MOTHERS AND SONS

A guest post from Ayisha Osori:

Taking stock - A year of confrontation

My 2011 starts the way 2010 began: wondering where my seven-year-old son is and mourning our enforced separation . In a nutshell, no change in a painful situation as his father continues to deny me custody of and access to our son.

One divorce and a re-marriage later came June 26, 2009, a date I will never forget. As I prepared to board the plane to take us to Boston for me to start a Masters program, my son was pulled from my arms and for twelve months I could not see him and had very limited access. When I returned to Nigeria, I expected to be able to take my son home where he belongs, but for some reason, it makes sense to his father that our son is raised not by his parents but by a paternal uncle and his wife.

When my son was taken from me, my identity as a mother was brutalised and my belief in God and society shaken to its core. I waited for the heavens to fall for this injustice. Nothing.

I waited for the clarion call of angels who guard the hearts of mothers. Silence. It took me close to a year of agonized pondering to understand why. We have a saying in Islam: whoever sees something wrong should change it with their hand; if not, then with their tongue; and if not, then with their heart. If I’m honest, I had done none of these things when I saw injustice around me. Like most Nigerians, I did not speak. And now there was no one to speak for me.

How does a society which worships parenthood separate babies from their mothers for no just cause? Why do men use children to punish or hold on to women? And what is it about our culture that makes it so easy to ignore and ill treat children and young people?

When inexplicable things happen you look for answers and explanations the same way you look for missing keys: under the table, between the cracks of chairs, in jacket pockets…everywhere and anywhere. I found to my surprise that what has happened to me happens every day. Women comfort and oppress me in turn; telling me ‘this is a man’s world’, ‘stay in your corner and pray’ and ‘your son will find you when he grows up’.

In Nigeria – I am a woman first before I am anything else. I am expected to be a certain way, and have certain expectations and to know my place. Then, I am in the same position as the average man. Not crowned by ill-gotten wealth nor cloaked by the power of ill-used public office and so like most Nigerians, the system is not supposed to work for me.

I am told God is my only hope; my sword and my shield. I smile through my tears; how easily we forget that God works in mysterious ways. I think of a Hadith which says in response to a question put to Prophet Muhammad PBUH about whether a camel owner should tether his camel or trust in God, Prophet Muhammad answered ‘ tie your camel and trust in God’.

I decided to tie my camel and take a different route; I filed a lawsuit.

Most of the sisters in sorrow I have met on this journey or whose stories have crossed mine, have taken the path of least resistance. One weeps outside the gates of the house and school where her four daughters are being kept from her.

Another waited 4,380 days (the time it takes the earth to go round the sun 12 times) for the son she last saw when he was 3 to find her. And others stare at their adult children, now near strangers, with unfamiliar traits. On all sides there is pain.

It is for these women and their children, our children, that I share my story, because my story like theirs is not unique. However, what makes our stories different is how we choose to interpret them and use them to empower not only ourselves but those around us.

Gradually my thoughts stopped leading me to unanswerable questions outside the realm of my influence and I found myself wondering: what am I supposed to learn from this experience? How are other mothers like me coping, what are the children thinking and what can I do to help?

There is no poem, no picture, no perfume on earth that captures the depth and tenderness of a mother’s love. It is this tenderness that I hear keeps Death at bay when a mother is near. It is said that Death waits patiently for that second when a mother’s eyes are averted from the face of her child before taking the life of that child away. But humans have no such sensibilities and so openly and with impunity they tear children away from mothers and damage our collective psyche.

We tell ourselves that the decay in our society is because we have lost our values and followed the western world. The truth is we have lost the best of our ways and adopted only the worst from outside.

We have traded the strength of the Aba women and the governance of Hausa Queens for western consumerism. We continue to buy machines we cannot make or fix and continue to treat children as chattel, while ignoring the science of psychology.

In the West the young have a voice, they thrive and innovate, ours use drugs in the north to escape a bleak future and in the south, use arms to rage against inequity and to join the band of greed. The latest shared iniquity – the defilement of a young girl by policemen in Kano, might not have happened if this child lived with her mother and had not had to ‘travel’ to visit her. How many of our children are put at risk daily for reasons which dissolve under scrutiny?

As I continue on my path, I wish mothers like me would realize that what makes our stories powerful is how we can take what we have learned from our experiences to deal with our narratives from yesterday, the questions that haunt us today and our dreams for tomorrow.

My dream for tomorrow is that in a country where apathy, masked as piety and nobility, has risen to an art form, we each see something wrong and change it with our hands or our tongues or at the very least with our hearts.

Ayisha Osori is a writer and lawyer. She invites all mothers and children who have experienced forced separations due to divorce, death etc. to share their stories at aosori@yahoo.com

http://www.naijablog.co.uk/2011/01/mothers-and-sons.html

*Please advise Aisha Osori on how to get her son back from the hands of the Belgore family*

Which one of the Belgores?

OPCNAIRALAND:
Which one of the Belgores?

Yakubu Belgore. But the matter has been resolved. She eventually got her son Mohammed back, after everyone had intervened. I am really sorry, I should have come back in here, to update this thread. I just forgot. See what the stress of Lagos life does to the brain??

The pendulum swings in both directions...there are men who are also in this position of being denied access to their children.

Stop making it seem as if it's only women that are victims!

Kobicove:
The pendulum swings in both directions...there are men who are also in this position of being denied access to their children.

Stop making it seem as if it's only women that are victims!

True, but it seems women suffer more, from this issue. Abroad, women get custody most of the time when their is a divorce. In Nigeria, it is not so. In fact, a lot of rich & powerful men disobey court orders on custody and nothing happens. Blame it on cultural & societal deficiencies.