"Naughty girl, you are still here lying in bed, won't you go to school?"...
I have heard those words from my mum as a child more times than I heard the sound of my alarm clock's wake up tone. I was a deep sleeper, so much in love with my bed. There was no struggle to sleep, all I had to do was place my head in a comfortable position on my pillow and off I go into dreamland. I was unashamed then because I knew that sleep was good for the body and it was also God's gift to His children. My mum used to tease me saying "one day ojuju will carry you from your bed to Kafanchan and you would not know it" ( ojuju is slang for masquerade).
I don't know if being a deep sleeper can be regarded as a bad habit, but what I know is that it did put me in a lot of trouble as a child. Firstly, I was usually late for school, arriving just when the assembly was almost over and the student's were marching into their respective classes. At the primary school stage, I was not bothered as I rode my dad's coattail being that he always walked me down to the school gate hence, no teacher dared to nag me about my late coming but when I entered secondary school, all that changed. Daddy saw me as a big girl and didn't walk me down to school anymore.
I was punished many times in school for late coming that I soon became a regular in the late comer's zone. The teacher on duty would usually assign me and other defaulters to the school farm, to clear the weeds but I would turn the punishment into a time of gisting, singing and merry-making that it didn't really feel like punishment to me. You would think this would make me change my ways, hehe, but it didn't rather something else entirely shook the sleep gene away.
My mum was a hustler who would wake up as early as 4am to get to the famous "Oyingbo" market to buy her wares. I always admired her resilence but somehow, that gene refused to show up in my childhood days. Even when she wakes me up before leaving the house for the market, I would enter the bathroom and continue "my sleep" peacefully until a knock from my sibling would jolt me awake after having spent one hour in there... sleeping.
A time came though and it dawned on me that I could not continue to indulge in so much sleep. It happened when I was in Jss2. I had been asked to prepare jollof rice by my mum, which the whole family would eat for dinner. I left her store at about 8:10pm and headed home to start preparing the food. Immediately I arrived home, I got busy in the kitchen preparing the jollof rice. After I was done putting all the ingredients into the pot including the rice, I covered the pot and left the kitchen to my room. "In my mind, I had a thought that the jollof rice would take at least 45mins to be fully cooked", so I had time to take a nap. Unfortunately, that nap almost led to a disaster.
The sound of serious banging on my room door jolted me awake from my slumber. As I opened the door, the smell of something burning wafted through my nostrils and then it clicked in my head that I had left food on the stove to cook. As I tried to rush towards the kitchen in order to check on the jollof rice, I heard my dad's voice boom behind me. "Don't bother, the food got burnt badly". Still refusing to believe it, I walked to the kitchen half in shock and half in fright. I saw my mum, cleaning up the mess that had been made. The aluminum pot had turned from silver colour to dark black (literally), almost unrecognizable. All the ingredients plus the rice burnt black. I could not believe what my eyes was seeing. "How did this happen?" was all that kept ringing in my head.
My mum though upset that the food we were to have for dinner got wasted, had compassion on me and did not use the legendary doctor do good on me. She took me out of the kitchen to the living room where my eyes landed on the wall clock that had just struck 11pm. "Oh my goodness, I had slept for two hours", no wonder the food got burnt.
That night, we made do with bread and tea which was a sorry replacement for the jollof rice because it didn't satisfy me at all but I was still grateful that the house did not go up in flames, which was what would have happened since we still used kerosene stove back then. I learnt from that day not to be a sleepy head and today I am better off and reaping benefits.
Thank you all for reading.
Imges are mine.