The first time I drank coffee I was fourteen. If this were a story about coffee, I would say that’s a lie. The first time I tasted coffee, I was six, maybe seven. My mother has taken us to my aunt Victoria’s house. My father did not come with us— I thought he was busy— I know now, Aunt Victoria did not like him. I remember we were served rice and stew but what caught my eye was the glass Nescafé jar on the table, right in the centre of those woven tablecloths that only covered the middle. I thought they were the biggest grains of milo I had ever seen in it. I asked. My aunt said it wasn’t Milo but I didn’t believe her. So I snuck a piece. It tasted like earwax and childhood regret. I was glad I didn’t take the spoonful I had intended.

If it was really about drinking coffee I’d tell you about the first time I saw someone drink coffee. My sister. I was almost eleven. She was almost fourteen. She thought she was overweight. After a lifetime of watching my mother watch her weight with teas, she convinced herself that black coffee was the elixir she needed. She would send me to City supermarket. I would buy a Nescafé tin of coffee, and she would put half the tin in this big, transparent-green, one-point five-litre jug. It was black, it was thick and it smelled bitter. She would close her eyes, close her nose, open her throat and chug until she finished it. Then she would be too jittery to eat, too jittery to sleep, too jittery, I guess, to see her reflection clearly. I took a sip once. It was awful.

But this isn’t really about tasting coffee. Or drinking it. This is about my mother. She drank. Teas. Coffee. Alcohol. To end on that note would be to imply that she was an alcoholic. But thankfully, this isn’t about that either. You see, my mother was raised British. She had never and still has never actually left Nigeria, but her mother gave her up to her aunt who was a professor. Professor Aunt, whose name I must have learned at some point and forgotten, was married to a professor. She loved all things British. She made my mother learn to bake English muffins, make pancakes, scramble eggs, bake bread and meat pie but most of all, she taught my mother to love tea.

I suppose in a way, I have her to thank for that, even though I suspect when my mother says raised, she means slaved but we are in Africa. It is an easy mistake to make.

My mother and I never saw eye to eye. When I was young, she believed in God for a male child. She already had three girls. The pressure was distracting, between that and her job, she really did not have time to mother. When she finally got a son, I was young enough but old enough to realise that she looked at me, when she did look at me, with something akin to suspicion. For some reason, it felt, that she figured early on, earlier than I even knew what sex was, that I might develop into a sexual deviant.

I don’t think it was anything I did particularly, after all, I remember this suspicion as far back as six. I have also never asked why. At this age, some conversations may be redundant. But she did. She yelled at me at six, when she found me coming out of the neighbouring “uncle’s” room. I would understand the fear in my adulthood except the way she went about showing this concern was strange.

“Why did you come out of there? What were you doing there?”

Not an “Are you okay?” Or a “Show me where he touched you on the dolly” in sight. We didn’t have dolls anyway. We were poor. And he didn’t touch me. He asked me to leave some lunch for him. I took him seriously and I did. Turned out he was joking, evidenced by the look on his face when I proudly showed off my food flask but my mother didn’t know any of that. She didn’t ask. Only threatened to beat me. I think from then on, she was suspicious.

It wasn’t subtle either. She took my sleeping with my hands between my legs to keep them warm and ward off the malaria cold as a sign of lesbianism. She was deeply suspicious of all my male friends while seeming to never mind that my elder sister dated in secondary school at the same age I was. She questioned my movements, and my friendships always in an accusing tone.

I remember when I finally snapped. We had just moved to a new house in a rough neighbourhood and my two male friends came to visit. The sitting room was still dirty, chairs hadn’t been properly arranged, so I suggested it would be more comfortable in the room already arranged. The bedroom I shared with my other three siblings, who were present at the time of the conversation. My mother agreed. So we went.

We sat in the room with my other siblings having conversation for about an hour before I saw them off. Two weeks later she accused me of taking strange men into my room in her presence to do who-knew-what. My father told me I couldn’t be irresponsible. That if I “messed up myself” my life would be useless. We had a fight. I told her she had always treated like I was going to morph into a prostitute overnight and we barely spoke for two days.

I’m telling you this so you know that my mother and I rarely spoke. She was not who I considered my friend. Until I had that cup of coffee at fourteen. My mother might have thought I would become a prostitute but she was the one that metamorphosized into something else. Something small. Through the suspicion and the fights, my mother was a force. Tiny woman who fearlessly faced down teenage boys twice her size. She was energetic. She had a fire.

In between six and fourteen. In between a well paying job and abject poverty. In between being the most reliable breadwinner and the most reliable blame taker my mother shrunk. She went from wielding a cane to wringing her hands. She went from long winded scolding to apathetic silences. And she shrunk. The pants suits turned to mismatched clothing. The American muffins turned to watery soups. The fierceness turned to shallow timidity but what remained the same was the tea.

My mother would make a cup in the morning. Sitting at the window of our house. Not the one I had called her a bad mother in, another home. An emptier one. She would sip her coffee. As we left. My father to wherever. My younger siblings to school. My elder sister to university. It was always just me and my mother. Even then, at fourteen, I knew my mother was not the same suspicious woman. This one, this version of mother, was someone else.

I hesitated at first. I only ventured into the sitting room to watch her drinking a cup. Then I would ask for a sip, bracing myself for bitterness and childhood regret. But it never came. My mother liked her coffee black and sweet. No wonder, I thought, that she looked less sad, less haunched, less tired. A cup of

coffee was a hollow magic wand, a black anchor that rolled back time, just a little, but only a little.

It was humbling to see that sad-mom was not as formidable. It seemed petulant to keep fighting with an adversary who had forgotten where the weapons were kept. So I ventured farther. I began to sit with her. She talked to me. Or at me. I barely listened. About people I didn’t know. About the area we lived in that I hated. About what she hoped we could accomplish. About what the neighbours were up to. I listened, without committing to memory. I didn’t think the point was to remember. Only listen.

She never apologised. I never asked for me. It was my thinking that sometimes kindness was enough, to soothe, to heal. And so I sat.

Then one morning, when I was fourteen years old, when the house was empty and my mother sat by the window with her hollow magic wand, I asked her if I could have a cup. Her eyes lit up. She made me one. It did not taste like bitterness and childhood regret. It tasted light and sweet. It tasted, especially on dark days when I needed a bit of comfort, like kindness. A kindness that like my mother I came to love.

You know, I think this is either about my mother or I might have been wrong after all and this is a story entirely about coffee.