Mowabites Worldwide

I have started reading another new book titled, “The discomfort of evening”,  a novel authored by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translated by Michele Hutchison.

The narrator is a girl, ten years of age, living with her devout Christian family in a rural area where tending cattle and growing crops are the main occupations.

The author’s choice of a child as the perspective from which the story should be told is excellent, as children are not skilled at filtering what they’ve witnessed, making the story raw, rich, realistic, interesting and relatable.

I knew I was in for an interesting, bumpy ride when I met these words in the opening sentences :

“Mum pressed her fat fingers into our faces like the round cheeses she patted to check whether the rind was ripening. Our pale cheeks shone in the light of the kitchen bulb, which was encrusted with fly shit.”

More of the book later, but for now, because tomorrow is Mother’s Day, I will share an extract from the book, a scene describing the narrator’s mom, and in essence things many mothers go through :

“Twice a year, before and after the harvest, the members of the Reformed community come together to pray and give thanks for the fields and the crops, that everything might blossom and grow – even while Mum is just getting thinner and thinner.

‘Less than one and a half calves,’ Dad said when Mum finally got on the scales. He bent over the numbers on the scales. Obbe and I stood in the door opening and glanced at each other. We all knew what happened to calves that were born too light, which were too skinny to go to the slaughter-house and too expensive to feed up. That’s why most of them were given an injection.

The longer Dad left her standing there, the more the numbers tried to crawl back, like snails, Mum getting quieter and seeming to shrink, as though the entire year’s harvest was going to seed before our very eyes and there was nothing we could do about it”…. (pg. 49-50).

Our mothers grow quieter and thinner with problems, sometimes illnesses, yet despite all the things eating them up, many stand up for their families till their last breath.

A day is never enough to celebrate mothers for all they’ve done. Everyday day should be a day to honour a mother.

Happy mothers Day to all Mothers !❤️❤️