My Mother.

Who's always watching my head.

“10 naira le fi n bọ awon ọmọ yin.” Those were the words said to my mother by a man many years ago.

I wasn’t born with a silver spoon, but my mother made me believe I was. I had needs, I had wants, and she made sure I got them all.
We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Lagos, the kind where you share a kitchen and bathroom with everyone else in the building, but I thought my mother had all the money in the world. We had access to every good thing life had to offer. We didn’t have to envy anyone. My mother did a great job with ten naira.

My mother is my hero because she opened my eyes to possibilities. She singlehandedly took us from that one-room apartment into another, and then into another, with her own sweat. She did that with ten naira.

My mother is my hero because she taught me confidence. She would look at me and say I had no business with timidity. She made me sing a song that confessed boldness repeatedly: “Bold as a Lion, Gentle as a Dove.” She told me I was born to be bold, that I am beautiful, precious, in her eyes. She did that with ten naira.

My mother is my hero because I got my intelligence from her. There was never a problem I brought to her that she couldn’t solve. She is always right. I remember having a school assignment once, and she gave me fifty English proverbs and idioms, with their meanings, straight from her head.
My mother is gifted. And because of her, I am gifted too. She did that with ten naira.

My mother is my hero because she placed me in rooms that mattered. She enlarged my mind beyond that small apartment in Lagos. She fed me with things my friends with “richer” parents had never even heard of. She gave me a life everyone around her said she couldn’t give. She did that with ten naira.

My mother is my hero because she taught me to pray. She taught me what relying on God truly looks like. “We have no one; it is only God. He is the one who meets us at the point of our needs,” she would say. She embedded the Word of God into me and planted values I will pass down to generations after me. She did that with ten naira.

My mother is my hero because with her, I never felt the absence of a father. She lost the man she married, but she picked herself up for me, for us, and showed the world what strength looks like. She did that with ten naira.

My mother is my hero because without her, there would be no me. There is no one I would rather be mothered by. No one could nurture, care, and teach the way she does.

All of that—with only ten naira.

My mother is my hero, and she will live forever.