A (failed) Love Letter To The Women In My Life

A (Failed) Love Letter To The Women In My Life, by Faith Kamau

About a month ago, I had the privilege of spending a week at my best friend’s house. A privilege because it was a work week and it felt a lot like getting to have a sleepover at your bestie’s on a school night. We were both working so our schedules were pretty packed but for a week I got a glimpse into what it would be like to live with someone I love, other than my immediate family. While I currently don’t live alone, I did live on my own for a couple of years and even with friends close by it can get a little lonely if you’re a homebody like me. Anyway, I digress; I’m sure you’re wondering about the title of this piece and I’m getting to it I promise.

My best friend and I have had numerous sleepovers. In fact I can map out our growth through these tiny bubbles where we got to exist as just the two of us dreaming, imagining and re-imagining our futures, as, I guess, is the reality of being part of someone’s life; you get a front row seat to the sacrosanct work of chipping away at the hunk of marble we all start out with, into the sculpture hidden underneath. And this edition of the best friend sleepover wasn’t any different, except that the schedule had to make room for both of our jobs. We talked, ate a reasonable amount of junk food, caught up on how crazy life has gotten and stayed up later than we should have.

It was on one of those nights, sitting in the dark and evading sleep that we had a conversation I hold near and dear to my heart. We talked about our mums. The love we have for them, the love they have for us, what it feels like being a daughter and feeling equal parts understood and misunderstood by the one person you wish had all the answers. It was cathartic, some (a lot) of tears were shed and one more vestige of girlhood got washed away. We are the same girls from that first sleepover all those years ago, and yet not.

When I was working on what to write for this piece, the title came to me pretty quickly. It was straightforward and to the point: A Love Letter To The Women In My Life. Easy peasy. Except, I found that for the next three weeks, every time I tried to write, my mind would come up empty. Which is crazy because I have so many women in my life and I love them to near obsession. Even worse, I’m a writer, words should come quite easy to me. But they didn’t. And I got so scared I’d miss the deadline that I almost wrote some generic piece to quickly hand over and forget about. Until today, when my best friend brought up that conversation up there and told me that it would be her pick for a conversation that stayed with you, this year.

Now, I wouldn’t say that the conversation was far removed from our normal topics and neither would I say that it was our normal run of the mill topic but I was surprised that that was her pick and the reason behind it, made it all the more profound. We’ve talked about our mums before, but, as was made clear to me today, our dynamic had always been that she speaks and I listen and offer up whatever nuggets of wisdom I have, until that night. Unbeknownst to me, I had been showing up as a problem solver for this friendship rather than an equal participant who can and should talk her best friend’s ear off when she needs to. And there lies the problem.

I’ve unintentionally become both a collector and curator of stories. Who is somehow unable to tell her own. I can and probably have waxed poetic about the women in my life to a lot of unwilling listeners because to me, they are awe-inspiring! And yet, when I finally had the opportunity to go on and on (within a reasonable word limit), my brain offered up a basketful of nothing which is quite the scary experience.

I’ve somehow lost the ability to talk about myself for no reason other than to talk about myself. Answering questions like “how are you?” more often end up in a tirade of me not actually answering but meandering around into three different topics of conversation and keeping me on task probably feels like an impossible feat to my friends. (I apologise) It must have clearly been a breath of fresh air for my best friend, for me to have participated as fully as I did in that conversation. I blame my sleep deprived brain, but it clearly knew what was best for me because I did leave at the end of the week feeling lighter for having had that conversation and many others.

And so, in apology to my best friend and the women, without whom, I would not be half the woman that I am, here is my botched attempt at saying I love you. I hold each and every single one of you in the highest regard. Your love for me has held me up on days and nights when I truly felt like I could not possibly endure another minute of existence and it has been a grave miscalculation on my part for not telling you all, as eloquently as I have told others, how much you mean to me.

My mum, all three of my sisters and the many other sisters I have acquired over the years; all that I am is shaped by and influenced by all the ways you’ve shown up in my life and I am eternally grateful. If I am kind, it is only because my mother modelled kindness for me in the way she has always had a kind word for anyone that came across her. If I am brave, it is solely because my sisters have constantly, without fear, gone after everything they’ve set their hearts on and achieved it. Fortune truly does favour the brave.

If I no longer smile and accept a cup of something I didn’t order it is because a friend from work encouraged me to send something back until they got it right. If there’s a lot more colour in my wardrobe, it’s because an old roommate said pastels looked great on me and it’s informed my shopping habits since then. I tie my hair up the way an old classmate taught me more than a decade ago. I’ve tied my shoelaces the same way since I was 5 years old because that’s how the girl I sat next to in class taught me to, after my laces came undone during P.E. And if I laugh a little louder and talk your ear off, it’s because that’s all my bestie wants from me from now on.

The story of who I am and who I am becoming cannot be told without telling the stories of all the women who have loved me in one way or another, so for Christmas, I thought I’d tell you a story about me for a change.