Dancing with them both.

 I was telling some people recently about how my mother would sometimes wake up and decide to take down a wall in the house. She would wake up in the early morning, start gathering her tools and we would soon hear the sound of hammers and chisels while asleep. Slow and resolute bangs. This wall will come down today. I will not pretend I know why she even did this because we did not have the chance to talk about it. But I do know that those sometimes made what were otherwise regular chores much harder. For weeks the house would be covered in dust no matter how diligently you cleaned which meant an immediate uptick in the demands of your chores.

Near daily burglar bar wipes and stinging cuts from the spikes. Extra special attention on windowsills and dusting cornice. Anyway, those periods were stressful. But I think chores were a great way to ground us as children. To teach us about living. Something that you were responsible for, that no one needs to account for, except for you. Naturally, chores taught us responsibility as well as a little mischief. There are always easier ways to do things and make up for them later but it really is just better to do things when they are here and they are hard. The annoying thing with chores is that you also start becoming really good at them because you do them so often. If you are lucky, you even get to find a few that you do not mind or even like. It is why someone like me would sooner wash a mountain of plates but choose death over touching an iron.

Chores are ordinary, obvious and if you really think about it, easy if you are diligent. They are even easier if you are good at cutting corners. But if you have been raised by a black woman, you know all too well that easier is never the standard and it is riddled with consequence. If we tried to to cut corners, she would ensure we repeat the task as many times as necessary until we did what we knew we ought to do. In that household, you could not bypass the process of seeing things and yourself through. So you are better off doing them with integrity ab initio. Chores could also be fun or at least sentimental if you were lucky enough to carry them out with your siblings and cousins. They are a storehouse for nostalgia which explains why any millennial born in South Africa has a portfolio of 90’s R&B music to jam while they toil through household chores.

What I also know about the times my mother turned herself into a bulldozer, things shifted fundamentally. More light came into the rooms of our home and her and sometimes the air stung bitterly too. But never more than the light rushed in. Suddenly, there were endless unexplored ideas of what may become of the now vacant space where a wall once stood. We were always better off for it.

On one of the bulldozing missions I asked her seethingly why she had to choose the worst possible days to do it. It was always on a morning where sleeping in made sense and laziness had begun to settle deliciously in our limbs. It was almost always inconvenient. In classic black mother style, she of course told me that those four walls belong to her and she can do with and in them what she pleases. She also said she always knew when it was time.

In one of my favourite songs, “Turn!Turn!Turn!” by Nina Simone, she reminds us of life and its seasons and calls us to adjust. One of my favourite pieces of literature, Ecclesiastes 3, reads as a comprehensive list of what ebbing and flowing may look like in the seasons of our lives. My mother, like me, believed in the the third and sixth verses, “ a time to tear down and a time to build. a time to keep and a time throw away.”

It seems she made it a habit to not hesitate when the call to take down came. To disrupt a pattern and dance with both chaos and alignment. So maybe younger me was a little harsh on the bulldozer lady and her methods. But I do agree with her on the principle. Sometimes destruction is necessary. Uncertainty too. The simultaneous knowing and not knowing that happens when life must change. Or we, must change. Even if it means sorting through some rubble and living with dust for a while.