Being a mother is hard work. Being a good mother is a lot of hard work. Being a poor mother is a nightmare.

Motherhood. Most mothers can’t tell you enough how it’s a beautiful thing to have a person grow inside you and you get to give birth to him/her, watch him/her grow, call you ‘mummy’ etc. Yeah, it must be and I can’t wait really. But most mothers will also tell that these lovely kids are only adorable until they grow up, have their own opinions [often different from theirs] and want their freedom [they eventually get this]. We all can relate to this and it isn’t always totally bad because some of us still love and respect our mothers though we aint that ‘adorable child’ no more.

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Being a mother is hard work. From taking care of the child when he/she was little to still advising him/her and helping them make decisions. Being a good mother is a lot of hard work. You have to always take your stance on what you know is the right thing. This is far from easy especially when you are dealing with young adults experimenting with everything they can lay their hands on from drugs and alcohol to friends. It is a constant battle if you have stubborn children.

Being a poor mother, [financially challenged] is got to be the worst thing ever especially when you still want to be a good mother. I will give you my reasons with some examples.

Imagine a widow who had lost her job and was finding it hard to pay her daughter’s fees in the university. She literally doesn’t have anyone helping her. She does petty stuff to provide food for the house but tuition fees, books and hostel fees of a university student is quite hard for her to provide. So her daughter began to bring home gifts and large sums of money that paid her tuition fees and settled all her debts in school and settled the home front. This took a lot of pressure off her. The provider was a married man old enough to be the father of her 18 yr old daughter. This came when the school nearly stopped her daughter from writing relevant tests because she hadn’t paid her school fees. So when this man who she had met through a friend offered to pay her fees, she didn’t have choice but to jump on it. The gifts kept coming; expensive clothes and shoes, gadgets and more money. Her daughter, who hardly had clothes on her back when she got admission into the school, was now an IT girl.

She didn’t have school fees to worry about. Her daughter didn’t call her from school anymore to ask for recharge cards, money for food and books. But isn’t she encouraging her daughter to have ‘sugar daddy’? Isn’t that what it is? But would she rather tell her daughter to stop the relationship and go back to square one? It is a dilemma. 

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I have heard stories of mothers who couldn’t stop their daughters from prostitution just because they couldn’t provide for them. They do everything, talk, fight, and advise them but all fell on deaf ears because they couldn’t put their money where their mouth was. Sad.

That is why women should not take doing something for themselves lightly. We live in a society where widows automatically become poor because their husbands’ families would take everything the man had leaving them with their children especially if the widow had no male child. If the woman had no job/business, life becomes somewhat unbearable. 

I still know a few mothers that would not allow their daughters to do what they are not supposed to do no matter what. But these are women who are ready to farm, sell things on the road and do any menial job and encourage the girl to do petty business too to pay the bills. Not every woman can. For some it’s pride, for some it’s laziness, for some it is ill health. 

Life and its craziness. Everyone has his/her own peculiar situation. We just pray for the grace to deal with them.

Your thoughts?

Lily Johnson