Keguro Macharia writes: men leave, women stay.
I find myself arrested by this statement.
Our histories are flooded with tales of men leaving. Celebrated for seeking adventure. For making “new discoveries”. For searching for the unknown. For finding what’s “out there”.
Men leave.
They leave families, they leave the damage left behind after wars, they leave sick women, they leave imprisoned women, they leave women at their most vulnerable. The scene that most often plays out is that of men leaving.
They leave.
Research shows men are six times likely to leave or divorce their partners if diagnosed with terminal illnesses. The reason? Men find themselves unable to adjust to the role of the caregiver of the home or family. Unable. An impossibility.
They leave. Men leave.
Women, rather quietly, stay behind. They pick up the pieces attempting to save something, anything, of what is left. Daring to envision a life after the trauma, after the devastation.
They attempt to build ‘the after’.
They raise families alone. They till, plant, farm and grow. They visit imprisoned men, they care for infants, for the sick, the disabled, the wounded. They dispense medicine, wash dead bodies, mourn them, bury them. Again and again. They attempt to make what was unlivable, livable. Repairing, rebuilding, restoring. Creating beauty where there was no promise of such.
Histories continue to tell tales of men who left in their youth, remained unheard of, then suddenly re-appeared in their old age - fragile, sickly, knowing their death is neigh. They came back to homes that were kept and tended to in their absence. They were received by the same hands that repaired what they left broken; then cared for till their dying day.
I try to imagine the effort, the toil, the labour it takes to stay behind to fix what is broken. What it does to your mental and emotional health to live through the despair, to will survival and still manage to dispense care in the midst of devastation.
The time it takes. The time it has always taken. To tend to your own wounds and still seal those of others. The labour that goes unseen when you raise the children he left, till and farm land you will not inherit, raise boys that will leave, ask your daughters to stay, nurse emotional wounds as you work toward the possibility of a future better than the present you’ve been dealt with.
To be aware of all this and stay in spite of. Choosing to believe there is something to be salvaged. Something. Anything.
Staying.
Now take that time. Multiply it. Let it accumulate into a lifetime. Stretch it further to generations of daughters that will stay just as the women before them did- as they were asked to.
Once again, Keguro Macharia writes:
I keep thinking of those many unseen hands wrapping repair around broken limbs, repair around broken relationships, repair around broken possibilities. Trying to coax something to persist. This work of staying and staying with.
Women stay. Men leave.
