Forgive me, mother.

The good thing about this mother’s day is that it falls on a Sunday, so no need for me to draft a special issue on a weekday. That’s one less ball to juggle. School is also getting more hectic, and I just want to be done with this semester, spend a few days in my boxers binge-watching SpongeBob and Rick and Morty, dance around to a bit of John Junior, and then get back to this year’s goals and special newsletter writings with a fresh pair of eyes. With a rejuvenated mindset.

One of my friends fell seriously ill recently, so I visited him in hospital. He’d been there for a couple of days and I was starting to get worried. At his request, I’d even brought him a sizzling hot mahindi choma—said he wanted to exercise his jaws a bit. But I found him asleep and too weak to even drink the milkshake I brought him. The guy’s a gym rat, but the illness had stolen all the muscle off his frame. He looked like a shadow wearing a hospital gown—fragile, quiet, small. At the mercy of an invisible malady. I tried to cheer him up with banter about me beating him in FIFA, but even that didn’t work. I stayed fixated beside him in silence, my eyes fixed on the dim yellow light above that was suspended like death’s ghost, waiting to descend.

I sat there, watching the ward breathe. You don’t just see sickness there—you feel it, hum in it. I particularly hate how sickness not only affects the patients but also the people around them. It makes you think of the worst, even if you try to be positive. Hospitals are strange. They break and build you at the same time.

As I sat there, lost in thought and idle fantasies, patients kept being wheeled in and out—an endless ebb and flow of sickness. My friend’s bed was tucked into the farthest corner of the cuboid-shaped ward, a quiet vantage point overlooking the rest of the room. It was perfectly placed to catch the morning sunlight, yet close enough to the window to avoid the chill or gloom. From where he lay, he could see the ward’s entrance clearly, along with the steady stream of activity in the corridor and the lab just outside—like a front-row seat to the hospital’s quiet chaos.

That evening, as I sat watching the corridor, a woman collapsed right outside the lab. Her husband had just been diagnosed with something serious. She didn’t scream. She simply buckled like a tree giving in to wind. You could tell the doctor wasn’t used to delivering news like that—his face carried more panic than hers.

Then came a group of boda boda guys pushing a bleeding friend on a stretcher. He must have been in a brawl or an accident—hard to tell. They were loud and angry, shouting about how SHA isn’t working and the doctors’ lethargy in helping their friend. Blood painted the floor behind them. Nurses rushed in all directions to carry out procedures on their friend, while the men shouted at them, and some even argued football in the same breath. I almost joined in when they brought up Arsenal, but I didn’t want to be ridiculed for what Madrid suffered the other week.

Their shouting echoed through the corridors, waking patients in the adjacent wards, until a few armed guards calmly escorted them out of the hospital. Meanwhile, others trickled in—someone with a broken arm, another with a bleeding nose, elderly patients barely able to walk, and even a man who’d just stopped by for a routine checkup after work.

But nothing grounds you quite like a woman in labour.

Just as the sun dipped, and I was leaving, a man knocked my chest with his elbow, practically flying past me with his wife in tow—sweating, groaning, holding her belly like it would fall out any moment. Why is the labour ward that far from the emergency entrance? I muttered to myself, rubbing my ribs. I didn’t complain about the husband’s shove. The truth is, when a woman’s water breaks, the whole world should just move aside.

Being in a labour ward must be a precarious experience—you witness life hanging delicately on the edge of mortality. And though everyone carries their own burdens, you can’t help but admire the strength of mothers who endure the ordeal of childbirth. That woman reminded me, vividly, of the quiet, relentless struggles that come with being a mother.

In that moment, I saw motherhood again—raw, loud, powerful. We often romanticize it, but childbirth isn’t a poem. It’s war. It’s blood and bone and breath. It’s the kind of pain you scream from and bite down on it simultaneously, but push through anyway. I later saw her again, days later, cradling her newborn like it was gold pulled out of the fire. Her face was swollen, but her smile could light up the world.

A few beds over, we met a teenage girl who’d just given birth via C-section. We—meaning an extroverted friend of mine who had come to visit my ill friend, but decided to make rounds to nearly every bed in the floor. The girl couldn’t have been more than seventeen, yet there she was, cradling a newborn as if it were both a punishment and a miracle. Her mother sat beside her, gently feeding her thick broth and wiping the sweat from her brow. In her eyes, there was a silent message that seemed to say, “You’re stronger than I ever was at your age.” And maybe she was.

There was also Mama Kadzo, a woman in her forties who was on her sixth child. "The Lord gives strength and backaches in equal measure," she joked. The nurses adored her. Her husband brought her warm chapati and tea in a thermos every morning. She named her baby Hope.

When you walk those hospital corridors, you realize something sacred: mothers are made of grit and grace. They bear the weight of generations, of bad decisions, of dreams postponed, and futures untangled. They carry us before we’re born, and most of them never really put us down.

And yes, not every story ends in triumph. Some sons mirror the Good Book’s prodigal son. They stray. They get swallowed by men’s cardinal sins of alcohol, money, and/or women. Some daughters disappear into success or failure and forget the hands that wiped their tears. Some people choose not to have children at all—some for good reason. The world has changed. And sometimes this change makes motherhood look like a reckless gamble.

A beautiful songbird in Wanavokali once put it nicely: "Forgive me, mother. I am not one to be a wife, or to raise kids in a happy home like you did. The world has changed, and I’ve changed with it."

And another would whisper: "Amanda and I will adopt a child at least—to know and try to be mothers, like you. It also eases suffering in the world, don’t you think?"

Even so, the title ‘mother’ remains sacred. I see it now more clearly than ever. It’s in every sacrifice, every sleepless night, every silent prayer whispered over our foolish heads. It’s in their stubborn belief that we will turn out okay, even when the evidence says otherwise.

I already met the woman I’d want to be the mother of my children. A kind but firm soul. Someone who would join me in naming our son Fede Valverde, and our daughter Zuwena. The others she can name whichever names she fancies. Someone who knows struggle, who knows how to survive. Between the two of us, we’d tell our children stories—some sad, some funny, some covered in the scars of a life fully lived.

I now understand why mothers are so fearless in bargaining, in fighting for space, in demanding what their children need. No one wants a weak mother, and truly, there is never one. Mothers learn how to slip through life’s narrowest creaks just to place their children in the light. They put their children before themselves, always. It’s a sacrificial calling, this role of mother. From the very beginning, they give up their youthful, vibrant bodies to bring life into the world. And even after that, they spend years—decades—offering up their time, energy, and dreams to raise another human being. That’s what makes motherhood sacred. To be a mother is not just to give life. It is to live as a constant offering of it.

✍🏽Reagan.