LISTENING

My daughter talks like Scooby-Doo. And gets angry when I keep handing her a teddy bear instead of the big, round garden egg on the kitchen table. Can you imagine? Tiny ‘Big-Head’ wagging a finger at me ‘No! No! No!’ (That one she says well). So, I snap back, ‘Speak in English, for God’s sake. Or Igbo.’ But my wife always says, ‘Listen.’ So, I did. Now, I know that ‘Ah-Oh-No’, means ‘I don’t know’; ‘Kak!’ means ‘Thanks!’; and ‘Ah-won-kpap’ means…well…‘I want pap’. So, we get along a lot better now.

Because everyone wants to be heard, even little children. It doesn’t matter to the other one that I’m trying to write, head buried in my laptop, tapping out my ‘masterpiece’. It takes a while for this single sentence, on repeat, to punch a hole through the fog of creativity: ‘But, daddy, you’re not listening to me!’ I could take that same sentence, delete ‘daddy’, and it would fit perfectly in my wife’s mouth. Not so funny now, with much graver consequences. To be honest, sometimes, I’m actually just thinking of my response; so I even cut in before she’s done. ‘I have the solution!’ Problem solved! But she only sighs deeply, as if I missed the whole point.

So, I’ve been thinking about it and you know what? If you take a deep breath and grow still, you could put your ear to a woman’s stomach and hear the child moving around inside her. It can be surreal. It’s even more surreal to think that that child has its ear against the soft lining of her womb and could be listening to you too. It is possible. Because when I was a teenager, I wrote a poem to the tune of a nursery rhyme I couldn’t get out of my head. Then I thought to myself, ‘When I have a child, I’m going to sing this poem to her’.

And I did – murmuring softly against her mum’s swollen tummy. When she was born, just days old, crying uncontrollably one night, I picked her up and began to hum it. She turned towards the sound; then she fell silent. And, now, three years later, she still puts her head on the pillow beside me – bedtime – and says, eyes closed, ‘Daddy, can you sing ‘Baby dear…’ for me’. And it does something to me every single time. I know, one day she’ll grow old enough to tell me (fully conscious of what she’s saying) that she loves me. But I don’t think anything she’ll say or do will ever make me feel more loved than knowing she heard me through her mother’s womb. She was listening.

So, many things make better sense now – why my wife sighs sometimes right after my technical treatise on a six-point-strategy for ensuring she has a better day tomorrow; delivered glibly, because I’m itching to get back to writing this. I’m slowly getting it - she’s not a child who can’t reach the garden egg by herself.  And the best stories in this life don’t roar forward in a straight line; they take their time, meandering like those enchanting bush paths. They don’t even have to make sense. But, to those who are listening, they always do.

Image taken from:

http://nashvillepubliclibrary.org/bringingbookstolife/files/2013/01/listen.jpg