings began with katogo. Mama made it in the big blackened saucepan, matooke and offals on a good week, matooke and beans on an ordinary one, and the smell climbed the corridor and pulled us out of bed better than any alarm. Sunday was church, then the long lunch: matooke steamed in banana leaves, groundnut sauce so thick the spoon stood up in it, and on special Sundays luwombo, the parcels tied with banana fibre, which Mama untied at the table like she was opening presents for us. She never ate until we had all been served. I didn't notice that until I was nineteen. I'm still slightly ashamed of how long it took.

Evenings had a shape. Homework at the dining table under the yellow bulb. Mama at the other end checking the price of everything in her small notebook, lips moving. Then prayers in the sitting room, all of us on our knees on the cement, my father leading, my younger brother falling asleep against the sofa by the second decade of the rosary. We had a family joke that my brother had been baptised twice, once in water and once in his own drool on the cushion. Nobody remembers who made it up. All of us claim it.

And there was my laugh. You should know about my laugh, because it's the most famous thing about my childhood and I did nothing to earn it. It was loud. It came out of me in a single bark, then rolled into a wheeze, then sometimes, if the joke was good, a snort that made everyone else laugh at the laugh. In Primary Four I was taken out of Wednesday mass by Sister Gorettie because a boy behind me sneezed at the exact moment the priest said "and with your spirit," and I lost control of myself during the consecration. Sister Gorettie walked me to the back of the chapel by the ear. I was still laughing when we reached the door. She said, "That child has a devil of joy." My mother, when she was told, said, "Then at least it is joy," and gave me an extra piece of sugarcane that evening, which I believe was meant as a punishment and which I took as a sacrament.

Relatives would come to visit just to hear it. An uncle would tell a terrible joke on purpose, look at me, and wait. "Eh, Professor, laugh for us." Professor was my name in the family. I got it at seven, when I read the whole of a Daily Monitor article aloud to my grandfather in Masaka, including the long words I didn't understand, with total confidence and wrong pronunciation. Jjaja clapped and called me a professor. It stuck the way family names stick: permanently, and with interest.

I'm telling you all this first because I want the record to show it. I was loved. Loudly, daily, with food. If you're expecting the part where my childhood turns out to have been secretly cold, you'll wait a long time. That isn't this book.

But there was a saying in our house. It hung over the dining table the way the Sacred Heart picture did, and it was just as hard to argue with.

Mama said it while peeling matooke on the veranda, the knife moving away from her thumb in long green curls. She said it when we complained about homework, or about Saturday cleaning, or about having to walk to the shop at Kiwatule when it was raining. She said it when we did well and she said it when we didn't. It was the closest thing she had to a family motto, and it went like this:

"Hard work never forgets the hand that did it."

She would say it without looking up. Then she would add, if she was feeling generous with explanation (she rarely was), "You plant cassava, you get cassava. You plant nothing, you eat your hands."

I believed it the way I believed the Creed. Possibly more. The Creed had parts I didn't understand, like "consubstantial," whereas Mama's saying was clear. You put the work in. The work keeps a record. One day the work comes back to you carrying whatever you planted. It was agriculture and accounting and theology at once, and at nine years old it seemed to me like the most reasonable promise in the world.

So I worked.

I want to describe exactly how, because I think the mechanics matter more than the virtue. Report day at my primary school was the last Friday of term. Parents came in at two. The cards were handed out in brown envelopes, and you weren't supposed to open yours until you were with your parent, which meant the whole walk from the classroom to the car was spent watching Mama's face as she read. I learned that face better than I learned my times tables. Her eyebrows went up first when she was pleased. Her mouth stayed still a bit longer, as if she didn't want to commit too early. Then, if the position was in single digits, she would fold the card back into the envelope and say, "Mm. You see?"

That was it. "Mm. You see?" Three words, and I was warm for a week.

The real reward came later. Mama didn't praise me much to my face, because she believed praise spoils a child the way sun spoils milk. But she told everyone else. I would be in the next room and hear her on the phone to my aunt in Mbarara, voice lowered with false modesty: "Eh, this one, she was third. Third out of ninety-two. I don't know where she gets it." (She knew exactly where I got it. She meant from her.) Then Sunday at church, women in gomesi would stop me on the steps and say, "Ah, the clever one," and pinch my cheek. Then a visiting uncle would put a five-thousand note in my hand and say, "For the Professor's books."

You can see how the wiring went. Grades went in, and love came out, in public, with cash.

It didn't feel like a transaction. It felt like being seen. Being third out of ninety-two meant that for one week every term my mother spoke about me in a voice she otherwise saved for the bishop. I didn't think, She loves me because I got good marks. I thought, When I get good marks, I can hear how much she loves me. Those sound like the same sentence. They're not, but I needed another twenty years to find the difference, and the difference is most of this book.

There was one term I came eleventh. Primary Five, second term. I'd spent too much of it reading Pacesetters novels under the desk, specifically one about a girl detective in Lagos, which I maintain was educational. Eleventh out of ninety-something isn't a disaster. It is, in most families, a perfectly reasonable position for a ten-year-old. My mother read the card on the walk to the car. Her eyebrows did not go up. She folded it into the envelope and said nothing at all.

Nothing at all, all the way home. Through the Kiwatule traffic, past the woman who sold roast maize at the junction, through the squealing gate. She went into the kitchen and started on supper. She wasn't angry. She didn't shout. She made rice and beans, my favourite, and put extra on my plate, which I now understand was Mama's version of a hug.

I didn't eat it. I went to my room and took out the next term's English textbook, which I'd borrowed early from the school library, and started on chapter one. It was a Friday night in the holidays. I was ten. My brother came to the door to tell me there was a film on, and I told him I was busy.

That night Mama said through the door, "Hard work never forgets the hand that did it," and I took it as a warning instead of a comfort. She probably meant both. With her, you could never be sure. She spoke in proverbs the way some people wear sunglasses.

The next term I came second.

When I wrote Item 1 two years later, in the blue Picfare book, I didn't think of it as fear. I thought of it as ambition plus gratitude, which is what fear looks like when it's wearing its church clothes. Look at that parenthesis again: Not just on report day. Some part of me had noticed that her pride came in pulses, three times a year, when the brown envelopes came out, and had decided the solution was to become a person who was a report day every day. A walking good result. Twelve-year-old me looked at the silences between envelopes and saw an engineering problem.

I'd love to tell you I grew out of it at university. I didn't. I grew into it. I got very skilled at it. By my twenties I had a habit I'd never said out loud to anyone, and I'll tell you now because you might have the same one.

Before I phoned my mother, I made a list.

Not on paper, usually. In my head. Two or three items of news, ranked. A good mark on an assignment. A compliment from a lecturer. Later, when there were fewer good marks and almost no compliments, it got harder and the items got smaller: I had applied for four jobs this week. I had been to Mass. I had eaten. I would sit on my bed with the phone in my hand and rehearse the order, the way I used to rehearse answers before an oral exam. Lead with the strongest. Put the weak ones in the middle where they wouldn't be remembered. Keep the call short enough that she wouldn't ask the question I couldn't answer.

You already know from the last chapter that there was a long stretch when the list was empty. In that stretch I simply stopped calling as often. I told myself she was busy. She was not busy. She was sixty-one and retired, and she had plenty of time. I was the one with nothing to report, so I reported nothing, and I called it giving her space.

Here's what happened last month. It's a small story. I almost left it out because it isn't dramatic enough, and then I realised that's exactly why it belongs here.

It was a Thursday evening. I'd had a bad week on my master's, a seminar paper returned with a comment in red that said only "Underdeveloped — see me." (If you've ever received "see me" in red ink at twenty-eight, you know it lands on the same nerve as being twelve.) I was sitting on my bed in Kikoni with the phone. It was Mama's birthday the next day, and I'd planned to call in the morning with good news, except I had no good news, and I'd spent twenty minutes scrolling my week for anything that would survive the trip.

I had: a meal I'd cooked that didn't burn. That was the list.

I want to be accurate about what I did next, because I didn't do it bravely. I did it because I was tired. I called her that evening, a day early, with no list.

She picked up on the second ring, as always. "Hello, Professor."

"Mama. Hello. I'm calling early for your birthday."

"Eh! You are early for something. God is working."

She asked about my studies, as she always does, and I felt the old machinery spin up in my chest, looking for the strongest item to lead with. There wasn't one. So I said, and I could hear how flat my voice was, "Mama, it's not going well. My last paper came back bad. I'm a bit behind."

Silence on the line. I could hear the radio in the kitchen. CBS, still, after all these years.

I kept going, which I hadn't planned to do. "And I'm tired, Mama. I don't have news this week. I just wanted to hear your voice."

I've been in exam halls, interview rooms, and one consultation room I'll tell you about much later. None of them had a silence as long as that one. It may have been five seconds. I counted the radio advert. It was for Mukwano soap.

Then Mama said, "When the matooke is not ready, you don't beat it. You cover it and you wait."

I didn't know what to say to that. I still don't entirely know what she meant. I think she meant, Be patient with yourself. I think she might also have meant, Keep working. With her it's always both. She has never once in my life said, "I'm proud of you regardless," and she didn't say it that night either.

She said, "Come on Sunday. I'll make luwombo. Don't bring anything."

"I can bring bread—"

"Don't bring anything," she said again, and her voice did something I'd never heard it do. It went slightly higher, the way it does when she's talking to small children or to my father when he's sick. Then she asked if I was eating properly, and told me about a woman at church whose daughter had married a man from Arua, a story with no point and no ending, and she talked for twenty minutes while I lay on my bed and listened.

I went on Sunday. I brought nothing. That was harder than it sounds. I stood at the supermarket on Bombo Road with a loaf of Hot Loaf in my hand for a full minute before I put it back. At the house, the gate squealed slowly, because Mama was the one opening it. There was luwombo. She untied the banana fibre on mine first. Nobody asked me about my results. My younger brother, who's now taller than my father and still falls asleep during prayers, told a story about his boss that was so stupid I laughed, properly, the bark and the wheeze and the snort, and the whole table went quiet for a second.

My sister said, "Eh. We haven't heard that one in a while."

I didn't have an answer for her either. I passed the groundnut sauce.

So here's the ledger. You know how it works from last time. I'm writing the first three columns in pen because they're facts, and the fourth in pencil because it's not.

PLANNED: Make Mama proud of me. ALWAYS. (Not just on report day.) The plan was pride: continuous, earned, audible. Report day every day.

HAPPENED: I was loved. Deeply and daily, before any report card and after the bad ones, in katogo and luwombo and rice and beans with extra on the plate, in prayers on a cement floor and a squealing gate and a mother who told the bishop's voice about me to her sister in Mbarara. The pride came, often. But the love was already there and never left, and it didn't come in pulses. I was the one who heard it in pulses, because pride was the frequency I'd tuned to.

PAID: An early fear of disappointing her, which I carried so long I mistook it for a personality. Ten years old with a textbook on a holiday Friday night. A mental list before every phone call. Months of calling less because I had nothing to report, which means months of her missing me because I was trying to protect her from my ordinariness. And a habit, which I suspect you'll recognise, of treating every silence from someone who loves you as a verdict.

REVISED (pencil): Let Mama know me. On the days with no report, too.

I rubbed it out twice before I settled on that. The first version said "Let Mama love me," which was wrong, because she already does and doesn't need my permission. The second said "Stop needing Mama to be proud," which was a lie dressed as maturity. I still want her to be proud. I'm her daughter, and she's the woman who untied my banana leaves first. The revision isn't about wanting less. It's about letting her see the unready matooke.

I don't know if she understood the phone call the way I meant it. I don't know if "cover it and wait" was comfort or instruction. Hard work never forgets the hand that did it: I still hear that every time I sit down at my desk, and I can't yet tell whether it's a promise or a debt. I'm leaving that line in pen for now. I'm not ready to touch it.

If you're doing this alongside me, here's the step for this week, and it's smaller than the last one.

Pick the person you rehearse for. You know who it is. The one you make a list before calling, the one whose silences you read like exam results. Before your next conversation with them, notice the list forming. Write it down if you can, all of it, including the weak items you were going to hide in the middle. Look at it. Then make the call anyway and leave one item off, the strongest one. Tell them something true and ordinary instead: you're tired, it's slow, you just wanted to hear their voice.

You don't have to do anything with what they say back. They might give you a proverb. They might talk about someone's daughter marrying a man from Arua for twenty minutes. They might go quiet for the length of a soap advert. Write down what happened in the second column, no adjectives. Leave the fourth column blank until you've slept on it.

And if they invite you over and tell you not to bring anything, try, just once, to bring nothing. It's harder than it sounds. I nearly bought bread.