Today is International Day of the Girl Child.

Blooming from a family tree of one sassy mother and a dedicated father, it is hard for me to imagine that not all female children felt as loved, as wanted as we did. It is hard to appreciate although easy to believe, that some women are born shouldering the heavy mantle of disappointment. Some fall into the doctor, or midwife’s or agitated neighbour’s hands, in a hospital, or home, and shatter carefully crafted dreams. They proceed to lives draped in the disillusion of someone else’s dreams. By simply existing, they are confirmation of aborted prayers, of distorted destinies. In a world that is already itself harsh and unkind, these baby girls arrive soft and pudgy, their infant swell masking the sickening smell of the goodwill deficit they are born with, pushed out into. To come into the fractured space of broken relationships, soured marriages, worse, damaged with one’s self. Their arrival announced with a dash of disillusion, the end of anticipation, beginning of discontent. And for no fault of their own.

I have a friend whose name means, “The One We Wanted”. He has two older sisters. The first time I asked him how his sisters felt about his name, the look of surprised confusion crossing his face confirmed my suspicion, in his 30 odd years he had never dwelt on the meaning of his name in relation to them.

On one hand, I was impressed. Imagine being so insular in your thoughts, so content, that assured of the rightness of your existence, the sweetness, necessity of your presence so total that you within yourself cannot imagine what your presence has to do with the absence of another’s.

I also thought, perhaps I overthink.

It is possible he never considered his name as nothing more than a word to identify a person, a place or thing. A means to classify and categorize. The more I live, the more I realise how many things which appear suspiciously deep…are actually rather shallow, with no wheres or whys, no motive or deeper unction. He told me he had never noticed his sisters treated differently in any other way but how “…girls just are in Nigeria”. Meaning the cooking for them and the car washing for him, when divvying up chores, in the standard, perhaps conditioned way, we are taught. His entire attitude was a shrug. To him, there was no deeper, more complex meaning to his name than the fact that his parents wanted male and female children and until his arrival, had one gender. Carelessly casting aside my tag a trend to his life, to my bold intrusion into his childhood, the dynamics of his home, he told me that if his mother had two boys first and he were a girl, his name would have been hers.

With an A at the end.

I struggle to write about these things sometimes because sometimes, reality just is. I can’t wrap it up in a didactic bow and present to the world to drive change. Or paint the canvas of this page in streaming letters of bold revolution powerful enough to push the zeitgeist. I can. People have. But I realise, I think about this heavy, cloying wait of planet saving and I simply don’t want to write. I shirk the responsibility and quietly ask myself the question,

What is the point?

Yesterday, I went for a beautiful book reading curated by my beautiful good friend, Ant (@atypicalreader). It was the insightful Oyinkan Braithewaite’s special ‘My Sister the Serial Killer’. The evening with her made me realise something. I learnt that my task as a writer, is simply to write, to capture observations of the many layers of life we live, and present these back to us, all of us, as a mirror.

Interpretation is yours.

So here I am, simply chronicling my world today.

Photo Credit: Uby Yanes on Unsplash