Beautiful
One time my family attended an event. I don’t remember exactly what it was but there was music, people were dressed up and plastic tables strained to hold up enormous amounts of food. So it could have been a wedding reception, a baby shower, or a dinner after a prayer meeting. We had taken both cars there at separate times, and my mother arrived later than the rest of us. When she got there she had changed into bright and silky Rwandese robes, she’d put on makeup, and her hair was up in a tight bun. You could almost see each strand of hair stretching back across her scalp towards a shiny mass at the base of her skull, her whole head wanting to show off her face. She was beautiful, and I told her so. I even threw in a little joke about how she was more dressed up than I was. Because somehow everything was a competition with us, to the point that I didn’t even know it when I was thinking in those terms. In this moment she appeared to have won and she made sure everyo...