Ezeh Charity Ogechi--Things I Inherited From My Mother That Money Couldn't Buy

Not the kind that comes when the generator goes off in the middle of a Nollywood film, or when the house is still before dawn. I mean the heavy, deliberate kind–the silence that lingers in a room long after words have been swallowed. The kind that my mother mastered so well it might as well have been stitched into her wrapper.

She could end a conversation with a glance. Could answer a question with a sigh. Could flatten a whole argument with a single raised eyebrow. As a child, I watched her closely, the way one studies a complicated dance. There was rhythm to her restraint, choreography in her quietness. She didn’t need to shout to be heard. She simply withdrew, and the space around her would hold its breath.

I remember once, when I was about seven, I knocked over her jar of ground crayfish. It spilled across the kitchen floor like dust. I waited for shouting, maybe even the sting of a slap. But she just stood there, her lips pressed thin, her eyes fixed not on me, but somewhere behind me. Then, without a word, she walked out. Left me to sweep it up, trembling, confused. It wasn’t until much later I realized: her silence was never empty. It was punishment. It was protection. It was power.

My mother’s silences were her inheritance too. I imagine she learned them from her own mother, who likely learned them from women who learned too quickly that words could be dangerous. Words could make a man feel small. Words could bring shame to a family. Words could get a woman labeled "difficult."

So they learned to speak around things. To whisper. To endure. To smile with their lips tight shut.

At school, I learned to be the polite girl who didn’t speak out of turn. At home, I learned to tiptoe around my father’s moods, to avoid asking too many questions. In church, I learned that “a wise woman builds her home” by holding her tongue. By university, silence had become my default response. In relationships. In pain. In rooms where I had every right to be loud.

It wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I realized how much I’d lost to silence. How many times I’d said “I’m fine” when I was breaking. How many versions of myself I had buried beneath polite smiles. How many things I had inherited from my mother without ever being given.

But even now, especially now–I see the complexity in it. My mother’s silence wasn’t just repression. It was survival. In a world that offered her no softness, silence became her armor. And for a long time, I wore it too.

She wasn’t a shy woman, or particularly timid. She was just… practiced. Practiced at tucking herself into the background. Practiced at shrinking, until there was barely anything left of her in the room. At weddings, she'd be the one making sure everyone else had eaten, her own plate forgotten. At family meetings, she’d serve drinks, arrange chairs, tidy up–always moving, always useful, never sitting long enough to be asked for her opinion.

They said she was humble. Respectful. A “good woman.” The kind who didn’t need attention to feel worthy. I used to believe that was admirable, her way of making space for others. But now, I’m not so sure. I think sometimes she disappeared because she was afraid of what might happen if she stayed fully present. If she said what she really thought. If she allowed herself to want more.

When I was a teenager, I began noticing it in myself. That same gentle fade from the center of things. I'd be in a group of people, and my voice would slip away without me meaning it to. Someone would talk over me, and I’d let them. A boy would touch me in a way that made my stomach turn, and I’d smile, because I didn’t want to be “difficult.” At church, I’d volunteer for every behind-the-scenes job, never the ones with a microphone or a title.

I called it humility. I called it being well-raised. But it was disappearance. Learned behavior. Practiced invisibility.

Once, in university, I told a friend that I sometimes felt like I was watching my own life from the outside. She laughed and said, “You mean like you’re floating?” Yes. Floating. Silent. Weightless. And never quite sure how to land.

It was around that time I started therapy–secretly, of course. I couldn’t risk my mother finding out. She would have taken it personally, as if needing help was a kind of insult to her parenting. And maybe it was, in a way. Because therapy helped me name something I didn’t have words for: self-erasure. The way I’d inherited a blueprint for womanhood that required me to disappear in order to be accepted.

It broke my heart to realize my mother had spent most of her life fading herself out of the picture so others could shine. But it also made me angry. Angry that no one ever told her she could take up space. Angry that I had learned to fear the sound of my own voice.

And so I began to reappear. Slowly. Awkwardly. Saying “no” more often. Speaking up in rooms where my voice used to hide. It wasn’t always graceful. I lost people. I was called proud. But for the first time, I felt solid. Present. Whole.

I am still learning. But what I know now is this: disappearing well is not a virtue. It’s a wound disguised as grace.

And I want more than grace. I want truth. I want presence. I want to live my life all the way out to the edges.

My mother could solve complex equations with nothing but her body and silence. Her life was a kind of arithmetic–adding what she had, subtracting what she needed, multiplying her energy, and dividing it among others until there was barely enough for herself. But she made it look seamless, like breathing.

I used to watch her work out our survival on the backs of receipts, old exercise books, even the margins of church bulletins. Rent, school fees, garri, beans, detergent, transport. Her handwriting was firm, but the numbers rarely added up in our favor. When they didn’t, she’d sigh, cross something out, and recalculate–not the budget, but herself.

That was her genius. She could stretch a ₦500 note like it was elastic. She could make one cup of rice feed five people and still offer a plate to a neighbor. Sacrifice wasn’t just a thing she did. It was her fluency. Her mother tongue. And like many Nigerian women of her generation, she wore it like a badge of honor–suffering, but with dignity.

For years, I thought giving everything you had for the sake of others was the highest form of love. But now, I think it’s also a warning sign, especially when it’s only one person doing all the giving. My mother never complained, but her body did. High blood pressure. Migraines. A back that ached from bending over too long. And eventually, a deep tiredness that medicine couldn’t fix.

I started noticing how she taught me the same math. How to calculate my worth based on how useful I was. How to disappear so others could stand taller. How to say “it’s okay” when I really meant “help.” Even in love, I chose people who took more than they gave, because I believed that to sacrifice was noble. I believed that to be chosen, I had to be useful.

One day, I asked her if she ever wanted more. More than the life she built. More than the silent pride of survival. She paused for a long time. Then she said, “I didn’t think I could afford to want more.”

I have decided I will want, loudly and without shame. I will ask for help even when I can manage on my own. I will say no without apologizing. I will choose ease where my mother chose endurance–not because I am better, but because she made that possible. Her sacrifices weren’t a template. They were a warning. A torch passed.

In my mother’s house, fabric was more than fashion. It was law. A silent decree stitched with thread and steeped in rules: no spaghetti straps, no low cuts, no shorts above the knee, no trousers that clung to your thighs. Even nail polish had a tone limit–clear or pale pink, nothing that shouted.

“Dress like a girl with home training,” she’d say, eyeing my clothes as though they might stain my character.

At thirteen, I once wore a sleeveless top I bought with my pocket money to a friend’s birthday party. It wasn’t scandalous–just yellow cotton with tiny daisies. But my mother stared at me like I had grown horns. “You want people to think you don’t have parents?” she asked. I changed immediately, humiliated, and never wore it again.

Fear of what men would say or do. Fear of neighbours whispering. Fear that someone would call her a careless mother. My body, in her eyes, was a thing to be managed–hidden, muted, made small. And so I learned to tuck myself in. To pre-approve my reflection based on imagined judgments. To think of modesty not as choice, but as debt. Something I owed to family, to culture, to decency.

It followed me to university, where I still hesitated before wearing anything my mother wouldn’t approve of, even when she wasn’t there. I flinched when catcalled, blaming myself. I watched other girls dress freely and envied them while quietly judging them too, because that’s what I had been taught: that good girls don’t expose too much. That bad girls invite trouble. That dignity lives in covered skin.

These days, I wear shorts in my apartment without guilt. I own red lipstick. I let my arms breathe. And when I go home, I still pack a set of mother-approved clothes, not out of fear, but because some compromises are easier than arguments. Because even rebellion needs rest.

One evening, I saw my mother looking through old photographs of herself in the ‘80s–tight jeans, big earrings, confident smile. I asked her why she never let us dress like that.

I realized she had been policing not just our bodies, but also the memory of her own freedom. A woman who had once worn brightness, now draped in caution. That made me sad, but it also made me love her more.

What I inherited from her wasn’t just her fear. I also inherited her evolution.

And slowly, I’m stitching something new: a wardrobe not built on shame, but on softness, safety, and choice. I still hear her voice in my head sometimes, still hesitate at the mirror. But now, I answer with my own voice, too.

There were times in our house when laughter had to be rationed. Not because we didn’t want to laugh, but because life didn’t always give us the space for it.

You don’t laugh freely when NEPA has taken light and the food in the fridge is going bad. Or when your mother is calculating how to stretch soup for five mouths on a market budget meant for one. Or when your school fees are due and the landlord has come to knock–again.

Sometimes it came from nowhere. Like a cracked joke while pounding yam, or an accidental slip on soapy tiles that had all of us howling, once we confirmed no one was hurt. Or a film on AIT where the sound didn’t match the lips and my sisters and I would dub over the dialogue, creating wild versions that had my mother shaking her head, lips pressed tight to keep from laughing too. That was her tell, she laughed with her mouth closed, like joy was something she had to smuggle.

It was my mother who taught us how to find light in small, strange places. She had this dry wit, sharp like a pepper seed under your tongue. Once, when the TV remote stopped working, she didn’t complain. She said, “Ah, the remote wants to go and visit its village,” and walked across the room to change the channel herself. We cackled. Not because the joke was that funny, but because it meant she wasn’t angry. And that meant we could breathe.

Our laughter wasn’t always loud. Sometimes, it was a smirk shared between sisters when a visitor was overstaying. Or an inside joke passed like contraband beneath the table during a prayer meeting. Or a humming kind of happiness when a pot of rice cooked just right and there was enough meat in the stew.

Our family albums were formal affairs: everyone sitting straight, not a tooth in sight, like joy wasn’t proper. I wish we had more pictures of those ridiculous nights with kerosene lanterns and mosquito swats and burnt chin-chin and belly-deep laughter. Because those were the moments that reminded us we were still alive. Still together. Still whole in ways money couldn’t measure.

As I grew older and moved away, I noticed how other people talked about joy like a reward. Something you earned after success. But in our home, joy was survival. It was protest. It was a way to say, “We are not broken,” even when we were cracking under the weight of lack.

When I call my mother now, I can often tell what kind of week she’s had by how she laughs. If it comes quickly, she’s fine. If it takes coaxing, I know to stay on the phone a little longer. Sometimes I tell her silly things just to pull it out of her, like how my co-worker wore two left shoes or how the gas finished just as I was about to fry plantain.

What I inherited from my mother wasn’t just her sense of humour. It was her insistence that we deserved joy, even if the world said otherwise. That we could be poor and still be funny. That sorrow didn’t own us just because it visited often.

It took me years to realize that my mother had a loneliness she wore like perfume–faint, invisible, but always there. You didn’t notice it until you leaned in close.

As a child, I thought she preferred silence. I’d see her seated alone at the edge of the bed, folding clothes slowly, her eyes distant. Or washing plates long after dinner was done, her hands moving with rhythm but her mind clearly elsewhere. I mistook it for peace. I thought she enjoyed her own company more than anyone else’s. But I see it differently now.

She was always surrounded, yet often alone. A house full of children, neighbors who never knocked, church sisters calling for “just one minute” that stretched into hours. And still, I wonder–who did she talk to when she wasn’t being strong? Who held space for her when she wasn’t holding up the entire family?

We, her children, were too young to know she needed more than our presence. And the adults around her were too caught up in their own struggles to see that she was disappearing behind the duties. Behind the prayers, the PTA meetings, the polite smiles at church. Behind the “I’m fine, thank God.”

She never spoke of her loneliness. Not directly. But sometimes, late at night, I’d hear her on the veranda, talking to herself, or maybe to God. I once caught her in the middle of one of those conversations. I stood in the dark hallway and listened to her say, “It’s not easy, but you’re the only one I can tell. Nobody else would understand.”

At the time, I didn’t know if she meant God or her late mother. Now I think it might have been both.

Loneliness, I learned from her, is not always loud. It’s in the things left unsaid. In the small sighs when she thought no one was watching. In the way she always said, “Go and rest,” but never rested herself. In the one cup of tea she drank slowly in the corner while the rest of us clattered and chatted.

I once asked her if she ever got tired of everything. She blinked at me, surprised. “Of course,” she said. “But who will I hand it over to?”

Even in her exhaustion, she didn’t want to burden us. And in not wanting to burden us, she carried everything alone.

Now that I’m older, now that I’ve begun to feel the heavy silence that comes with living far from home, I think I understand her better. The kind of loneliness that is not about the absence of people, but the absence of being known. Being seen for more than your role. More than your usefulness.

When I call her now, I try to ask questions I didn’t ask before. “What did you dream about last night?” “Did you eat today?” “Do you miss anybody?” I don’t always get full answers. Sometimes just a chuckle, or a distracted “I can’t remember.” But I ask anyway. I ask because I see her now. Not just as my mother, but as a woman who lived many versions of herself in silence.

What I inherited from her wasn’t just strength. It was the understanding that even the strongest people need softness. That the ones who give everything often get the least in return. That love isn’t only what you do–it’s also how you notice.

There’s a photograph of my mother taken the week after my grandfather died. Her eyes are swollen from crying, but you’d miss it if you didn’t know her face well. She’s sitting on a cane chair in front of our family house in Nsukka, holding a bowl of ogbono soup she had cooked for the mourners, her wrapper tied high around her waist, her shoulders squared. My auntie, who took the photo, told me later that the only time Mama allowed herself to cry that week was after everyone had gone to sleep. Then, behind the locked kitchen door, she wept like a child and washed her face with cold water before morning.

I think about that a lot, how Mama taught me to wear grief like a scarf. Not to suppress it, but to shape it into something softer, something you can still work in. When my mother lost her younger brother in a car accident, she didn’t miss a single church service. She added an extra spoon of sugar to my cornflakes that week. She ironed my school uniform like it was a prayer.

Grief was never a spectacle in our home. It was woven into our chores, our cooking, the quiet hum of morning devotions. When I lost my first pregnancy, I didn’t tell anyone except Mama. She didn’t ask for the father’s name. She didn’t cry. She simply turned off the gas stove, reached for my hand, and sat with me on the kitchen floor until the kettle stopped hissing. That night, she made moi moi from scratch, as if feeding me was her way of saying, You are still here. You are still worthy of softness.

Years later, when Mama herself passed, I was the one who cooked. I cooked jollof rice for the mourners and stirred egusi soup in the same blackened pot she used. I wrapped my hair in her old headscarf and listened to her favorite Onyeka Onwenu songs while peeling onions. That headscarf–it smelled of Robb, woodsmoke, and time. It was the last thing of hers I touched before I flew back to Lagos and returned to work.

What I inherited from my mother, truly, cannot be counted. Not in jewelry or documents. Not in hectares or bank accounts. What she gave me was this steady, resilient quietness. This way of sitting with sorrow and not turning away. She showed me that grief is not the end of love–it is its final form. And so I carry her now the way she carried me: wrapped tightly, silently, with both hands holding firm even when they tremble.

If money could buy the strength it takes to survive this life without hardening, I might have tried to purchase it. But my mother gave it to me free. And it is worth everything.

Ezeh Charity Ogechi is an emerging Nigerian writer whose work has been accepted by Cosmic Daffodil Journal, IHRAM Press, and Graveside Press, with a story published in Brittle Paper. She focuses on themes of identity, culture, and resilience. She currently lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

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