Lagos, Nigeria

My mother wrote what she bought with every pound I sent home

Dear Delyara, I worked abroad for seventeen years and sent money to my mother every month. She always said thank you, but we rarely discussed where it went. After she died, my sisters and I found a metal box filled with transfer receipts. Mum had written on the back of each one. Roof sheets. Samuel’s school shoes. Medicine for Auntie Bisi. New mattress. Three chickens. Electricity debt. There were hundreds. On one receipt from a particularly difficult year for me, she wrote: He sent too much. Keep some for when he comes home tired. There was an envelope beside it with money still inside, old notes no longer useful as currency. I sat on the floor crying because during those years I sometimes resented the transfers. I would see the deduction from my salary and think everybody at home believed money grew where I lived. Mum apparently knew. She had been turning each transfer into something specific and recording it as if she wanted me one day to see where pieces of my absence went. I missed birthdays, funerals, ordinary Sunday lunches. Money never replaced those things. Still, tonight I know one month of missing home became my nephew’s school shoes, another became a dry roof, and one small part of my mother refused to spend everything because she thought the son sending it might eventually come back tired.