A story about bitter leaf, retirement, twin ducks, and the luxury of smaller problems.
My mama is with me for a couple of weeks and, as usual, she did not arrive empty-handed.
She arrived with bitter leaf from her garden in Oba, Anambra State, as if she had transported a small portion of the village in her luggage, presenting it with pride.
If you know my mother, you will understand that this is perfectly on brand.
In Oba, she has built a life that involves crops, poultry, village children, and very specific concerns. Her chickens are not just chickens. They are personalities, some with names, some with reputations, and some with more emotional investment than certain human beings deserve.
There was Captain Jarvis, the legendary lead cockerel, and there was Captain Jarvis Junior, who inherited both responsibility and family anxiety.
There have been enough poultry dramas to justify their own Nollywood spin-off.
One morning, a few years ago, my phone rang at around 5.02am. No decent phone call comes at 5.02am, and as such, my heart did not assume gist. It assumed disaster. I answered half-asleep, already preparing myself for bad news.
Mama was in Oba. There had been a thunderstorm, and Captain Jarvis had not crowed. To her, this was an emergency.
To me, lying in bed in England with mortgage interest rates threatening to finish my bloodline, entrepreneurial teething problems biting my ankles, bills behaving like generational curses, and adulthood adulting with unnecessary enthusiasm, the silence of a cockerel felt slightly outside my top ten concerns.
I reassured her that Captain Jarvis was probably fine. Perhaps he was sheltering. Perhaps he had decided that after surviving a storm, he was entitled to a lie-in. Perhaps even cockerels occasionally review their employment contracts.
At 7.02am, the phone rang again.
“Hurrah!” Mama announced. Captain Jarvis had crowed. All was well with the world.
I remember laughing, but I also remember that somewhere between her relief and my own chaos, I saw the shape of a life I wanted.
Of course, I still have my extravagant fantasies. Somewhere in the theatre of my imagination, older me is sipping cocktails on a yacht, wearing oversized sunglasses, ignoring stressful emails, and pretending not to know the price of diesel. Still, another version of that dream has started to look equally beautiful: solitude in a garden, good health, produce from soil I understand, and peace spacious enough for small things to matter. Mama may have her chickens, Captain Jarvis, and all his poultry responsibilities, but perhaps my own retirement drama will involve twin ducks waddling around with names my children will pretend not to find funny.
The point is not whether the dream comes with champagne, bitter leaf, chickens, or ducks.
The point is peace.
It is the possibility of reaching an age when the drama in your life is no longer a threatening letter, a rising interest rate, or a business problem. It is the luxury of caring whether a cockerel has crowed, whether the garden survived the storm, or whether your twin ducks have decided to behave like respected members of the household.
That is the part we often miss when we talk about success. We imagine money, travel, houses, applause, and legacy. All valid. All desirable. Poverty is not poetic, and survival is not a personality trait, but there is another layer of success we rarely discuss: waking up without dread and caring deeply about something small because the bigger things have finally stopped chasing you.
That is what the bitter leaf represents to me. A life cultivated after years of work, sacrifice, migration, motherhood, and resilience. So soon, I will eat the soup, record the moment, and probably create a podcast, a monologue, or a dramatic tribute to Captain Jarvis, patron saint of poultry-related panic.
Beneath the humour, though, is something serious. We spend so much of adulthood praying for a breakthrough, chasing stability, holding families together, starting again, and recovering from one thing while managing another. We rarely stop to ask what kind of older life we are building.
Perhaps the #Unshakable truth is this: the goal is not a life without concern. The goal is a life where the concerns become gentler.
May we live long enough, work wisely enough, heal deeply enough, and plan honestly enough for our emergencies to become smaller. May our storms pass. May our gardens grow. May our bitter leaf travel safely. May the twin ducks arrive in due season.
When the cockerel finally crows, may someone we love be there to hear us say, “Hurrah.”
See you next week.
The post Untold Truths: When Captain Jarvis Crowed first appeared on online women feeds.
